Category: Climate change

“Four seconds to midnight … that’s plenty of time!” Anonymous

I assume there are other aspiring blog writers who experience the sensation of gawping like a fish at a screen as blank as one’s mind, gasping for ideas like the fish trying to breathe out of water.

Maybe it just afflicts those of us of modest talent and originality.  Or maybe (being a little less critical or a touch more deluded, depending on your point-of-view) it is the natural consequence of life’s tiring demands.  Perhaps it is particularly acute in a modern existence that is constantly bombarded by electronic ‘news’ and social media.  Or one surfeited on too many riches when it comes to food, stuff, facts and experiences.

Whatever the reason, writers’ block, to give lack of inspiration a more respectable name, is surely intensified by being in a minority, of swimming against the zeitgeist – so if you have sympathy for any of the views expressed in this somewhat rambling series of posts, please do let me know.  In fact, even if you think I am demented, your feedback is valuable …

The Maw of Large Numbers

Speaking of dementia, one of its listed traits is an inability to cope with time: the events of yesterday may be confused with those of last year or one’s childhood.  We pity those who suffer so, but maybe theirs is just an acute manifestation of a muddle that also affects us who are supposedly ‘sound of mind’.  We too find it hard to grasp lengths of time longer than our lifespan, even if some of us are feeling cocky about remembering when things happened.

So when we read that fossil fuels have taken around 2,000,000,000 years to form in the Earth’s crust and we have used up a large chunk of them within the last 200 years, we might not immediately think “Oh, that cannot last!”, because 200 years seems like a jolly long time to most of us and 2 billion is just mind-numbing.  It is as if there is a large maw in our psyche into which we discard these difficult numbers and their unrelatable meaning.  We might even be comforted rather than alarmed when the BP Statistical Review 2017 reports that we still have circa 50 years’ worth of proved reserves of oil and gas in the world, and implies the existence of further decades’ worth of reserves not yet proved.  At least we who live today in the Western world should be able to heat our houses in our retirement (pending war or financial meltdown).  Future generations – at least those that succeed our grandchildren – are faceless and unimportant.

Admittedly, it does seem that environmentalists have tended to underestimate how long we’ve got.  For instance, in 1972 the Club of Rome warned of the impending depletion of a range of resources that have lasted much longer than the club anticipated.  James Lovelock, the scientist who discovered CFCs in the atmosphere in the 1960s and developed the Gaia theory of a living Earth, wrote in 2007: “before this century is over … the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable”.  Five years later, he commented that he had been “extrapolating too far” and exaggerating the speed of climate change.  David Mackay, the imperious twaddle-busting expert on sustainable energy, wrote in 2008 that cheap oil and gas might be used up in our lifetime, an outcome that looks improbable in 2018.

There is, though, a crucial difference between errors of kind and those of degree.

Out of experience, out of thought

Perhaps we cannot relate to the long term because the ‘long term’ is alien to our own experience of life.  In this respect, 2 billion years is as unreal to us as quantum mechanics, or what a flower looks like to a bee.  It is not much easier to relate to methane gas (invisible and odourless), or what electricity really is; and in consequence we struggle to be aware of our energy consumption.

Recently, there has been something of a success achieved by David Attenborough in his latest Planet Earth series, in terms of increasing awareness of the damage done by plastics in oceans.  Many people (me included) are trying to reduce the volume of plastic we throw away.  And some are calling for more incineration of waste plastic.

But this just shows how much easier it is to get the public to engage with something real and tangible.  We cannot see electricity (only its conversion to visible radiation when we switch lights on) or natural gas (only its combustion if we use a gas cooker).  The wider effects of their consumption are diffuse and indirect (e.g. droughts partly but not precisely attributable to climate change); they lack the incontrovertible quality of a dead fish that has swallowed a plastic bottle top.  So it’s a much harder battle to stimulate public concern about our energy use.  For every ten who might now say we should incinerate plastics to avoid them spilling into our oceans, is there one who will rejoin with the questions: Where will the energy for incineration come from?  How much extra CO2 is produced in the process?

Future vision

We can at least try to see where we are headed.  In this respect, the occasional glimmer of public honesty lightens the pervading darkness of denial, for a moment at least.  In October 2017, the Dept for Transport published “UK aviation forecasts 2017”, a rare report in which CO2 emissions from all flights departing from (but not arriving at) a UK airport, regardless of destination, have been taken into account in the calculation of “UK emissions”.  Using this accounting method, which seems fair, the document estimates that CO2 emissions from flights are now about 38 MtCO2 per annum, or nearly 10% of the UK’s total CO2 emissions, a useful admission given that government statistics for CO2 emissions generally ignore international aviation altogether on the basis that they are not physically produced within the UK.  But the honesty is incomplete: the same document omits any calculations showing that the contribution of flying to GHG emissions is much higher than the MtCO2 figure suggests (perhaps around twice as high, which would make aviation’s contribution to UK GHG closer to 20%) because of the extra potency of CO2 emissions at high altitude.  Indeed, the DfT report includes a ‘box’ on page 46 that discusses the issue – admitting that “aviation’s overall climate effects could be up to double the climate effect of its CO2 emissions alone” – but then ignores this point in its presentation of GHG numerical data.  Its statistics are based solely on CO2 emissions at ground level.  If an effect is acknowledged to be important but uncertain, it is intellectually more honest to go with a central estimate of its magnitude than to present statistics that omit it altogether.

Be that as it may, let’s peer into the gloom … but perhaps I will leave it until my next post to present an optimistic vision of an enlightened world.

 

 

“The best thing we can do with environmentalists is shoot them” – Michael O’Leary

Wastefulness, it seems, is endemic to life on Earth.  Of the sun’s incoming energy, about half reaches the Earth’s surface, with the other half reflected or absorbed by particles in the atmosphere.  Of the solar energy captured by plants, no more than 5% is turned into biomass via photosynthesis and 1% is more typical of modern crops.  Of the chemical energy in the food that we eat, about 25% is converted into useful mechanical work by the human metabolism.  So if all of the sun’s energy that reaches the surface were to be captured by plants, and if all of the plant life in the world were to be consumed by people, then around 0.1%, or one part in a thousand, of the incoming solar energy would be converted into useful human energy: breathing, hearts beating, growing, thinking, talking, running, working, playing, reproducing, … The proportion is much less than that because plants only capture a small portion of the non-reflected solar energy (most of which goes into the oceans) and we only eat a fraction of plant life (and much of that indirectly).

Given how wasteful this is in energy terms, why do we worry so much about the wastefulness of human activity, which seems pretty minor in comparison?  Because before the second Industrial Revolution, there at least appeared to be a natural balance: the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere had varied in the range 200-300 ppm for half a million years depending on the Ice Age cycle; in just 150 years, the concentration has increased by about 40% and is now over 400 ppm.

If the Earth’s existence were scaled to one day, then human beings have been around for about the last 4 seconds, and the time since the second Industrial Revolution corresponds to the last three thousandths of a second.  Large changes to our biosphere in such a short fraction of planetary history are unlikely to be sustainable.

There is a nice metaphor in David Mackay’s “Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air”, which he uses to explain why it matters if human activity leads to emissions of say 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere annually when the oceans are emitting (and absorbing) over 300 billion per annum.  It is an image of an airport that has been designed to cope with a maximum of 1000 passengers per hour: if for some reason the flow increases to say 1050 passengers per hour, then queues will build up and the airport becomes dysfunctional, even though the increase in passenger numbers is small compared to the airport’s capacity.

A loss of nutrition?

One consequence of tipping the natural balance appears to be that human foodstuffs are gradually losing (on average) their nutritional value, at least those produced through intensive farming practices.  It seems that nature does not like it if we try to increase output all the time – eradication of “weeds”, greater yields from arable land, faster growing chickens, bigger beef cattle.

Maybe less is more, as an old Heineken advertisement used to say.   Maybe too much of anything causes it to lose its value, whether it is the food that we eat, goods that we buy, or Gross Domestic Product.  Charles Dickens had the right instinct with education in his creation of M’Choakumchild in Hard Times, a caricatured teacher bursting to the brim with facts to stuff children with.  More recently, Alain de Botton also highlights the virtues of economy with respect to eduction in Religion for Atheists, and with respect to verbal expression and architecture in The Architecture of Happiness.  We need to “notice what we have already seen” (The Art of Travel), which perhaps becomes harder when we are obsessed with increasing the amount of travelling that we do.

The idea that “less is more” doesn’t really convince us though.  Reducing our consumption and travel sounds pretty negative, and so when it comes to environmentalism there’s a part of us that sympathizes with the immortal words of Michael O’Leary, the embattled Ryanair chief executive:  “The best thing you can do with environmentalists is shoot them”.  Frugality is depressing, or so it seems; we need to live and enjoy life!

Permaculture

But maybe what seems plain is really rich but unappreciated.  A patch of garden, or a lifestyle, that seems poor and insipid to me is not innately so, but I perceive it as such because I am insensitive to its innate value.  Maybe it’s a case of learning how to be positive about a way of life that can be sustained.  This begins with seeing ourselves as part of nature, and having to live within nature’s limits.

I was recently introduced to permanent agriculture, or ‘permaculture’, which is both a set of techniques and a mindset for living off the land without ruining it. One of the principal techniques of permaculture is trapping water.  This can involve reshaping the landscape, building swales (even small ones in one’s own garden) so that water does not rush off into drains, leaching nutrients rapidly into water courses and ultimately the sea.  The water is saved, along with the nutrients of the soil.

In permaculture, diversity is appreciated and plants are grown in combinations that are mutually supportive and keep nutrients locked in.  Productivity is much less than in intensive farming techniques, but does that necessarily matter if the produce is better quality?

Everything matters and has value, but needs to be in its right place.  With this mindset, pollution is simply resources in the wrong places or wrong combinations: carbon dioxide and methane that are in the atmosphere rather than the land or sea; energy that is in the atmosphere in the form of heat rather than in the ground in the chemical structure of hydrocarbon molecules;  plastic bags that are in the sea or landfill rather than in their constituent components of fossil fuels, or as plastic bags retained for useful purposes in the house or garden.

Life can prosper in seemingly barren settings if we nurture it, not by using invasive techniques because we are impatient to see progress (e.g. smothering a flower bed in manure, planting things we want to see without enough thought as to whether they are well suited to the garden) but by following a more thoughtful and patient process of experiment and adaptation (e.g. making and adding our own compost, planting flowers and crops that suit the soil, temperature, aspect and water level).

In permaculture, our own ecological footprint is not minimized, but maximized in a good way.  It is not that we leave nature alone but that we try to improve the health of the soil and everything that depends on it, taking into consideration the wider ramifications of our actions (energy use, waste, and so forth).  The concept that everything has value extends from plants to people.  Far from being negative, surely this is the most positive of all possible philosophies of life?

How to bring about change?

How do we make this happen, though?  How do we bring about a way of life that is gentler and more sustainable, in accordance with permacultural principles?

I do not know, but the Quaker teaching always to admit you might be mistaken seems like a good place to start.  Change is thwarted by the habits we get into – which do not seem to make us happy – and by defensiveness.  To make significant change in one’s life can be tantamount to admitting the past life was faulty in some respects.  Rather than admit that, we continue as we are.

When it comes to the environment, this defensiveness manifests itself at a national and European level in a tendency to blame China.  At the Bonn summit in November 2017, a number of European researchers involved in the Global Carbon Project concluded that there will be a 2% increase in global CO2 emissions in 2017 driven by an increase in China’s smokestack industries.  This is shamefully disingenuous.  On a per capita consumption basis, we in the West contribute much more to global warming than the citizens of China.  If Chinese emissions increase, it is largely because China is producing what we consume. (And parenthetically, it is interesting to note that in the last year, China has increased its renewable energy capacity three times as much as the whole of Europe combined.)

Before we can really change, we probably have to summon up the honesty and self-awareness that we need to do so.