Signs From Earth

Population Trends: Magic Number is 2.1: Go forth and multiply a lot less (via @TheEconomist)

Live chart here: http://tinyurl.com/yf75sko

Gapminder chart of children per woman as GDP per person increases (2007) 

Large Blue circle is India, large red is China, large yellow at right is United States.

Economist: "Fertility and living standards: Lower fertility is changing the world for the better"

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14743589

"Sometime in the next few years (if it hasn’t happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below..."

Economist Opinion: Demography, growth, and the environment: 

Falling Fertility: Astonishing falls in fertility are bringing with them big benefits

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14744915

After Borlaug: A New Green Revolution?

Wheat near Dalby, Western Australia. Photo by Raeallen/flickr

Norman Borlaug improved wheat harvests and kept starvation at bay. As population keeps rising what will the world do for a second act?

In the early 1970’s when I was studying agriculture at Oregon State, the name of Norman Borlaug was spoken with great reverence, especially in my cereal grains class, where we learned how Borlaug bred short, stocky wheat plants with big heads that could hold more grain than before. His efforts to improve grain production and stave off starvation in places like Latin America and Asia earned Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize.

Borlaug became known as the father of the “Green Revolution,” a transformation of world grain production that produced better harvests of wheat and rice when irrigation water, nitrogen fertilizers, and weed and insect pesticides were applied to crop fields.

So now Borlaug is gone, but we must continue the hard work of feeding an ever more populous world. World population nears seven billion people, about twice as many as when Borlaug’s Green Revolution began raising grain yields in the 1960s, and it is expected to top nine billion by mid-century.

Rising living standards pressure grain stocks as more people eat meat fed by harvests that otherwise would go to people. We’re also seeing large portions of corn harvests devoted to ethanol as a substitute for gasoline.

In late 2008 we saw severe price spikes for cereal grains and food. Supplies and prices of oil and natural gas have become volatile. Many analysts say we have seen the end of cheap oil. The Green Revolution would not have been green had it not been for cheap oil, and inexpensive natural gas used to produce synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.

Then there are the droughts, floods, and heat waves from climate change beginning to affect farm productivity in food growing regions worldwide. We’re seeing soil erosion, aquifer depletion, and loss of glaciers that feed farm irrigation. Nearly half of the world’s people live in tropical and sub-tropical subsistence agriculture regions, increasingly vulnerable to crop loss as rainfall and temperature patterns are disrupted.

So Borlaug's work must continue with even higher stakes. Just as when Borlaug worked to feed the earth, whether we achieve food security ahead remains a daunting challenge, as National Geographic reported this June in its article Global Food Crisis: The End of Plenty.

Human Footprint: Aral Sea Keeps Shrinking

 Central Asia's Aral Sea has been drained of its lifeblood water to slake our thirst. Photo: NASA

Formerly the world's fourth largest lake, the Aral Sea in central Asia has become a dustbowl of its former self after more than 40 years of irrigation that has sucked water from the rivers that feed it. These upstream diversions irrigate cotton and other farms in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan in central Asia, arid countries surrounding the Aral Sea that use more water per person than any other nations on earth. 

The August 2009 image above from NASA Earth Observatory highlights the Aral Sea's former shorelines and the few areas on its western and northern shores where water remains. A 10-year sequence of the lake's deteriorating condition also has been posted.

Shoreline of desiccated Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, Sept. 5, 2009. Photo: kvitlauk/flickr

Climate and Fire: The Blaze Last Time, and Next

Fires over southern California have burned before and will burn again. This wafting smoke over the Pacific Ocean came from 12 large fires burning in late October, 2007.  Photo: NASA Earth Observatory

Recent news reports about fires, whether in Greece or Los Angeles, have not explained their relationship to long-term climatic shifts underway. Why? Maybe the remaining reporters and editors aren't well-versed in the underlying science of climate change, or the science and environment writers have all been laid off to save money.

News stories reporting these disasters as isolated events, or caused by cigarette or lawnmowers, miss the point and do a disservice by failing to put them in context. Temperatures have been increasing in these regions, and rainfall has been declining long-term. Just as a lawnmower may be the flint, these underlying conditions provide the tinder, and explain the likelihood that as these fires have burned before, they will burn again.

These contextual links have been made for some time by scientists, but traditional news outlets apparently haven't been reading. When fires hit Athens a week or so ago, the only outlet that explicitly explained the link between fires and climate change was the new global trends reporting website GlobalPost. 

Elder More: In Decade More Will Be Over Age 65 Than Under 5

Population Pyramids from a new U.S. Census Bureau Report show proportion of age groups worldwide from 1960, 2000, and 2040. The bottom graph thows that by 2040 the proportion of those age 65 and over will double.

A new report from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that in three decades the number of people age 65 or over will triple, that there will be more of us over 65 than under 5 in just 10 years. Implications are pondered by Danielle Kuczynski and Rachel Nugent at the Center for Global Development in "Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me?" 

As we get older more of us in need of care and support, with fewer young, by proportion, to do that caring. What does it mean when we have more elderly and fewer young as a proportion of the whole world? Who teaches, who attends school, joins the armies and the police, builds the buildings and roads, and above all pays the taxes that the elderly depend on for government pensions?

Climate Change vs. National Security

 A coal fired power plant in Germany. Action against causes of climate change is tied to significant reduction in world use of fossil fuels. Photo: davipt/flickr

Slowly the idea seeps into major media mindset that climate change presents challenges far beyond polar bears and melting ice, that political stability and security of nations also are at risk. As has been discussed here and elsewhere, carbon emissions affect how the atmosphere works, and this in turn impacts stability and security of food and water supplies, and eventually survivability of societies.

The question remains whether these concerns linking continued use of fossil fuels and their impact on global climate will make a meaningful difference in the views and actions of policymakers and the public. 

John Broder reports in an August 9 New York Times article, "Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security,"  that climate change impacts in other nations, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia, could demand an American humanitarian or military response.

“The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Linking Population and Carbon Emissions: Breathing Earth

Designer David Bleja has produced Breathing Earth, an animated map of the earth showing simulated realtime carbon emissions and birth and death rates. With data from the CIA World Factbook and the UN Statistics Division he has produced a country-by-country look at population, carbon emissions, and per person carbon emissions.

For example, United States residents produce 19.66 tons (give or take) of carbon pollution per person per year. Residents of China produce about 3.7 tons annually, and Indians produce 1.17 tons each. He points to a "land footprint" calculator from Global Footprint Network to help understand how much land area each of us needs to support our "lifestyle."

Linking population growth and carbon emissions occurs more frequently now. According to a July 24 posting at The New Security Beat, "Clinton, Congress Link Family Planning, Climate Change," U.S Secretary of State Clinton recently realized the population-climate link at a forum in India:

"“One of the participants pointed out that it's rather odd to talk about climate change and what we must do to stop and prevent the ill effects without talking about population and family planning. That was an incredibly important point. And yet, we talk about these things in very separate and often unconnected ways," said Clinton.

Costa Rica Said to Be Happiest Place

The place to be these days is Costa Rica, if you seek a spot on earth where happiness abounds, or at least is in measurably greater quantities than the alternative. This according to the Happy Planet Index 2.0, which gave runner-up status to the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. Nine of the top ten nations in the index are in Latin America.

Apparently happiness is not in great surplus globally, as the New Economics Foundation, patron and host of the survey, has renamed the index website "The (Un)Happy Planet Index 2.0." 

So if you are looking for a hangout with more happiness potential than your current outpost, here is the resource to locate that new address. To produce its rankings, the unhappy planet index adds up measures such as life expectancy, life satisfaction, and ecological footprint.

In case you are interested, the United States ranks 114th of 143. Apparently our huge cars, mega-mortgage starter mansions, and endless credit card debt aren't always tickets to happiness. Perhaps, among other things, our ecological footprint is working against us.

Below: A map of the world, color coded by the Happy Planet Index. Countries in red are said by the index to rank poorly in at least two of the three measures.

 

Climate Change Bell Tolls for People, Too

If we all wake up one day surprised in the grip of some massive drought, crop failure, or endless heat wave, we can't claim we weren't warned. The United States climate impacts study released by the government this week is only one of several reports out in just the past month addressing the issue. 

This idea of consequences begins to take hold, that our profligate burning of fossil sunshine coal and oil will come home to roost in ways far beyond disappearing Arctic ice. No longer are we just pondering a planet where polar bears float around stranded on Arctic ice remnants. We are beginning to realize that climate change means changes in the climate for us too.

I've been in Geneva as a panelist this week at a United Nations conference on what they call "Disaster Risk Reduction." Impacts of climate change now and upcoming -- rising seas, loss of land and homes, floods, drought, loss of stable food supplies -- are all front-burner topics here. 

The idea is that we can spend money now to reforest millions of acres, replant coastal mangroves as coastal storm defense, restore damaged watersheds or produce drought- and heat-tolerant crops to prepare in advance and reduce the cost of projected impacts. But that means money spent now to avoid something that hasn't happened yet, and in a cash-strapped world this is a hard sell. Money and help seems so much easier to find once a catastrophe has happened.

Climate and Migration: A report last week from CARE, Columbia University's CIESIN program and the UN focuses on climate migration. Called "In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement," it focuses on people in several vulnerable regions who will need to move around within the regions where they live now. They include regions of Asia that depends on glacial meltwater from the Tibetan plateau, Mexico and Central America, the Sahel, several low-lying river deltas, and low-lying islands.

Climate, Conflict, and National Security: Dan Smith of International Alert discussed his report A Climate of Conflict last week in Washington at ECSP on the links between climate change, peace and war. The Center for New American Security initiated its new program, blog, and "working paper" on a similar idea: that the future security of nations depends on preservation of natural systems now being threatened by rampant consumption and the rising effects of climate change. And there is also the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report "From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment." (PDF file here.)

Climate and Health: Finally, there is the extensive report out last month from English medical journal The Lancet saying that climate change is the biggest global health threat of this century.

Resources:

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

Climate Change: The Problem for Others

The political reporting site fivethirtyeight has produced an inverted pyramid graphic that well explains why concern for climate change, global warming, global weirding, you name it, is a problem not for us to worry about. 

It's just too abstract, far off, something for others to furrow their brows for.

According to the results of a survey out this spring, climate change is something for plants and animals, future generations, people in developing countries, and others, but not me, to be concerned with. And this is why little or nothing gets done to reduce carbon emissions. If we have to choose between solving the problems in front of us or those facing others or the future which to choose?

This is a visualization of the results of a study, Climate Change in the American Mind, published recently by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication.  

Yet the main problem we face with kicking the can down the road, allowing heat-trapping carbon to keep building in the atmosphere, is that unless we set ourselves on a pathway towards drastically reducing our emissions now, little we do in the future will matter, as has been written here and many places elsewhere previously:

Signs From Earth: A Thousand Years of Warming Ahead

Signs From Earth: Hot Planet - Our Path Ahead

 Sources:

Profile (and Seas) Rise for "Climate Refugees"

 

Tulun Atoll in the low-lying Carteret Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Photo: NASA via Wikipedia.

The drowning Carteret Islands northeast of Papua New Guinea get the attention of The New York Times in an article "Refugees Join List of Climate-Change Issues," which also discusses the emerging awareness that hundreds of millions could lose their homes due to rising seas and other effects of climate change. 

..."There could be 200 million of these climate refugees by 2050, according to a new policy paper by the International Organization for Migration, depending on the degree of climate disturbances. Aside from the South Pacific, low-lying areas likely to be battered first include Bangladesh and nations in the Indian Ocean, where the leader of the Maldives has begun seeking a safe haven for his 300,000 people. Landlocked areas may also be affected; some experts call the Darfur region of Sudan, where nomads battle villagers in a war over shrinking natural resources, the first significant conflict linked to climate change...."

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The phrase "climate refugee" comes into increasing use, yet has no legal definition. Geoff Dabelko wrote in 2007 at The New Security Beat in the postiing, "A Word of Caution on Climate Change and “Refugees” that the word "refugee" is problematic when applied to being driven from one's place because of environmental conditions.

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"In order to achieve refugee status, people must be fleeing persecution or violence and must cross a national border," he said.  Dabelko continues that discussion here in the introduction to a new report from the Woodrow Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program, where he is director. 

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A beacon, ECSP and its blog The New Security Beat continually explores the confluence of issues like population, water, ecosystems, resources and migration -- and their impact on security, economy, and society.

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As people increasingly are displaced from the accumulating catalog of climate impacts, perhaps we need to consider expanding the legal definition of refugee, or find new words to describe environment- and climate-driven flight from home. Right now no internationally accepted term exists for people moving because of environmental reasons, and according to the International Organization for Migration, the terms "environmental refugee" and "climate change refugee" have no basis in international refugee law. 

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So if not refugee, what now to call those driven elsewhere by the effects of human-induced climate change?

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Who Doesn't Work Where

Geography of a Recession: The New York Times offers an interactive map showing unemployment across the United States by county (above,) metropolitan area, those areas with housing bubbles, rural areas, and manufacturing centers. The map was based on a nationwide average unemployment rate of 7.1 percent. Most severe job losses are in housing boom and manufacturing areas, and those with previously high unemployment rates. 

The map accompanies an article by David Leonhardt, "Job Losses Show Breadth of Recession":

"What does the worst recession in a generation look like?

"It is both deep and broad. Every state in the country, with the exception of a band stretching from the Dakotas down to Texas, is now shedding jobs at a rapid pace. And even that band has recently begun to suffer, because of the sharp fall in both oil and crop prices..."

Extreme Climate Change Journalism

Editorial page editors at the Washington Post might read recent articles on climate change in their own news pages. After publishing an ill-informed and poorly researched op-ed column by George Will a week ago called "Dark Green Doomsayers," the newspaper now fronts an article on human migration driven by climate change.

"Climate Fears Are Driving 'Ecomigration' Across Globe" discusses migration trends unfolding as individuals and nations move or prepare to move to avoid climate change impacts.  A family from Montgomery County, MD moves to New Zealand to avoid America's systemic fragility, the nation of Kiritbati seeks new ground to move its whole population to avoid sea level rise, Floridians who can no longer get insurance on their homes (because of rising risk from hurricane damage) ponder a return to colder climes. It's insightful reporting on a trend little highlighted by mainstream media.

This story follows another published the same day as the lamentable Will bloviation called "Scientists: Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates." This article by Kari Lyderson details accumulating effects of changing climate discussed at the AAAS science meeting by Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and a lead author for the upcoming 5th global climate assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

Field explained the increasing urgency of "climate feedbacks" and why scientists underestimate future impacts from planetary heating. This because we emit more heat-trapping carbon dioxide now than ever imagined, that the southern ocean and forests counted on to absorb it are failing, and that permafrost is beginning to melt, producing more heat-trapping methane. In its 2007 report, the IPCC did not even ponder effects of permafrost melting because too little data existed.

So as the planet ramps up its extreme behavior, we get extreme journalism, both good and bad.  The planet will respond as it must to our excesses, and we need smart journalism like the Post offers in its news pages to explain those changes. But the least my local newspaper can do can do is not further confuse the issue by publishing clueless commentary. We deserve better from those who decide what to print, and Will should stick with what he knows: baseball.

Scenes from a Drying California

Feb. 3, 2009 view of Lake Oroville northeast of Sacramento, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Photo from CA Dept. of Water Resources.

Time runs out for California to receive its annual quota of winter snow and rain. The state is now in the third year of a drought.

Recent snowpack and reservoir measurements indicate that parts of the state now face the most severe water shortage since a major drought in 1991. More than 9 million people have since moved to the state.

State authorities Friday called for statewide 20 percent water use reductions. Federal and state water authorities notified irrigators and other users of federal water in the Central Valley that deliveries would be from zero to 10 percent of normal. 

This means if you are a farmer counting on irrigation water to grow your crops, you will be have enough water to grow crops on 10 percent of your acres, or to put 10 percent of needed water on all your acres. Neither choice appeals.

Graphic published in Sacramento Bee, Sat. Feb 22, 2009

Lake Oroville, above, a reservoir on the Feather River that produces hydropower and water for irrigation, is among lowest in the state. Projections are that Oroville will fill only about one-third this year. 

California's Central Valley farms, dependent on irrigation water from reservoirs like Oroville and Lake Shasta, produce major portions of the nation's lettuce and vegetable supply.

Western states must confront the reality of declining snowpacks due to long-term increases in temperatures from human-induced climate change. This while regional population increases stress what water supplies remain.

CA Dept. of Water Resources: Executive Update 

CA Dept. of Water Resources: Photos of Lake Oroville 2009 and 1991

New York Times: Severe Drought Adds to Hardships in California

Sacramento Bee: California urges all to cut water use by 20 percent 

Signs From Earth: California Keeps Drying Out

Signs From Earth: Western Water Worries Intensify

Washington Post: Decline in Snowpack is Blamed on Warming