'Green Blog' - A monthly column of environmental issues

 

Comments on the Climate Change discussion

 

Preamble: I visited an old German mining town a few years ago. The local museum told the story of how the owners of a number of mines in the 14^th century got together to solve the problem of water intrusion in their gold and silver mines. The mining area I am talking about is located in a mountainous area called the 'Harz', which is a high undulating plateau rising some 800 meters above the surrounding land and some 50 Kilometres across in both directions. The vertical mine shafts of up to 400 meters deep where driven into the mountain from the top down, following rich bands of precious metal. Back in the 14^th century the miners realised that they could solve their water intrusion problem once and for all by connecting their individually owned mine shafts with a common underground canal system, which would terminate at the side of the mountain range, still above the surrounding valleys. The water then would simply run out there and would not need to be pumped up to the surface anymore. This also would have the benefit of allowing the transport of ore and overburden on narrow barges out of the mountainside. So they set off to construct this canal system. At this time, one should add, the lifetime achievement of a single miner was a tunnel of some 16 meters long, chiselling the hard rock with simple hand tools! Nevertheless the people back then undertook this project, knowing that it would take over two hundred years to complete with countless miners working away. And sure enough, the great - great - great - great - great - grandchildren of the original planers of the scheme stood to harvest the gains.

 

Why am I telling this story and what dos it have to with Climate Change?

 

It is obviously a story of successful strategic thinking and planning over a very long period. It is a story, where many generations co-operated and worked hard to make life better for some distant offspring. And this vision and determination is exactly what seems to be missing from humanity at our present juncture. To the contrary, we seem to be collectively obsessed with maximizing our own lifetime wealth while neglecting the generations that will come after us. It seems that our economic planning horizon is not much longer than the mortgage on our houses. There seems to be no vision of how our children's children shall cope with the legacy of the current generation's excesses.

 

At the end of last month New Zealand hosted an international conference on climate change. And there appear to be a lot of parallels with the story above in the discussion of Climate Change. We do know today with certainty that the burning of fossil fuels has raised and will further raise the level of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere dramatically. The CO2 levels have already risen from 280 ppm (parts per million) since the beginning of the industrial age to 380 ppm today and it seems likely that they will rise a lot further as we burn through the second half of the worlds oil reserves and then probably through the still vast reserves of coal in the reminder of the century. A change in the concentration of one the gases that make up our atmosphere by a magnitude of this (plus 35% to-date with a predicted doubling by the middle of the century) is unprecedented in the recent (millions of years) history of the planet. The concentration of Methane in the atmosphere has risen by over 300% since the beginning of the industrial revolution! The mix of gas concentrations in the atmosphere is very carefully balanced by nature's processes over millions of years. Changes of this magnitude are nothing but staggering from the perspective of our finely tuned ecosphere!

 

 

 

CO2 and Methane act like a warming blanket in the atmosphere, absorbing and reflecting the infrared radiation from the earth's surface back upon us and thus preventing the normal radiation heat loss of the surface and atmosphere. This inevitably will lead to a gradual warming of our climate - gradual on the scale of our own lifetime but very dramatic when viewed on a geological timescale. CO2 in the atmosphere is also involved in many chemical processes in the environment from plant growth to ocean chemistry. One of the most discussed aspects of global warming is the predicted rise in ocean levels due to the melting of the polar ice caps, which by the mid of this millennium is said to reach 6 meters or more. The ocean level has risen by 20cm since the year 1900 in Auckland for example. At the current increasing speed, the sea level would rise by about a meter per century, making much of downtown Coromandel flood at high water by the end of the Century.

 

In the past, critiques have argued that the earth will somehow compensate for this and adapt to the rise in CO2 and Methane levels. However scientists have begun to understand various feedback cycles in the earth's climate and discovered that instead of regulating the earth's climate back to normal, there are a number of powerful positive feedback cycles which actually promote further global warming once it has kicked into motion. Historic climate records tell how the earth has repeatedly swung between quite different states of its climate in rhythms lasting millions of years. And it is becoming increasingly clear that the earth has now started up a track of rapid warming, likely unprecedented by anything seen in past geological records and triggered by our burning of fossil fuels and Methane emissions. Some of the positive (warming enhancing) feedback cycles that we have now begun to understand are the increase of sun and heat absorbing areas in the artic region where reflective sea ice and the snow and ice cover over the vast northern regions of Siberia and Canada are waning and giving way to sun absorbing ocean water and thawing permafrost regions. Also the thawing permafrost is releasing more greenhouse gases from its soil such as further CO2 and Methane, which has an even greater ability to reflect infrared radiation back to earth than CO2. Most glaciers are receding rapidly and the ice cap of the Antarctic and the glaciers of Greenland are shrinking.

 

What is so worrisome is the fact that even without the CO2 and Methane emissions of our industrial world, the Earth's climate has gone through swings of several degrees of its average temperature and the associated large swings in mean sea level and ice cover over long periods in the geologic past. Now the addition of these vast amounts of excess CO2 from our fossil fuel deposits, which have been storing this carbon for hundreds of millions of years, is likely to produce a swing in our climate larger than any on our recent prehistoric record. At a time when already about a billion of people are threatened by hunger - 24,000 die daily of hunger and malnutrition related causes - the predictable impacts of Climate Change and the probable loss of arable land and sea life caused by rising seal levels and temperatures are alarming.

 

Many scientists are by now painting a quite dire outlook for the prospects of humanity and indeed many species on our planet. One of the critical mechanisms set into motion by our burning of fossil fuels is the acidification of the oceans. CO2 dissolves into sea water by creating carbonic acid lowering the PH level of the water. This process is challenging especially the bottom of the ocean's food chain by significantly reducing the growth of phytoplankton and zooplankton and generally all shell forming creatures such as mussels and corrals, with a devastating ripple effect to all sea life.

"If CO2 from human activities continues to rise, the oceans will become so acidic by 2100 it could threaten marine life in ways we can't anticipate," said Ken Caldeira, co-author of a report to the Royal Society in the U.K.

 

Of cause there are also the Climate Change critiques, who say that there is no proof of any human induced climate change whatsoever. Most of these critics are coming from the very top of worlds wealth pyramid and understandably from the carbon producing industries or are scientists who are funded by these and have a vested interest into the continuation of the status quo. Their main argument is that there is insufficient scientific consensus on these matters to warrant political interference with our free market economy. However the huge body of scientific evidence to date negates these arguments and it is very doubtful that a free market economy will move quickly enough to address any of these critical issues. The mechanisms of our free market economy are geared to maximise short term profit for shareholders of enterprises and not to save the planet.

 

Often it is mentioned that the 'Peak Oil' argument will lead to self regulation of carbon emissions in due course, as we might run out of carbon fuels before having set the world's climate onto the path to self destruction, however that is unfortunately not so. With great probability we will carry on burning the remaining vast reserves of coal and thereby emitting much more CO2 in the process than all other industrial emissions combined so far.

 

What can be done about all this and what should New Zealand do? We are a small country and whatever we will do will have only a small impact globally. But what we can do and have done is to participate constructively in the generation of an international body of treaties for the reduction of the impact of our economies on the future prospects of the planet. This is an arduous and difficult task. We can also do our part in searching for economically feasible technologies to lower greenhouse gas emissions. One of these areas of research is concerned about the science of the digestive tracts of our large numbers of sheep and cattle. The methane emissions in New Zealand from farming are our single largest contributor to global warming, well ahead of traffic emissions! Research is underway to perhaps genetically engineer the gut flora of these animals or to breed animals which are methane-free. There are already methane-free sheep being bred by conventional selection. Research in this area could give New Zealand the edge in a significant technological contribution to the limiting of global warming.

Rt. Hon Simon Upton, former NZ Minister for the Environment and now Chairman of the Round Table on Sustainable Development at the OECD remarked at the conference: "what is going on in the rumens of our cattle is equivalent to what is going on in energy industries of countries like China or the US when comparing greenhouse gas emissions". He also advocated a carbon tax on fossil fuels in order to seed up the pressure on society to adopt energy saving strategies. Such measures must be based on broad political support in our society to generate a stable and predictable environment for the investments that will need to be made.

 

It seems sufficiently obvious to me that we are saddled with probably the most significant responsibility in the history of humankind to date. We have unleashed powers that will destroy much of our current environment over time unless we succeed to put the genie back into the bottle. If we fail, Earth may well go through a mass extinction event comparable to some of the great mass extinctions of species from the prehistoric past from which evolution will need millions of years to recover. Failure to act responsibly seems simply not to be an option for our generation.

Thomas Everth