“Everywhere we look, impacts are coming faster and harder than we would have predicted just a few years ago.”
Peter Sinclair’s recent Crock of the Week video .
[youtube]YVh7z-0oo6o[/youtube]
Author: Bryan Walker
The God Species
It’s an arresting title, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans. For author Mark Lynas the Holocene, the 10,000 year post-ice age era during which human civilisation evolved and flourished, has given way in industrial times to the Anthropocene, an age in which the human population has undergone extraordinary growth, and become totally dominant on the planet. In the process we have interfered in the planet’s great bio-geochemical processes to the extent that we are threatening to endanger the Earth system itself and our own survival. Things are badly askew and we must help Earth to regain stability. It cannot do so alone. “Nature no longer runs the Earth. We do. It is our choice what happens from here.”
Not that Lynas proposes to shoulder nature aside. Far from it. It’s a question of restoring nature’s balance and working within its limits. His book is about the planetary boundaries which must be respected if we are to avoid very serious environmental damage. He aims to communicate to a wide audience the findings of a group of 28 internationally renowned scientists who a couple of years ago identified nine such boundaries and wrote about them in a notable feature in Nature. Along the way he has his own suggestions for tackling the challenges involved and takes issue with other environmentalists over what he considers wrong-headed stances on many issues, including nuclear power and genetic engineering. This aspect of the book is often argumentative, but the central exposition of the planetary boundaries is straight science, set out with the lucidity apparent in his earlier book Six Degrees.
Horn of Africa Drought: is it climate change?
The horrifying pictures of famine in the Horn of Africa haunt us as human tragedy, and the more because they carry with them the question of whether this has something to do with climate change. Are we going to see more and more of this kind of suffering as climate change impacts begin to mount? That’s an easier question to muse than to answer with certitude, but it deserves our attention. There is every indication that poor people are going to suffer from the impacts of climate change sooner and more harshly than the rest of us. But is the Horn of Africa famine part of that? Continue reading “Horn of Africa Drought: is it climate change?”
Leave fossil fuels undisturbed.
A recent Forest and Bird Newsletter contrasted the anticipated loss of 100 jobs in the Department of Conservation with the announced doubling of the number of people employed in the Ministry of Economic Development’s unit aimed at expanding the oil and minerals industries. The newsletter comments that some of those who will lose their jobs with DOC are expected to be people with strong scientific and technical experience who know what would be lost if mining or other destructive developments were to take place on conservation land.
Forest and Bird are right to be suspicious. The Minister for Economic Development has given ample evidence that in the thinking of the government the economic gain to be had from fossil fuel exploitation balances any environmental damage it causes. They have had to backtrack from the initial plan to open up some of the most highly protected conservation land for mining, but there’s every indication that they will continue to hover and find other opportunities to prize open land that ought to be left undisturbed, in order to extract fossil fuel from it. The same Forest and Bird newsletter set out the organisation’s hope to save the Denniston Plateau from a proposed new opencast coal mine which would destroy 200 hectares and increase New Zealand’s coal exports by up to 63% per year. And that would only be the beginning. The Australian company holds mining permits across the Plateau, which would generate an estimated 50 million tonnes of coal. Continue reading “Leave fossil fuels undisturbed.”
Anthropogenic CO2 Far Exceeds Volcanic
I was a little startled a few weeks back to see in a Waikato Times column written by former National Party MP Michael Cox the extraordinary claim that the 1991 Mt Pinatubo eruption “shot out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in its entire years on Earth”. I don’t know where he derived this from – no doubt it’s floating around somewhere in the denial world, though even there it seems possible that he misunderstood what he was reading. Anyway it served to support his view that talk of human-caused warming is a Left-inspired crusade to compensate for the collapse of communism! I was able to say in a letter to the paper how ridiculous the Pinatubo statement was, and pretty much everything else he said as well. Continue reading “Anthropogenic CO2 Far Exceeds Volcanic”