Trophic cascade

Wiping out top predators like lions, wolves and sharks is tragic, bad for ecosystems – and can make climate change worse. Mass extinctions of the big beasts of the jungles, grasslands and oceans could already be adding to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

-- report, original paper.

It looks as if, across a range of terrestrial and marine ecosystems, climates and predators, carbon dioxide emissions typically increased more than tenfold after the predators are removed.

(Photo by Brian Skerry: Gray reef shark at Kingman Reef, where predator populations remain large)

Moral enhancement

Julian Savalescu and Ingmar Persson write:

Modern technology provides us with many means to cause our downfall, and our natural moral psychology does not provide us with the means to prevent it. The moral enhancement of humankind is necessary for there to be a way out of this predicament. If we are to avoid catastrophe by misguided employment of our power, we need to be morally motivated to a higher degree (as well as adequately informed about relevant facts). A stronger focus on moral education could go some way to achieving this, but as already remarked, this method has had only modest success during the last couple of millennia. Our growing knowledge of biology, especially genetics and neurobiology, could deliver additional moral enhancement, such as drugs or genetic modifications, or devices to augment moral education.

It's good to see this argument spelled out.  But even if (and I think it may be a big if) "our growing knowledge of biology, especially genetics and neurobiology" can deliver "additional moral enhancement" can they really do so faster than foreseeable breakthroughs in energy technology can (just perhaps) solve the energy/carbon challenge?
So, for example, Benjamin Strauss of Climate Central argues that "Our best hope is some kind of disruptive technology that takes off on its own, the way the Internet and the fax took off."

Note: two recent useful pieces relating relating to the psychology of climate change are Beth's We are all climate change idiots, which notes Robert Gifford analysis of habits of mind he calls the "dragons of inaction", and Atul Gawande's Something wicked this way comes, which is actually about health insurance in the US but notes Albert O. Hirschman's anatomy of reactionary argument in three basic forms: perversity, futility, and jeopardy.

(Image: melting ice on Greenland coast)

Hyperwarming

Studies suggest that long-term climate models up to the year 2300 are missing key positive feedbacks that could send global temperatures towards levels high enough to melt the ice, if not over the entire Gamburtsevs, then at least large parts of even Antarctica for the first time in over 30 million years:

In particular, the release of methane from melting Arctic permafrost has not yet been factored in. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, but remains in the atmosphere for only 10 years on average before it reacts with hydroxyl radicals in the air to form CO2. However, a large release of methane from melting permafrost could swamp the hydroxyl supply, allowing the methane to linger in the atmosphere for 15 years or more, further amplifying the warming. 

Some feedbacks never before considered might also come into play... In the future oceans may store less carbon. Normally some atmospheric carbon is lost at sea, buried in the carcasses of tiny marine animals. But sediment from the Eocene contains little carbon, suggesting that this process failed during the last hothouse...

Reversing this?

Uunartoq Qeqertaq

One here for the Nuvvuagittuq Eidouranion (a phrase to be explained another time):

According to the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, Greenland lost around 15% of its ice cover between the 10th edition (1999) (left) and 13th edition (2011) (right).

Uunartoq Qeqertaq – translated from Inuit as Warming Island – joins Southern Sudan and nearly 7,000 other countries and places added or changed since the last edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World.

The Greenland ice sheet is said to have shrunk by about 15% in 20 years. Update 19 Sep: the 15% figure is said to be an exaggeration. [1] (See This is what global warming looks like.) Where, exactly things go from here, and when, is hard to predict. The ice sheet may not disappear as quickly as some previous models have suggested. (The precise impacts of fresh and seawater ice melting are also unpredictable.)

But in the absence of dramatic changes in the nature and pattern of human activity, the likely trend is towards complete disappearance of the ice sheet. In a review of Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth by Curt Stager, Scott L. Wing writes:

Relying on simulations of the effects of high partial pressure of carbon dioxide by Richard Alley, Jeff Ridley, and others, Stager lays out the development of Greenland's landscape and economy as its ice cap melts. He even playfully proposes a name, Ny Fjord (New Fjord), for the giant tongue of ocean that could come to occupy central Greenland by 5000 CE. He envisions a thriving Arctic-fishing industry lining the shores of the 400-m-deep fjord, then explains how the fjord would (to the shock of most nongeologists) empty over the succeeding 50,000 years as isostatic rebound following deglaciation raises the crust of central Greenland. 

Footnote

[1] (added 21 Sep): see Greenland Meltdown at Realclimate.

The levers of extinction

Carl Zimmer's survey of research and discussion on the matter of the sixth extinction and the role of climate change (Multitude of Species Face Climate Threat) is useful:

scientists who study the impact of global warming on biodiversity are pushing back against the pressure for detailed forecasts. While it’s clear that global warming’s impact could potentially be huge, scientists are warning that it’s still impossible to provide fine-grained predictions.

At a talk on the future of life in Oxford last Sunday Kathy Willis said that while climate change is a matter of huge concern, the direct destruction of natural habitat by human activity on the ground is a much greater threat to biodiversity in the 21st century.

Prof. Willis pointed out that during the PETM, when CO2 concentrations were over 1000ppm (?), tropical forests thrived to a far greater extent than they do today. The implicit corollary (as I understand it): reduce degradation/deforestation and tropical forests will do OK. [For a different view see the note added on 2 May below]

I asked her whether a (presumably) much greater rate of change in atmospheric concentrations during the 21st century (a hundred years or so as against 10 to 20,000 years 55.8mya) could make a difference? Her brief, informal answer was: the rise in CO2 at the time of the PETM was also rapid (constrained, she said, to less than 10,000 years).  She did, however, think that the current rapid rate of change in ocean pH was a significant cause of concern for the marine biota.

P.S. 30 April: Michael LePage has good overview of some instances of human forcing of evolution, and the question of extinction

P.S.  2 May: William Laurance is less optimistic. In an overview of the impact of climate change on tropical forests he concludes:

we know that climates have changed in the Earth’s past, and that species have shifted their latitudinal and elevational ranges in response to this. However, even in periods of rapid warming, such as the interglacial periods of the Pleistocene or the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, temperatures rose only at a few percent of the rate happening today. On top of this, the impacts of future climate change will be worsened by massive habitat loss and fragmentation. The synergistic impacts of these combined body blows could well be the greatest of all threats to tropical biodiversity.

Helter skelter

When we look at residence times for protected areas, which we define as the amount of time it will take current climate conditions to move across and out of a given protected area, only 8% of our current protected areas have residence times of more than 100 years.

--Healy Hamilton quoted in report on the study Climate change puts ecosystems on the run.

Creature crunch

IUCN finds a new way to spin a story with a 'hit list' species whose plights highlight the way climate change is adversely affecting marine, terrestrial and freshwater habitats. [1] The 'top ten' are:

Arctic fox, Beluga whale, Clownfish, Emperor penguin, Koala bear, Leatherback turtle, Quiver tree, Ringed seal, Salmon and Staghorn coral.

As communication to the general public IUCN's work may be useful and timely. Belugas, for example, are charismatic animals: intelligent and cute. [2] But it's only a start. In the Arctic alone, other threatened species include the Walrus and the Narwhal, which may become as rare in reality as the unicorn. [3], [4] And Dr Seuss got to the real point in 1954:

a person's a person no matter how small!

Footnotes:

[1] Species and climate change: more than just the polar bear, pdf

[2] Captive here. Half eaten here

[3] And not just the Arctic, of course. Antarctica, among other places, may also lose many or most species altogether. Fen Montaigne's nice photos of Adélie penguins are likely to be an advance In Memoriam.

[4] What is the term for animals that only continue to exist in captive conditions? Will someone create a zoo that only contains such animals?

Cold comfort

Around 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, about 90 per cent of land species were wiped out as global temperatures soared. A cat-sized distant relative of mammals, Kombuisia antarctica, seems to have survived the extinction by fleeing south to Antarctica.

-- finds a study by Jörg Fröbisch et al. This provides valuable evidence that animals today could survive climate change by migrating, Peter Mayhew tells New Scientist. But today, says David Jablonski, humans have so thoroughly fragmented much of the land surface with cities, suburbs, farmland and highways that many species cannot make the necessary range shifts.

There are other factors too. Most obviously, Antarctica is further south than it was 250 million years ago and no longer joined to other land masses.

In 2007 Stephen Pyne described Antarctica as an analogue for space, so barren of life is its great centre.


Still, if climatic change proves to be very large -- with for example, a rise of more than 4 or 6 C in global average temperature, and rises far greater than that at the poles -- Antarctic ecology will change beyond recognition. The continent's present fauna will be devastated. Some plant and animal species will arrive from the north will-he nill-he, but others could be deliberately transplanted, and a rapidly emerging set of new ecosystems protected and managed, to a limited extent, by people who somehow succeed in keeping the human urge to extract and despoil every last resource under control. The Gamburtsevs could teem with life (an idée fixe on this blog).

Much of the rest of the world may be blasted and wrecked. But fragments of the song of songs would continue in full voice in what had been the deadest place on the planet.

Antarctic Highlands, 3009 AD?

For science rather than wild speculation see SCAR's report on Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment.

P.S. 18 Dec: Data to expose 'ghost mountains'

Extrahuman

The preface to Contours of climate justice (pdf) includes a note written in 1951 by Dag Hammarskjöld which, say the authors, show with particular clarity his deep bonds with the wilderness. What mattered for Hammarskjöld was the:

…extrahuman in the experience of the greatness of Nature. This does not allow itself to be reduced to an expression of our human reactions, nor can we share in it by expressing them. Unless we each find a way to chime in as one note in the organic whole, we shall only observe ourselves observing the interplay of its thousand components in a harmony outside our experience of it as harmony.

I find that last sentence confusing, but the main drift of the passage is probably on target.

Endurance

Predictions made over the last decade about the impacts of climate change on biodiversity may be exaggerated.

-- report.

After the ice

The Bowhead has survived a lot. [1] Could it survive a 15 C rise in the Arctic? [2]


Footnotes

[1] On the Bowhead, or Greenland Right Whale see also Thin Ice and Hunters and hunted.

[2] See Richard Betts here. The signs are already bad for Walruses. See: Walruses Suffer Substantial Losses as Sea Ice Erodes

P.S. (added Oct 5): Could Gray whales be one of the species to move into Arctic waters in place of the Bowheads (assuming there to be sufficient food available for them in the newly warming waters)? In Watching whales watching us, Charles Siebert reports the biologist Steven Swartz saying, "they’re expanding their feeding grounds all along their migration route and in the north, and some are even staying in Arctic water over the winter..."

P.P.S (added Oct 6): 'Arctic seas turn to acid, putting vital food chain at risk.'

Save the gorillas *and* the carbon

Here, slightly edited, is a comment I just posted in response to Stephen Fry's article Why turtles make me cry:

Stephen Fry says "if people don't go to Uganda then the gorillas will die....the only way of paying for the mountain rangers to keep them alive is for people to go to Bwindi Impenetrable Forest...and see them."

I disagree. It is possible to get people to support projects and initiatives they have not seen and will not see first hand, especially in the age of the Internet.

One example of the way to go is Oxfam's 'Unwrapped' in which you 'give' a present to a friend such as 100 school meals in a poor African country. The friend does not receive and does not sees the meals (except, perhaps in a photograph) but has the satisfaction of knowing that some children who may otherwise go hungry are getting a square meal. Another example are the thousands who support global political campaigns by the organisation Avaaz to support the rights and dignity of people they may never meet (such as the Burmese people).

I hold no brief for Oxfam, Avaaz or other organisations which use 'virtual' strategies such as these. I just suggest they are examples of the kind of things that demonstrably work.

I think the efforts of Richard Leakey and colleagues can be supported in a similar way.

All we need (!) are imagination, organization and energy. Stephen Fry can help.

Call me an idealist, but we have to try to save gorillas (and other charismatic species) without making an unnecessary additional contribution to the already high risk of dangerous anthropogenic climate change.

Green Arctic

This blog has speculated vaguely on life in Antarctica in the Anthropocene, but with a mind to hundreds of years or millennia hence. Now this:

A study of what the Arctic looked like just before dinosaurs were wiped off the planet has provided a glimpse of what could be to come within decades.

The Rough-legged hawk of Minerva flies at dusk.

Stabledoor, horse?

I didn't make it to the Royal Society meeting last night. This is from Alok Jha's report (emphasis added):

David Attenborough joined scientists today to warn that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already above the level which condemns coral reefs to extinction, with catastrophic effects for the oceans and the people who depend upon them.

If this analysis is correct then one of the few options left would to be scrub very large amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere. But that doesn't look a likely prospect, does it?

See also the Inter-Academy Panel statement on Ocean Acidification.

My review of Veron's book is here.

A new place for life

There's been a lot of climate change over the last 14 million years, and what we can say about this place in the middle of the Antarctic is that nothing has changed.

But if levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide continue to rise, in around 1,000 years they will approach the same levels that existed before there was persistent ice sheet in Antarctica.

-- Martin Siegert, University of Edinburgh (BBC)

Stars of future seas?

A species of starfish has confounded climate change doom-mongers by thriving as sea temperatures and acidity increase - a scenario that is likely as the world gets warmer...

...Pisaster ochraceus thrive in temperatures of up to 21 °C and atmospheric CO2 concentrations of up to 780 parts per million - beyond predicted rises for the next century.

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0811143106.

Run slowly, night-horses

Half of vertebrate species may be gone by the end of this century. Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction? is good on, among other things, the frogs, the bats and some of the people who care for them. [1] At least one take-home point is familiar:

In the end, the most deadly aspect of human activity may simply be the pace of it.[2]

One of the consequences of frenetic human activity as currently organised is, of course, rapid climate change. [3] In Heatstroke: Nature in Age of Global Warming, Anthony Barnosky writes that, before Man, the typical species life span of a mammal was 1.7 to 2.5 million years [4]. For plants, reptiles or amphibians the likely span was somewhat longer. For birds and fish perhaps a little shorter. And, he says,

In order to have that long a life span a species must be able to withstand (or, in an evolutionary sense, adapt to) the broad, slow shifts in climate that are natural as tracked over many millions of years, and also the more rapid fluctuations in climate that are nested within individual million-year time slices.

On 'the lowest reasonable estimate', Barnosky continues, the global average temperature will rise will be 1.1 Centigrade by 2050, and the earth will be hotter than modern humans have ever seen it -- hotter than in at least 160,000 years. On a 'worst case scenario' the heating by 2100 will be 4 to 6 C; the Earth will be hotter than at any time in the last three million years, and:

Three million years ago, not one species of mammal or bird that lives on Earth was alive, as far as we know.

But Barnosky's worst case scenario may be actually be over-optimistic. A recent analysis at MIT calculates the odds as worse than previously thought: without effective policies a temperature rise of more than 7 C becomes a distinct possibility.

In all events, efforts at ecosystem protection are likely to continue, along with the kind of hedging Kolbert describes at EVACC, an amphibian conservation centre in Panama:

It might be thought of as a preserve, except that, instead of protecting the amphibians from their natural habitat, the center's aim is to isolate them from it.

...their former habitat being 'natural' no more. [5]

Another option -- one that may be more widely discussed before too long -- is whether and how some animals and other living entities can be engineered not for medical research but to withstand rapid change. [6]


Footnotes

[1] It also contains, among other things, a fairly good working sketch of the Anthropocene:

Most of the world's waterways have been diverted or dammed or otherwise manipulated -- in the United States, only two per cent of rivers run unimpeded -- and people now use half the world's readily accessible freshwater runoff. Chemical plants fix more atmospheric nitrogen than all natural processes combined, and fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the temperate coastl waters of the oceans. Through global trade and international travel, humans have transported countless species into ecosystems that are not prepared for them. We have pumped enough carbon dioxide into the air to alter the climate and to change the chemistry of the oceans.

[2] Kolbert asks Andrew Knoll to compare the current situation with past extinction events. He says he doesn't want to exaggerate recent losses, or to suggest that an extinction on the order of the end-Cretaceous or end-Permian is imminent. At the same time he notes, when an asteroid hit the Yucatan 65 million years ago,

it was one bad afternoon, but it was a short-term event, and then things started to get better. Today, it's not like you have a stress and the stress is relieved and recovery starts. [Instead,] it gets bad and then it keeps being bad, because the stress doesn't go away. Because the stress is us.

[3] One, but by no means the only one. Over-consumption is another. See, for example, 'turbo-evolution' of cod.

[4] Incidentally, the species life span of Erectus may lie within this range, or at least approach it. Perhaps Floresiensis lived longer.

[5] The world ocean itself ceases to be natural as its chemistry changes faster than at any time in more than fifty million years.

[6] A major extinction is a field day for fungi, pathogens, micro-organisms etc. In the long run (the next few millions to tens of millions of years), the current extinction event may, other things being equal, open up space for a new flowering of beings. Some of them could be as strange and marvelous as those of the cetacean radiation. Peter Ward argues that, looking to the even longer run (hundreds of millions of years), there is "only one chance for survival": planetary, not (just) genetic engineering. Humans [post-humans?] must, he says, "seize the controls of the various elemental cycles that determine the future of life on earth."

--

The title of this post is based on a line in Act 5, Scene 2 of The Tragical History Faustus, where Marlowe quotes Ovid

O lente, lente currite noctis equi!

but continues

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.

Bad times just around the corner

By the end of the century, 100 million people across South East Asia could be on the march, looking for something to eat. Communities might be breaking down and economies destroyed.

It's billed as a worst-case scenario, but...it is not as bad as the future we're currently headed towards.

-- Ove Hoegh-Guldberg: BBC, Climate shifts, WWF.

It's as clear as crystal
From Bridlington to Bristol
That we can't save democracy and we don't much care.

-- Noel Coward

"Stripping the harmonic notes out of a symphony"

Climate is a major determinant of where a species lives and how species interact. Biologists also know that climate change will outpace evolution for a great number of organisms, although perhaps not for bacteria, viruses and some insects. Barnosky describes the result as "like taking a color portrait and rendering it in black and white, or stripping all the harmonic notes out of a symphony". But not all organisms will be affected negatively; some will flourish. We need to figure out if climate change is eroding the species that humans value and replacing them with those that cause harm. And we must identify which species will be most affected, which ones will muddle through and which will rise to prominence. This information will help us to determine what sort of biotic world climate change is creating and what steps we might take to affect that change.

-- from a review by Jessica Hellmann of Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming by Anthony D. Barnosky, included in Nature's Climate Crunch package.

Image: lakes forming on glaciers in the Bhutan-Himalaya region.

The Angel

...Scientists say ocean acidity has increased 30% since the Industrial Revolution, the fastest change in ocean chemistry for at least 65 million years...

...The rate of increase [in atmospheric concentrations of CO2] is much faster than only 10-20 years ago...[1]

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

-- Walter Benjamin

Footnote

[1] (added 21.00) See also: Hit the breaks hard at RealClimate