WDC Blog - From the Front Line

‘They say’, said the reporter carefully, ‘that the age of cheap oil is over’. ‘They’ being a group of invisible and anonymous experts. The sentiment, however, seems to ring true. In order to exploit dwindling oil reserves, the industry is pushing into more extreme environments, for example deeper seas and further offshore, than it would have worked in before. This raises some difficult questions. Does the escalating cost of what may be described as the ‘oil addiction’ of modern societies, now include an increased risk embedded in the deployment of newer technologies in more difficult environments? And with such an increased risk would there not be an inevitability of increased accidents; and, arguably, the deeper a well and the further offshore it is, the more difficult it may be to cap?

The latest horrify and still expanding spill in the Gulf of Mexico points to this, but we should also not forget the recent major spill in Australia where another offshore rig started to leak and also proved very difficult to staunch.

Continue reading "Oily Times"

So here is how it all began.

It was a long time ago and God was in the final stages of assembling all the animals.

Working from a large pile of pre-assembled organs and limbs, She had carefully constructed the land mammals using a similar plan for each (with some small modifications): four legs (some short, some long), two eyes (various shades), two ears (some powerful, some less so), a range of noses, tails and other attributes, and a variety of decorations (hair, stripes, scales and so forth) and brain sizes.

Then She turned to the marine animals. She quickly realized that they did not need legs. Instead she made the fish stream-lined and finned, and able to quickly cut through the dense medium of the water (something she had made earlier and which she liked so much that she filled most of the planet with it).

She briefly experimented with the whales but, after a while, took their little legs away too. They really were not needed in the watery world.

Finally, when God had almost finished, She stopped to review what she had made, but realized that there remained a pile of parts that she had not used. Many legs were left over. So she took these and using groups of five she made the star-fishes, the sea-stars and, rolling five legs into a tight ball and adding some left-over spines, she made the sea-urchins.

God looked at all that She had done, and thought that it was good. She had no idea that the difference She had made between the marine animals and the land ones would lead to so much trouble in the future.

Hundreds of millions of years passed. In the dawn of a new age, the human species (by now globally dominant and hugely destructive) was meeting to review the fate of some of the others, including several marine ones, and maybe it was the difference between the animals in the sea and the animals of the land that led to the differences in the ways that they decided they should be treated.

The meeting was the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES) and it met in Doha, in Qatar in March 2010, where a variety of issues were on a packed agenda. Here agreements could be reached to protect species from international trade, and foremost in these issues was the question of the Atlantic blue-fin tuna – a large, fast-moving and delicious species. The proposal came from Monaco and after almost no debate, was profoundly defeated by a vote of 68 to 20. (It would have needed the support of two-thirds of the nations attending the Doha conference to succeed).
In fact there were thirteen proposals for marine species protection at this CITES conference (more than ever before) and all ultimately failed.

There are various tuna species. These tasty fish ultimately find their way into many human meals, from sandwiches to sushi and expensive sashimi. In the last fifty or so years, 90% of the big predatory fish (including the tuna) have vanished from the seas; the seemingly insatiable human appetite for these animals has virtually wiped them out in a single human generation. The Bluefin tuna is so prized that it can sell for several hundred dollars a kilogramme and a single Bluefin weighing in at 262kg fetched a near-record 16.28mn yen ($175,000) at an auction at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market two months before the Doha meeting.

The proposal to protect them at the CITES conference was a last ditch stand to save them and Japan has been largely credited with blocking the proposal. Given Japan’s dependence on marine foods, its ability to corral the votes of many allied nations and its fierce opposition to protection for marine species, as evidenced by its actions concerning whales and whaling, this was not perhaps surprising.

The loosers at this particular CITES conference, in addition to the tuna, included the sharks and the corals. Perhaps even more surprising was that the polar bear proposal from the United States also failed. (The bear is very much an animal of the frozen sea, even if it has four legs, and maybe its honorary marine status helped to crash the trade ban proposal). Given the bear’s status as the most obvious and immediate victim of climate change, the failure of countries to agree to address the trade threat to its survival is all the more remarkable. This also bodes badly for other species which may have their survival truncated by climate change combined with international trade.

A few species did gain new protection: an endangered salamander from Iran and the Bolivian rhinoceros beetle were added to the lists of the protected. (Japan presumably has no interest in eating either in the immediate future.)  A proposal for a one-off sale of elephant ivory from Zambia and Tanzania was defeated and more action was called for to protect rhinoceroses, but these positive developments for the terrestrial animals stand in stark contrast to the thirteen defeated pro-conservation proposals.    

Perhaps God is looking down and wondering where She went wrong. Perhaps She is watching the tuna merchants hording the flesh of these increasingly expensive fishes in their freezers against the day when extinction will make their stores even more valuable and a tuna sandwich will become a luxury for the privileged few alone to nibble on.  

In a follow up to my recent post on the issue of climate degradation I noted two features in this week's New Scientist Magazine that i thought might interest you.

Firstly, further evidence is coming to light that methane is being released from under the Arctic Ocean. Alaskan based scientists have discovered over 100 hot-spots where methane is leaking from seabed permafrost to form areas of seawater at eight times the level of expected dilution in surrounding Arctic waters. Estimates suggest that 7 million tonnnes are being released a year at the moment, but as the Arctic warms up this could accelerate, contributing to rapid climate degradation.

At the same time three US states, Texas, Louisiana and South Dakota, have told their schools that they have to teach climate change scepticism. In the land of the 'First Amendment' it appears that states can decide what science is relevant, and what is not, and dance closely with the Constitution to insist that a political view is promoted in schools. So, whilst UK schools can debate the issue, with all points of view able to be discussed by enquiring students based on the evidence they can find; in South Dakota the state legislature has decided that the science is 'unresolved' and is 'complicated and prejudiced'. The legislature bill also says that climate change debate is 'political'.

These phrases from our state governments are political in their own right and I charge that they challenge the fundamental concept of Freedom of Speech. How can our legislators, local, state, federal or inter-governmental, insist that the science is 'prejudiced' unless they have already decided it is 'prejudiced' against what they wish students and young people to believe.

I for one thought the USA was founded on the right to oppose tyranny; but the modern tyranny of thought control over our children is maybe of more concern than any British musket ever could be.

Stop telling us what to believe, and let us decide ourselves.

On occasions when we have talked about climate change the more skeptical of our ‘friends’ have suggested that cetaceans ought to be pretty robust to all this warming and cooling. Some have even suggested that cetaceans ‘did all right in the last ice age, so should be fine now’.

To that I say ‘poppycock’.

WDCS has note the growing impact of acidification an its potential impact on cetaceans, but a recent report has again highlighted the problem of the silent death that is creeping through our oceans.

Les Blumenthal, writing in the McClatchy Newspapers writes; ‘Far away from our casual sight, something is going wrong in our oceans.’ Off the Pacific Northwest coast of the Unites States,  areas of lower level of oxygen are alarming scientists and conservationists.

 The report notes that in some spots off Washington state and Oregon, the almost complete absence of oxygen has left piles of Dungeness crab carcasses littering the ocean floor, killed off 25-year-old sea stars, crippled colonies of sea anemones and produced mats of potentially noxious bacteria that thrive in such conditions.

Areas of hypoxia, or low oxygen, have long existed in the deep ocean but in some spots, such as off the Southern California coast, oxygen levels have dropped roughly 20 percent over the past 25 years. Elsewhere, scientists say, oxygen levels might have declined by one-third over 50 years.



Scientists say the changes are consistent with current climate-change models.

'Previous studies have found that the oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

 As ocean temperatures rise, the warmer water on the surface acts as a cap, which interferes with the natural circulation that normally allows deeper waters that are already oxygen-depleted to reach the surface. It's on the surface where ocean waters are recharged with oxygen from the air.
 
Water that's pulled up from the depths is poor in oxygen, it's rich in nutrients, which fertilize phytoplankton. These microscopic organisms form the bottom of one of the richest ocean food chains in the world. As they die, however, they sink and start to decay. The decaying process uses oxygen, which depletes the oxygen levels even more.
'

Blumenthal reports further,  "It's a large disturbance in the ecosystem that could have huge biological changes," said Steve Bograd , an oceanographer at NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Southern California.

Bottom-dwelling species could be at the greatest risk because they move slowly and might not be able to escape the lower oxygen levels. Most fish can swim out of danger. Some species, however, such as chinook salmon, may have to start swimming at shallower depths than they're used to. Whether the low oxygen zones will change salmon migration routes is unclear. 



So why are we humans so reluctant to accept something is going on? Well I suggest its not because the evidence is saying that there is not a problem. The blip of debate over the IPCC reports is just that, a blip. In a year’s time we shall see more evidence and this will be forgotten.

But the traditional environmentalists in our younger generations are also being swayed by the naysayers. Its concerning to see a report that suggests ‘Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 are, for the most part, split on the issue of global warming and, on some indicators, relatively disengaged when compared to older generations.’

Is it that we do believe that man-made climate degradation is real, it’s just that by remaining skeptical to pollsters and the media, we put off having to take responsibility?

(Please note that I find using the phrase ‘climate change’ or climate warming’ can encourage a kind of positive view in some people’s minds; a view of a world of ‘gentle breezes blowing in over a Caribbean beach’ – not quite what it could really be – like a another frozen UK. Lets use a negative phrase to get people to understand what this could really mean)

Just as some people had ‘forgotten’ about whaling, and their governments have conveniently forgotten what a resumption of commercial whaling will do for whales and our oceans, - its just easier to ‘hope it will go away’ without having to do anything now.

The evidence in our oceans may be out of sight and therefore out of mind, but when these effects start to affect the cost of your fish, or mean that prey disappears for whales and dolphins and they themselves then disappear off your coastline, it may well be to late.

I for one don’t know what the absolute effects of man-made climate degradation will be. What I do know is that the possibilities are alarming, and I don’t want to gamble on those worse options happening for my children, but there again, maybe if I close my eyes and put my hands over my ears, and spin round three times, I could just ignore it…

Quite a few people have been looking at the very cold weather around Europe of the last few weeks and suggesting that this is disproving the notion that we are being affected by climate change. Their theory is that this is a sign that the planet is not really warming up. Sadly they are wrong.

It is not cold everywhere in the world at this time and, in fact, in North-east America, Canada, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and south-west Asia have all recently seen temperatures above normal. In some places this has been by more than 5 °C, and in parts of northern Canada, by more than 10 °C.

The immediate reason for the very cold weather in much of Europe at this time is that the air stream has been coming to us from the North. More usually it comes from the west in the winter and is warmed by the relatively warm Atlantic. (Typically this gives the UK milder winters than continental Europe.) For the last few weeks the Atlantic air movement has been ‘blocked’ and cold air has been flowing down from the Arctic or the cold winter landmass of Europe.

So what we are experiencing is part of the usual winter weather pattern (albeit it an unusually cold one) and it does not tell us anything about climate change.

The UK Met Office provides some further information here.

  

And please don't forget to put some extra food and some water out for the birds whilst the chill continues.

As is traditional at this time of year, the air is stirred by a gentle ringing of bells. But it is not the bells on a sleigh.

The Year, now ancient, her mind increasingly filled with holes, is ringing the bells by her bed summoning the Nurse. She doesn’t want anything except some company in her final days, and perhaps some reassurance.

She asks the question that she has forgotten that she has already asked many times before.

‘Was I kind?’

‘You were neither kind nor unkind’ says the Nurse gently, stroking her hand.

‘Will the people remember me? I would like to be remembered.’

‘Oh yes’, says the nurse, ‘You will certainly be remembered. You were the year when a great global recession lingered; you were the year when nations recognised that they were cooking the planet but failed to agree how to turn the heat down. You were the year when war, famine, weird weather and ignorance dominated global business. You marked the end of the first decade of the twenty first century. You were indeed an important and most memorable year.’

‘But I do not sound kind’, says the Year weakly turning her face away from the nurse, silent tears falling.

‘It’s not your fault dear old Year. It’s the people.’

‘What about the animals? Was I kind to the animals? I like the animals.’

‘Well’, the nurse pauses, and takes a deep breath, ‘Your passage saw a growing awareness by the people of animals as unique, valued, often sentient beings… as intelligences unlike their own, but still to be respected and cherished.’

The Nurse gently combs the grey tresses of the rapidly aging Year and smiles sweetly into her old rheumy eyes. He does not vocalise his own thoughts that, despite this awareness in some parts, cruelty continued to abound and people were more distracted than ever by their own immediate concerns. Nor does he mention that as conditions on the planet get more difficult, so he anticipates that the people will focus more and more on themselves and the animals will be increasingly forgotten.

But the Year has been reassured. ‘That’s good’, she gently sighs and then suddenly dozes. The Nurse tiptoes away until he will be summoned again to answer similar questions.

Soon it will be time to gently apply the medical sickle and the Year will pass.

Soon the jingling bells will be silent.

Soon, the Nurse will attend the urgent cries of the Baby, when little Twenty Ten arrives; a new year, even a new decade, full of promise and full of hope for all the denizens of the stressed planet.

The nurse knows that 2010 will keep him busy. There will be more people alive than at any previous time. Where the systems break down; the resources prove inadequate; or the planet rages in fever, then the merciful sickle will fall and the Nurse will take the fallen away. Where habitats and ecosystems fail he will do the same for the animals. So it is that some people, some populations, and even some whole species and will end before their potential span. But there is yet hope. A whole new year and a new decade to come that could mark a new beginning as novel rays of understanding and appreciation start to shine into the dark recesses of human minds. If humankind works together and applies its ingenious minds, things can still be resolved for the better.

The nurse stares into the void ‘Think people!’ he calls. ‘Think hard; understand and apply yourselves to your urgent responsibilities.’  Otherwise, in twelve short months, the Nurse will again find himself embellishing the truth for another dying year, and for all his kindness, he does not like to lie.  

Of all the post Copenhagen wraps up, George Monbiot pretty much sums up my feelings about the outcomes of the Copenhagen meeting, but others also remind me that there is still some hope.

Unlike many, I am not so worried not to have achieved the much sought ‘legally binding agreement’ at this meeting. It’s a lot to secure from so many Governments in such a short space of time.

I am a fan of global process. I am believer in the power and purpose of civil society. I am confident that the UN holds an important role in our future (when it overcomes the bureaucratic problems of the present). And, I know that when Governments want to, and the right negotiators are in the room, they can fundamentally change the way the world is structured.

Continue reading "Will the failure of Copenhagen whet our appetite for real change?"

Its been a night of confusion and deals within deals and 'meeting crashers' at the Copenhagen conference. And what's been agreed? Is it an agreement or is it a promise of an agreement? One of the best summaries of the intrigue last night seems to be Stephen Collinson
piece from AFP. The IWC meetings have been some of the most chaotic sessions I have ever attended in terms of international meetings, - but this conference seems to have taken the biscuit.

“It is not fiction it is science… the question… is no longer the nature of the challenge the question is our capacity to meet it….[but] our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now.”

With these words, US President Barack Obama, today called for urgent action at the Copenhagen climate summit to agree a deal on its last day.

However it appears that what is now being discussed has been stripped of any targets. Because countries simply cannot agree, simply cannot find that middle ground and we may well be left with just a wish list.

Two years ago they committed to making a new and binding agreement, now commentators suggest that the battle is on just to have some sort of paper agreement to take home.

It seems unlikely that there can now be a legally-binding treaty complete with verifiable emission and temperature targets or even a deadline to agree such a thing.

It seems that our species is just not us to this job any more than the dinosaurs were able to adapt to the global changes that ultimately wiped them out.

More information: BBC News/BBC Blog

Why do species go extinct? Many have gone extinct because they could not adapt quickly enough to changes in their environment. (Recently, we have helped many on their way.)

The big question for our species – the most adaptable species planet Earth has ever seen - is can we adapt quickly enough to address the global-scale damage we have done to our atmosphere. The latest reports from the Copenhagen conference on climate change now indicate that we probably cannot because no deal is going to be sealed there!

Many state leaders are now present. Many celebrities are also in town (Gordon Brown, Boris Johnson, Arnold Swartzeneger and many others and tomorrow Mr Obama arrives for the final day). Many non-governmental bodies are also there. Many are there without a hope of getting into the conference but they obviously feel they should be represented.

Outside the conference center there are reports that protestors are being treated very robustly by the security forces and delegates are even having problems getting into the conference itself.

Inside there is also conflict and an impasse, and people are starting to talk about another year of negotiations being needed.

Ed Miliband, the UK’s Energy and Climate Change Secretary who is leading the negotiations for the UK, said last night that the current position was very dangerous and if the talks failed that ‘people all over the world will be furious and they will be right to be furious’.

There is a lot of confusion about where the problems are. Many commentators are saying that they simply do not know what is going on. This may be one of the perils of having such a large conference with so many people involved.

One particular sticking point, however, is reported to be an objection from the developing countries based on the notion that the existing treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, will be done away with.

Britain had apparently agreed last night at the talks with Australia, France, Japan, Norway and the US to start a major new fund for the purpose of stopping and eventually reversing deforestation in developing countries, as long as there is "an ambitious and comprehensive" outcome in Copenhagen.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said "Unless action is taken, these forests could be lost forever, impacting not only the global climate but on the livelihoods of 90 per cent of the 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty who rely on forest resources for their survival.”

Sources: The Independent  and BBC Environment Blog