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Climate change: the big picture is being missed

By Melvin Bolton - posted Thursday, 2 April 2020


Imagine that we have persisted in driving at speed along a track that, for miles, has been shaking a beautiful car to pieces and littering the ground with wreckage. But our eyes are fixed on the temperature gauge and all we know to worry about is overheating. Only when the engine is becoming too hot do we realise that the cooling system of our vehicle is connected to lots of other parts, including some of those that have fallen off.

The metaphor may not be perfect but it draws attention to the fact that climate is an integral part of the way the world works. It is not a separate issue.

Everything is interconnected. The world is a hierarchy of systems. Nobody knows how many species there are among the living components, much less the exact roles they have in the ecosystems that we know about. But they do play a part; they don't just exist in numbers within categories like 'endangered,' 'threatened,' or 'pest'. And the systems work on vastly different levels. At the smallest level, individuals are evidently walking ecosystems of even greater complexity than we might have guessed.

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As parents have always known, the behaviour of babies is largely determined by signalling that goes on between the brain and the belly. What science has recently discovered is that the brain receives some signals from communities of microbes in the gut. In laboratory animals, at least, the microbes' chemical messages can influence mood, mental health and social behaviour. It is now reasonable to wonder whether microscopic forms of life in a person's gut could be involved in conditions such as depression and autistic spectrum disorder.

Research findings like this make good topics for wider publication because the recipe for getting articles published and widely read starts with finding interesting topics, then giving them catchy titles and keeping the writing focused. It's no good rambling on, trying to join all the dots that might come into view as you explore your subject and get into your stride.

So it follows that day-to-day reporting on anything involving the natural world is likely to be something of a snapshot, some tiny aspect of the bigger picture without the interconnections. In these times of information overload, readers are doing well to come away with a proper grasp of whatever works best in the limited space beneath a catchy title.

Broadening the picture

The study of earth's climate is as big as it gets in terms of system science so making sense of climate change is mainly the work of specialists who feed enormous amounts of data into computer models. The specialists' consensus, which is causing such a fuss in domestic politics, is that gases, largely released from burning fossil fuels, are amounting to more than the earth can cope with in its present state so the gases are accumulating in the atmosphere. Because of the greenhouse effect the lower part of the atmosphere is warming up and the climate is changing in ways that have no precedent during the past few thousand years - if ever.

As temperatures increase, polar ice melts, sea levels rise, oceans become more acidic, and extreme weather events become more frequent. There will be many regional and less predictable consequences and the cumulative impact on economies around the world is likely to vary enormously between nations. Changes to the temperature and chemistry of the oceans will have a severe impact on corals and on the many marine species that depend on the reefs. On land, it is hard to see how the net impact on biodiversity can be other than negative when the climate is changing swiftly away from that to which species have long been adapted.

But the fact remains that the major destroyers of wild nature are the same as they have been for a long time. Most destruction is still a direct consequence of human activities - including some of those most responsible for the release of greenhouse gases. We can expect a changing climate to make matters worse overall but on present trends the onslaught against wild nature is set to continue, with or without climate change.

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People and the planet

Fisheries reveal the pressure. In 1950 the global fish catch was 28 million tonnes and it seemed inconceivable that the oceans, covering 70% of the earth's surface, would be overfished within a person's lifetime. The catch peaked at 130 million tonnes in 1996, since when it has been declining despite increasing effort by the world's industrial fleets. In 1950 the human population was close to 2.5 billion. It is now 7.8 billion and set to reach 8 billion in the next three years. The last billion was added in a twelve-year period. A billion is a number that slips easily off the tongue so it is worth bearing in mind that a clock takes more than 30 years to count it in seconds.

Life inside the greenhouse

The messages commonly being hammered out in the everyday news are as simplistic as political slogans. We are told that CO2 emissions must be reduced, and quickly, because time is running out to save our precious world. Climate activists carry the messages on placards. The implication, intended or otherwise, is that all would be well with the planet if we could stop burning fossil fuels. So simple. If only it were true!

The earth's operating systems are being affected by a combination of human demands for energy, land, water and other resources. Soil, for instance, is a bigger carbon sink than all the trees and other vegetation that grow upon it, so land degradation contributes substantially to climate change. About a quarter of the world's land area is now degraded, let alone deforested. Wetlands are being lost particularly rapidly yet they are especially important in the carbon cycle, as well as providing many other ecosystem services.

Since 1970 there has been an overall decline of 60% in the sizes of vertebrate populations around the world, and within each vertebrate class (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish) at least two thirds of the losses are still being caused by habitat loss and degradation together with species overexploitation. The tropics are hardest hit, particularly in South and Central America (including the Caribbean) where the decline has been over 80%.

Freshwater ecosystems are under exceptional pressure and some major rivers are so heavily used that for most of the time they peter out before reaching the sea. Agriculture, in one form or another, accounts for some 70% of water withdrawal and water tables in many places are falling drastically as a result of pumping groundwater. But people make multiple demands on rivers and wetlands and the local consequences of urbanization can also be painfully obvious in polluted waterways near built-up areas.

Perhaps more surprisingly, water-worn sand has become a precious commodity, mainly for making concrete and largely to meet a demand driven by burgeoning urbanization. China, in the years between 2011 and 2014,is reported to have used more concrete than did the United States during all of the 20th century.It is not clear whether total demand exceeds global supply but there are certainly regional scarcities to which the world's tallest building stands testimony. Concrete for the Burj Khalifain Dubai was made from sand and gravel imported from Australia. The rounded, wind-blown grains of desert sands are not suitable for concrete. Coastal sands do meet the required standards but the need to wash out salt increases the cost.

Sand mining and dredging are poorly regulated and frequently illegal but 'sand mafias' are powerful enough to bribe and intimidate their way to huge profits. River beds are scoured and sandbanks and beaches are trucked and shipped away with no regard for natural ecosystems, coastal protection or communities of fishing folk whose livelihoods are destroyed.

In ordinary concrete the sand is bound by cement consisting largely of crushed clinker. The clinker is made by roasting limestone with clay in very hot kilns, and the process emits CO2 amounting to at least half the weight of the clinker it produces. That is regardless of the source of energy used to power the kilns.

Sustainable development

At a United Nations summit, held in New York in 2015, world leaders tried to see the bigger picture and pledged to take action, simultaneously, on a broad range of environmental, economic and social issues, including climate. The leaders signed up to a package of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) incorporating a total of 169 'targets' to be reached by 2030.

Now, five years later and with a decade to go, it looks unlikely that many SDGs will be reached and the targets to protect climate and biodiversity have actually slipped further away. In September last year, the UN published a Global Sustainable Development Report prepared by an independent group of fifteen scientists. The report points out that adopting appropriate policies will require 'a profound and intentional departure from business as usual' - nothing short of a transformation of social, environmental and economic systems.

The 17 separate goals are not independent of each other so the scientists came up with half a dozen 'entry points' through which the goals can be approached in combinations that will best enable the countless interactions to be managed. On this basis, the climate, together with life on land and in water (SDGs 13–15) are lumped together in a single entry point called the 'global environmental commons'. The combination seems logical and it might be thought that actions to mitigate climate change would also benefit biodiversity. But, of course, it's complicated.

What do we want? When do we want it?

Coal-fired power generation accounts for 30% of all energy-related carbon dioxide emissions so electricity generation has become a prime target for climate activists - for whom a switch to renewable energy sources cannot come too soon.

Among the familiar renewables are solar, wind, and hydropower. Comparing their efficiency as energy sources involves doing life-cycle analyses so that the energy used in constructing, maintaining and decommissioning the plants is taken into account. Published analyses vary wildly because so many variables are involved and the analyses are not necessarily standardized. In the end, the most effective mix of energy sources will be largely determined by local geography. In general, however, the economic outlook favours renewables, not fossil fuels.

Environmental concerns are something else. Carbon dioxide is not released when wind and water spins turbines, or solar energy generates electricity, though fossil fuels may be used in manufacture, setup and end-of-life processes. Environmental damage from windfarms depends on where they are located. Trees may need to be cleared, access roads built and substantial excavations carried out for cable trenches and foundations; a single big turbine requires more than a thousand tonnes of concrete at its base. Depending on soil types and drainage patterns, ecological effects can be quite far-reaching.

Hydropower, as a threat to natural ecosystems, is in a category of its own. In Europe and the USA, between 1920 and 1970, thousands of dams were built for hydropower and they caused substantial ecological and social disruption. In those countries more dams have been removed than have been built in recent years. But sizeable portions of the globe are being transformed by a dam-building boom in developing countries.

It has been estimated that at least 3,500 hydropower dams are planned or are under construction in regions that include some of the most ecologically valuable and fertile parts of the world such as the great basins of the Amazon, Congo and Mekong rivers. There are already many dams on major rivers draining the Himalayas, and hundreds more are planned in Nepal, Bhutan, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Among the thousands of dams in China is the world's biggest one - the Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze River which required 70 million tonnes of concrete and displaced 1.3 million people. Everywhere, large hydropower dams are notoriously disruptive to ecology, downstream agriculture, fisheries and the livelihoods of rural people. Many dams, depending on the extent of submerged forest and other rotting organic matter, will contribute to global warming for years by releasing methane, a greenhouse gas that is many times more potent than CO2.

We are often reminded that cattle also emit methane, and that raising livestock is an inefficient way of using land. Methane emissions can be reduced by changes to cattle diets but nothing can be done about the fact that meat contains only a small percentage of the calories that are consumed by an animal before it is slaughtered. Land can always support more vegetarians than meat-eaters. But if the hope is to restore the earth's natural systems to some extent then supporting more people on the same acreage is not helpful unless it restores or conserves natural systems elsewhere. Overgrazing on arid and marginal lands is a serious problem but trying to grow crops in the wrong places can be even more destructive.

At the heart of the global need, it is hard to see how 'a profound and intentional departure from business as usual' can be consistent with a continued fixation on growing the gross domestic product regardless of environmental cost. Yet, in nearly every country, GDP is put forward by governments as the paramount measure of progress, even though it frequently fails to represent an improvement in the lives of most citizens. In a list of the twenty fastest-growing economies last year, almost all were developing countries in Asia and Africa where people are swelling the towns and cities in search of a better life. Sadly, the coronavirus is likely to put a much bigger dent in CO2 emissions than will be achieved by all the valiant efforts of Greta Thunberg.

Australia produces only 1.3% of the world's CO2 emissions (bushfires excluded) but the per capita output is one of the highest. Better standards are needed if progressive nations are to set examples on the world stage because climate change can only be tackled with global cooperation. This cooperation, it has to be said, must be maintained in a world riven by political and religious rivalries and undermined by corruption. The United Nations estimates that corruption costs $2.6 trillion a year, a sum equal to five percent of global GDP and ten times the amount of official development assistance.

But climate activists should not despair if they are confronted with the true size and global complexity of the problem. Demands for climate action need not fall short of calling for climate resilience to be given a higher priority in activists' countries of residence. To the extent that this results in better town and country planning, hazard preparedness, and protection of natural ecosystems within national borders it will surely be a lot better than no action at all.

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About the Author

Melvin Bolton worked as an ecologist for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In semi-retirement he is a freelance writer and occasional broadcaster on Radio National. His writing output has included seven books, ranging from fiction through popular science to academic.

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