Arquivo da tag: Mudanças climáticas

There never was a global warming ‘pause,’ NOAA study concludes (Environment & Energy Publishing)

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Gayathri Vaidyanathan, E&E reporter

Published: Friday, June 5, 2015

The global warming “pause” does not exist, according to scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Their finding refutes a theory that has dominated climate science in recent years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013 found that global temperatures in recent years have not risen as quickly as they did in the 20th century. That launched an academic hunt for the missing heat in the oceans, volcanoes and solar rays. Meanwhile, climate deniers triumphantly crowed that global warming has paused or gone on a “hiatus.”

But it now appears that the pause never was. NOAA scientists have fixed some small errors in global temperature data and found that temperatures over the past 15 years have been rising at a rate comparable to warming over the 20th century. The study was published yesterday inScience.

That a minor change to the analysis can switch the outcome from a hiatus to increased warming shows “how fragile a concept it [the hiatus] was in the first place,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who was unaffiliated with the study.

According to the NOAA study, the world has warmed since 1998 by 0.11 degree Celsius per decade. Scientists had previously calculated that the trend was about half that.

The new rate is equal to the rate of warming seen between 1951 and 1999.

There has been no slowdown in the rate of global warming, said Thomas Karl, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information and lead author of the study.

“Global warming is firmly entrenched on our planet, and it continues to progress and is likely to continue to do so in the future unless emissions of greenhouse gases are substantially altered,” he said.

Errors from weather stations, buoys and buckets

That NOAA has to adjust temperature readings is not unusual. Many factors can affect raw temperature measurements, according to a study by Karl in 1988.

For instance, a weather station may be situated beneath a tree, which would bias temperatures low. Measurements made near a parking lot would read warm due to the waves of heat emanating from asphalt surfaces. NOAA and other agencies adjust the raw temperature data to remove such biases.

It has become clear in recent years that some biases still persist in the data, particularly of ocean temperatures. The culprit: buckets.

Ships traverse the world, and, occasionally, workers onboard dip a bucket over the hull and bring up water that they measure using a thermometer. The method is old school and error prone — water in a bucket is usually cooler than the ocean.

For a long time, scientists had assumed that most ships no longer use buckets and instead measure water siphoned from the ocean to cool ship engines. The latter method is more robust. But data released last year showed otherwise and compelled NOAA to correct for this bias.

A second correction involved sensor-laden buoys interspersed across the oceans whose temperature readings are biased low. Karl and his colleagues corrected for this issue, as well.

The corrections “made a significant impact,” Karl said. “They added about 0.06 degrees C per decade additional warming since 2000.”

The ‘slowdown hasn’t gone away’

What that means for the global warming hiatus depends on whom you ask. The warming trend over the past 15 years is comparable to the trend between 1950 and 1998 (a 48-year stretch), which led Karl to say that global warming never slowed.

Other scientists were not fully convinced. For a truly apples-to-apples comparison, the past 15 years should be compared with other 15-year stretches, said Peter Stott, head of the climate monitoring and attribution team at the U.K. Met Office.

For instance, the globe warmed more slowly in the past 15 years than between 1983 and 1998 (the previous 15-year stretch), even with NOAA’s new data corrections, Stott said.

“The slowdown hasn’t gone away,” he said in an email. “While the Earth continues to accumulate energy as a result of increasing man-made greenhouse gas emissions … global temperatures have not increased smoothly.”

The disagreements arise because assigning trends — including the trend of a “hiatus” — to global warming depends on the time frame of reference.

“Trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends,” the IPCC stated in 2013, even as it discussed the pause.

Robert Kaufmann, an environment professor at Boston University who was unaffiliated with the study, called trends a “red herring.”

A trend implies that the planet will warm, decade after decade, at a steady clip. There is no reason why that should be the case, Kaufmann said. Many factors — human emissions of warming and cooling gases, natural variability, and external factors such as the sun — feed into Earth’s climate. The relative contributions of each factor can vary by year, decade, century or on even larger time scales.

“There is no scientific basis to assume that the climate is going to warm at the same rate year after year, decade after decade,” he said.

Copying the language of skeptics

Trends are a powerful weapon in the hands of climate deniers. As early as 2006, deniers used the slowdown of warming from 1998 onward to say that global warming had stopped or paused.

The idea of a “pause” seeped into academia, launching dozens of studies into what might have caused it. But there was a subtle difference between scientists’ understanding of the pause and that of the skeptics; scientists never believed that warming had stopped, only that it had slowed compared with the rapidly warming ’90s. They wanted to know why.

Over the years, scientists have unraveled the contributions of volcanoes to global cooling, the increased uptake of heat by the Pacific Ocean, the cooling role of La Niñas and other drivers of natural variability. Their understanding of our planet’s climate evolved rapidly.

As scientists wrote up their findings, they unwittingly adopted the skeptics’ language of the “pause,” said Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol who was unaffiliated with the NOAA study. That was problematic.

“That’s sort of a subtle semantic thing, but it is really important because it suggests that these [scientists] bought into the existence of the hiatus,” he said.

Then, in 2013, the IPCC wrote about the pause. The German government complained that the term implies that warming had stopped, which is inaccurate. The objection was ignored.

NOAA’s strong refutation of the hiatus is particularly weighty because it comes from a government lab, and the work was headed by Karl, a pioneer of temperature reanalysis studies.

NOAA will be using the data corrections to assess global temperatures from July onward, Karl said. NASA is discussing internally whether to apply the fixes suggested in the study, according to Schmidt of NASA.

The study was greeted by Democrats in Congress as proof that climate change is real. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, used it as an opportunity to chide her opponents.

“Climate change deniers in Congress need to stop ignoring the fact that the planet may be warming at an even faster rate than previously observed, and we must take action now to reduce dangerous carbon pollution,” she said in a statement.

The fossil-fuel industry’s campaign to mislead the American people (The Washington Post)

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The dome of the U.S. Capitol is seen behind the emissions, and a smokestack, from the coal-burning Capitol Power Plant, in Washington, D.C., March 10, 2014. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA)

By Sheldon Whitehouse May 29

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, represents Rhode Island in the Senate.

Fossil fuel companies and their allies are funding a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead the American people about the environmental harm caused by carbon pollution.

Their activities are often compared to those of Big Tobacco denying the health dangers of smoking. Big Tobacco’s denial scheme was ultimately found by a federal judge to have amounted to a racketeering enterprise.

The Big Tobacco playbook looked something like this: (1) pay scientists to produce studies defending your product; (2) develop an intricate web of PR experts and front groups to spread doubt about the real science; (3) relentlessly attack your opponents.

Thankfully, the government had a playbook, too: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. In 1999, the Justice Department filed a civil RICO lawsuit against the major tobacco companies and their associated industry groups, alleging that the companies “engaged in and executed — and continue to engage in and execute — a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public, including consumers of cigarettes, in violation of RICO.”

Tobacco spent millions of dollars and years of litigation fighting the government. But finally, through the discovery process, government lawyers were able to peel back the layers of deceit and denial and see what the tobacco companies really knew all along about cigarettes.

In 2006, Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia decided that the tobacco companies’ fraudulent campaign amounted to a racketeering enterprise. According to the court: “Defendants coordinated significant aspects of their public relations, scientific, legal, and marketing activity in furtherance of a shared objective — to . . . maximize industry profits by preserving and expanding the market for cigarettes through a scheme to deceive the public.”

The parallels between what the tobacco industry did and what the fossil fuel industry is doing now are striking.

In the case of fossil fuels, just as with tobacco, the industry joined together in a common enterprise and coordinated strategy. In 1998, the Clinton administration was building support for international climate action under the Kyoto Protocol. The fossil fuel industry, its trade associations and the conservative policy institutes that often do the industry’s dirty work met at the Washington office of the American Petroleum Institute. A memo from that meeting that was leaked to the New York Times documented their plans for a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign to undermine climate science and to raise “questions among those (e.g. Congress) who chart the future U.S. course on global climate change.”

The shape of the fossil fuel industry’s denial operation has been documented by, among others, Drexel University professor Robert Brulle. In a 2013 paper published in the journal Climatic Change, Brulle described a complex network of organizations and funding that appears designed to obscure the fossil fuel industry’s fingerprints. To quote directly from Brulle’s report, it was “a deliberate and organized effort to misdirect the public discussion and distort the public’s understanding of climate.” That sounds a lot like Kessler’s findings in the tobacco racketeering case.

The coordinated tactics of the climate denial network, Brulle’s report states, “span a wide range of activities, including political lobbying, contributions to political candidates, and a large number of communication and media efforts that aim at undermining climate science.” Compare that again to the findings in the tobacco case.

The tobacco industry was proved to have conducted research that showed the direct opposite of what the industry stated publicly — namely, that tobacco use had serious health effects. Civil discovery would reveal whether and to what extent the fossil fuel industry has crossed this same line. We do know that it has funded research that — to its benefit — directly contradicts the vast majority of peer-reviewed climate science. One scientist who consistently published papers downplaying the role of carbon emissions in climate change, Willie Soon, reportedly received more than half of his funding from oil and electric utility interests: more than $1.2 million.

To be clear: I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don’t have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it’s all smoke and no fire. But there’s an awful lot of smoke.

The surprising links between faith and evolution and climate denial — charted (The Washington Post)

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By Chris Mooney May 20, 2015

For a long time, we’ve been having a pretty confused discussion about the relationship between religious beliefs and the rejection of science — and especially its two most prominent U.S. incarnations, evolution denial and climate change denial.

At one extreme is the position that science denial is somehow deeply or fundamentally religion’s fault. But this neglects the wide diversity of views about science across faiths and denominations — and even across individuals of the same faith or denomination — not all of which are anti-climate science, or anti-evolution.

At the other extreme, meanwhile, is the view that religion has no conflict with science at all. But that can’t be right either: Though the conflict between the two may not be fundamental or necessary in all cases, it is pretty clear that the main motive for evolution denial is, indeed, a perceived conflict with faith (not to mention various aspects of human cognition that just make accepting evolution very hard for many people).

The main driver of climate science rejection, however, appears to be a free market ideology — which is tough to characterize as religious in nature. Nonetheless, it has often been observed (including by me) that evolution denial and climate science rejection often seem to overlap, at least to an extent.

[Pope Francis has given the climate movement just what it needed: faith]

And there does seem to be at least some tie between faith and climate science doubt. Research by Yale’s Dan Kahan, for instance, found a modest correlation between religiosity and less worry about climate change. Meanwhile, a 2013 study in Political Science Quarterly found that “believers in Christian end-times theology are less likely to support policies designed to curb global warming than are other Americans.”

So how do we make sense of this complex brew?

Josh Rosenau, an evolutionary biologist who works for the National Center for Science Education — which champions both evolutionary science and climate science teaching in schools — has just created a chart that, no matter what you think of the relationship between science and religion, will give you plenty to talk about.

Crunching data from the 2007 incarnation of a massive Pew survey of American religious beliefs, Rosenau plotted different U.S. faiths and denominations based on their members’ views about both the reality of specifically human evolution, and also how much they favor “stricter environmental laws and regulations.” And this was the result (click to enlarge):


Credit: Josh Rosenau/National Center for Science Education. Used with permission of the author.

As Rosenau notes, in the figure above, “The circle sizes are scaled so that their areas are in proportion to the relative population sizes in Pew’s massive sample (nearly 36,000 people!).” And as you can see, while at the top right atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, non-Orthodox Jews and others strongly accept evolution and environmental rules, at the bottom left Southern Baptists, Pentecostals and other more conservative leaning faiths are just as skeptical of both.

Obviously, it is important to emphasize that a given individual, of any faith, could be anywhere on the chart above — it’s just that this is where the denominations as a whole seemed to fall out, based on Rosenau’s analysis (which itself mirrors prior analyses of the political alignments of U.S. faiths and denominations by political scientist and Religion News Service blogger Tobin Grant).

Reached by phone Tuesday, Rosenau (whom I’ve known for a long time from the community of bloggers about science and the environment) seemed to be still trying to fully understand the implications of the figure he’d created. “People seemed to like it,” he said. “I think some people are finding hope in it” — hope, specifically, that there is a way out of seemingly unending science versus religion spats.

Here are some of Rosenau’s other conclusions from the exercise, from his blog post introducing the chart:

First, look at all those groups whose members support evolution. There are way more of them than there are of the creationist groups, and those circles are bigger. We need to get more of the pro-evolution religious out of the closet.

Second, look at all those religious groups whose members support climate change action. Catholics fall a bit below the zero line on average, but I have to suspect that the forthcoming papal encyclical on the environment will shake that up.

[Our new pro-science pontiff: Pope Francis on climate change, evolution, and the Big Bang]

Rosenau also remarks on the striking fact that for the large bulk of religions and religious denominations, as support for evolution increases, so does support for tougher environmental rules (and vice versa). The two appear to be closely related.

So what can that mean?

Rosenau told me he was still trying to work that out — still playing with the data and new analyses to try to understand it.

One possible way of interpreting the figure is that as with political parties themselves, people at least partially self-sort into faiths or denominations that seem more consonant with their own worldviews. And thus, a cluster of issue stances may travel alongside these choices of affiliation. “People are choosing what religion they want to associate with,” suggested Rosenau. “If people feel alienated from a church, they’re switching.”

There may also be a substantive point here that links together the ideas. A view of the world that thinks of human beings as having evolved, as being part of the natural world and having emerged through the same process as other organisms, may also be related to a manner of thinking that puts great overall emphasis on the value of nature and one’s connectedness with it.

In any case, while the pattern above may require more analysis, one clear punchline of the figure is that it really doesn’t make sense to say that religion is at war with science. You can say that for some people, religion is clearly linked to less science acceptance — especially on evolution. But for others, clearly, religion presents no hurdle at all.

I would also agree that these data reinforce the idea that the pope’s coming encyclical on the environment could really shake matters up. Catholics are the biggest bubble in the chart above, and they’re right in the middle of the pack on the environment.

The pope, incidentally, also appears to accept evolution.

Previsão do clima: terremotos intermitentes (Folha de S.Paulo)

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Marcelo Leite, 03/05/2015  01h57

Depois de Katmandu, o terremoto no Nepal sacudiu também uma noção preconcebida comum entre jornalistas de ciência – esta coluna, por exemplo, foi abalada por um tuíte de Matthew Shirts, que levava para uma reportagem da revista “Newsweek”.

A leitura do texto, “Mais Terremotos Fatais Virão, Alertam Cientistas da Mudança do Clima”, trouxe à memória um momento constrangedor. Que o relato sirva para desencorajar nossa tendência a acreditar em verdades estabelecidas.

Certa vez um colega de redação perguntou se eu poderia escrever para explicar por que tsunamis estavam se tornando mais frequentes e qual era a relação disso com o aquecimento global. Segurei a vontade de rir e expliquei, condescendente, que processos climáticos não tinham o poder de desencadear eventos geológicos.

Não é bem assim. Há pesquisadores respeitáveis investigando a hipótese de que a mudança climática deflagrada pelo aquecimento global possa, sim, tornar terremotos e erupções vulcânicas mais frequentes.

Não seria nada inédito na história da Terra. Um exemplo recentíssimo na escala geológica (o planeta tem mais de 4 bilhões de anos) ocorreu entre 20 mil e 12 mil anos atrás, ao término do último período glacial.

A retração de geleiras continentais com quilômetros de espessura aliviou a pressão sobre a crosta terrestre o bastante para desencadear intensa atividade vulcânica. Há boas evidências disso em lugares como a Islândia.

O geólogo britânico Bill McGuire tem uma teoria ainda mais preocupante. Ele acha que a elevação dos mares em 100 m, causada pelo derretimento das calotas de gelo, teria deflagrado também terremotos e tsunamis (o que poderia repetir-se a partir de agora, com o aquecimento da atmosfera).

O imenso volume de água adicionado aos oceanos, ao pressionar suas bordas, teria desestabilizado as falhas geológicas próximas da costa, causando os tremores e colapsos submarinos que levantam ondas colossais. Mas a hipótese de McGuire, detalhada no livro “Acordando o Gigante”, ainda carece de medições e dados para ser aceita.

No caso do terremoto de Katmandu, o mecanismo pressuposto para pôr a culpa no clima é outro: chuva. Não uma pancada qualquer, mas as poderosas monções que castigam Índia e Nepal de junho a agosto.

Tamanho volume de água, que perde só para o movimentado na bacia Amazônica, seria capaz de alterar o balanço do estresse entre as placas Indo-Australiana e Asiática. O geólogo argelino Pierre Bettinelli, então no CalTech, mostrou que a atividade sísmica nos Himalaias é duas vezes mais intensa no inverno e atribuiu isso à gangorra de pressões entre os dois lados da falha tectônica.

Falta provar, claro. Mas que é instigante, isso é.

Quanto a terremotos causados pelo aquecimento global, ninguém precisa sair comprando kits de sobrevivência. O degelo da última glaciação demorou milhares de anos, e as piores previsões para a subida no nível dos oceanos indicam não muito mais que 1 m ou 2 m até o final deste século.

Ninguém está a salvo de tsunamis, porém. Há alguma chance – uma vez a cada 10 mil anos, talvez – de que o litoral brasileiro seja atingido por um deles, como pode ter ocorrido com São Vicente em 1541, após cataclisma nalgum ponto do Atlântico.

Clima marombado (Folha de S.Paulo)

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Marcelo Leite, 31/05/2015  01h45

Como o jornal anda cheio de notícias boas, esta coluna retoma sua predileção desmesurada pelas más novas impopulares e anuncia: 2015 caminha para ser dos infernos também na esfera do clima.

É provável, por exemplo, que este ano bata o recorde de temperatura global. A marca estava antes, veja só, com 2014. Os dez anos mais escaldantes ocorreram todos depois de 1998.

Um dos que acreditam no novo recorde é o alemão Stefan Rahmstorf. O climatologista do Instituto Potsdam de Pesquisa sobre Impacto do Clima, que ficou famoso em 2007 por criticar as previsões do IPCC como muito conservadoras, lançou sua predição para 20 jornalistas de 17 países reunidos em Berlim há 20 dias.

O período janeiro-abril de 2015 brindou o planeta com o primeiro quadrimestre mais quente já registrado desde 1880. O período de 12 meses compreendido entre maio de 2014 e abril de 2015 também foi o pior em matéria de calor.

Isso tudo já acontecia enquanto o fenômeno El Niño ainda era considerado fraco. Esse aquecimento anormal das águas do Pacífico na costa oeste sul-americana, que costuma abrasar o clima mundial, ganhou impulso neste mês de maio e deve permanecer até o segundo semestre.

Notícia péssima para o Nordeste brasileiro. O semiárido tem bolsões que enfrentam o quarto ano seguido de seca. Entre os efeitos mais conhecidos de um El Niño está exatamente a diminuição das chuvas nessa região do Brasil (assim como o aumento da precipitação no Sul).

Pior é a situação na Índia. Até sexta-feira (29), uma onda de calor –a pior em duas décadas, com temperaturas de 47 graus Celsius– havia causado mais de 2.000 mortes. E o El Niño pode atrasar e enfraquecer as monções, chuvas torrenciais que começam em junho e poderiam refrescar o segundo país mais populoso do mundo.

Enquanto indianos torram, amazonenses estão debaixo d’água. A cheia do rio Negro, também ela perto de bater recordes, já atrapalhou a vida de 238 mil pessoas em 33 municípios do Estado do Amazonas.

O governo estadual se limita a medidas de remediação. Mais de 450 toneladas de alimentos não perecíveis foram distribuídas, assim como “kits dormitório” (colchões, redes e mosquiteiros) e “kits de higiene pessoal” para milhares de desabrigados.

Também foram destinados às cidades atingidas 68 metros cúbicos de madeira e 750 kits de tábuas, caibros e ripões para os moradores construírem passarelas elevadas conhecidas como “marombas”.

Essa enchente provavelmente nada tem a ver com o El Niño, e também seria difícil demonstrar um nexo causal entre a onda de calor indiana e a anomalia no Pacífico. Os dois eventos constituem bons exemplos, contudo, das situações extremas que a mudança do clima em curso deverá tornar mais frequentes nas próximas décadas.

Pelo andar da carruagem das negociações internacionais, parece cada vez mais difícil, se não impossível, que se consiga evitar um aquecimento global maior que 2 graus Celsius neste século. Esse é o limite de segurança indicado pelo IPCC.

A mudança do clima está contratada. Não resta muito mais que adaptar-se –e preparar a infraestrutura das cidades para ela exigirá muito mais do que marombas improvisadas.

Rejeitado pela Presidência, estudo sobre adaptação será entregue ao Meio Ambiente (Observatório do Clima)

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Conclusões serão “subsídio importante” a plano nacional, diz secretário, mas não deverão ser incorporadas diretamente a ele

29/05/2015

CLAUDIO ANGELO (OC)

O maior estudo sobre adaptação à mudança climática já feito no Brasil tem uma perspectiva de final feliz. O Brasil 2040, criado na Secretaria de Assuntos Estratégicos da Presidência da República e por ela rejeitado, deverá ser entregue ao Ministério do Meio Ambiente nas próximas semanas.

O plano foi concebido na SAE pela equipe do economista Sérgio Margulis, então subsecretário de Desenvolvimento Sustentável da pasta. Após a mudança de ministro, o clima deixou a lista de prioridades estratégicas da pasta. Margulis e seu time foram demitidos em março, como revelou o Observatório do Clima. Havia temor de que o estudo fosse ser descontinuado ou de que seus resultados fossem ser classificados (colocados sob sigilo).

Nesta quinta-feira (28/05), o secretário nacional de Mudanças Climáticas do Ministério do Meio Ambiente, Carlos Klink, afirmou ao OC que o estudo será entregue pela SAE ao GEX (Grupo Executivo sobre Mudança do Clima), coordenado pelo Ministério do Meio Ambiente. “O secretário da SAE nos procurou para dizer que o estudo está prestes a ser concluído e haveria uma devolutiva”, disse Klink. “Vai passar para o GEX.”

Segundo o secretário, a ideia é que todos os ministérios possam ser informados do estudo e que usem seus resultados – por exemplo, para orientar o planejamento. Ainda de acordo com Klink, “há uma convergência muito forte” entre o Brasil 2040 e o Plano Nacional de Adaptação à Mudança Climática, o PNA, coordenado pelo Ministério do Meio Ambiente e também em fase de conclusão. Ambos deverão ser apresentados na próxima reunião do GEX, em junho ou julho.

Trata-se, no entanto, de dois animais diferentes. O Brasil 2040 focou em vulnerabilidades específicas do país e buscou traçar cenários para consumo imediato, por assim dizer, em políticas públicas. Dez grupos de pesquisa espalhados pelo país cruzaram modelos climáticos do IPCC (o painel do clima da ONU) regionalizados pelo Inpe (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais) com informações sobre infraestrutura, recursos hídricos, agricultura, energia e zonas costeiras, por exemplo. E procuraram saber como cada setor poderia ser afetado pela mudança do clima já no médio prazo, em 25 anos.

Entre as conclusões já conhecidas do estudo está que a temperatura no país poderá subir até 6oC na maior parte do Brasil no fim o século; de que grandes hidrelétricas, como Belo Monte e São Luiz do Tapajós, poderão ter reduções de vazão de pelo menos 30% até 2040, o que compromete sua viabilidade econômica; e de que a área cultivável de soja poderá diminuir no país até 39% no mesmo período.

Já o Plano Nacional de Adaptação faz uma mistura entre contexto, ações já existentes e diretrizes muito gerais para a formulação de políticas de adaptação no país. A ministra Izabella Teixeira disse em abril que “é claro” que o plano terá metas numéricas objetivas, o que foi confirmado por Klink. “Será uma mistura das duas coisas”, afirmou.

O Brasil 2040, porém, não deverá ser incorporado diretamente ao plano nacional. E não está claro se suas conclusões serão inseridas no capítulo de adaptação do compromisso do Brasil para o acordo de Paris – que só deverá ser entregue depois de agosto. Para Klink, mesmo assim o estudo será um subsídio importante. “Vários autores do ‘2040’ participam também do PNA, e devem trazer contribuições de um para o outro.”

“Esperamos que o Ministério do Meio Ambiente, de posse dos estudos do Brasil 2040, entregue-os à sociedade, que precisa saber como as mudanças climáticas afetarão o país”, disse Carlos Rittl, secretário-executivo do Observatório do Clima. “Cobraremos a secretaria no final do prazo para que o estudo seja de fato entregue e amplamente divulgado.”

– See more at: http://www.observatoriodoclima.eco.br/rejeitado-pela-presidencia-estudo-sobre-adaptacao-sera-entregue-ao-meio-ambiente#sthash.G4em00BO.4XYoaLXk.dpuf

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Presidência demite líderes de estudo sobre clima, a nove meses da COP de Paris (Observatório do Clima)

Demissões na Secretaria de Assuntos Estratégicos sinalizam diminuição da importância da questão climática dentro do órgão ligado à Presidência da República

13/03/2015

Claudio Angelo (OC)

O ministro da Secretaria de Assuntos Estratégicos da Presidência da República, Mangabeira Unger, demitiu nesta semana os membros do quadro técnico da Secretaria de Desenvolvimento Sustentável da pasta. O secretário, Sérgio Margulis, de férias, deverá ser substituído nos próximos dias. A diretora de Programa Natalie Unterstell foi exonerada nesta sexta-feira.

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Sérgio Margulis e Natalie Unterstell, que trabalhavam na Secretaria de Assuntos Estratégicos da Presidência da República (Fotos: SAE/PR)

Margulis e Unterstell coordenavam o maior estudo já feito no país sobre adaptação às mudanças climáticas. Batizado “Brasil 2040”, o trabalho tem o objetivo de embasar políticas públicas de adaptação nos setores de energia, infraestrutura, agricultura e recursos hídricos. Quase uma dezena de grupos de pesquisa do país trabalha nele neste momento. A análise deveria ficar pronta em abril, e trazia más notícias sobre os impactos da mudança do clima na expansão do parque hidrelétrico brasileiro.

A troca no comando da secretaria sinaliza uma queda de importância da mudança climática no governo federal, justamente num momento em que essa agenda sobe na escala de prioridades de lideranças políticas no mundo todo. Em dezembro, um novo acordo global contra emissões deverá ser assinado numa conferência das Nações Unidas em Paris, a COP-21. Líderes de EUA, Europa, Índia e China têm dado declarações e feito acordos bilaterais para ampliar a possibilidade de sucesso em Paris. No Reino Unido, os líderes do governo e da oposição se juntaram para prometer esforços ampliados contra as mudanças do clima. Um grupo de megaempresários pediu em fevereiro que o planeta zere as emissões de CO2 em 2050, e o Banco da Inglaterra alertou na semana passada contra o risco de investir em combustíveis fósseis. Até o papa Francisco deve lançar nos próximos meses uma encíclica sobre a mudança climática.

Ao longo deste ano, todos os países devem submeter à ONU seus planos de enfrentamento das mudanças do clima, que incluem metas de redução de emissões e medidas de adaptação.

O estudo conduzido por Margulis traria subsídios ao Plano Nacional de Adaptação à Mudança do Clima, que está sendo produzido pelo MMA (Ministério do Meio Ambiente) e deve entrar em consulta pública no meio do ano, segundo informou ao Observatório do Clima o secretário nacional de Mudança Climática e Qualidade Ambiental do MMA, Carlos Klink.

Segundo apurou o OC, o novo ministro, que chefiou a SAE quando ela foi criada, no governo Lula, está promovendo um rearranjo das prioridades da pasta. Educação e desenvolvimento regional passam a ser os carros-chefes da secretaria, em linha com o slogan definido por Dilma Rousseff para ser segundo mandato, “Pátria Educadora”. O ex-ministro Marcelo Néri havia priorizado temas ambientais – Margulis era um dos três únicos secretários do ministério.

O economista carioca, de 58 anos, serviu por 22 na sede do Banco Mundial, em Washington. Em 2003, publicou um estudo seminal sobre o desmatamento na Amazônia, apontando a expansão da pecuária como principal causa da devastação. Seus dados ajudaram a orientar políticas públicas implantadas a partir de 2007 de restrição ao crédito para a pecuária e de apreensão de “bois piratas” que tiveram sucesso em reduzir a taxa de devastação na floresta. Em 2010, coordenou um outro estudo sobre a economia da mudança do clima, mostrando pela primeira vez que a economia brasileira cresceria mais num cenário de desenvolvimento mais limpo, com redução de emissões de carbono.

* Nota atualizada às 11h53, de 13/03/2015, para corrigir informação de que o secretário Sérgio Margulis já teria sido exonerado. Até esta sexta-feira, a portaria de exoneração ainda não havia sido publicada.

So far, most atolls winning the sea level rise battle (Pacific Institute of Public Policy)

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So far, most atolls winning the sea level rise battle

11 May, 2015

An increasing number of atoll studies are not supporting claims of Pacific island leaders that “islands are sinking.” Scientific studies published this year show, for example, that land area in Tuvalu’s capital atoll of Funafuti grew seven percent over the past century despite significant sea level rise. Another study reported that 23 of 27 atoll islands across Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Federated States of Micronesia either increased in area or remained stable over recent decades.

Speaking about Kiribati, Canadian climatologist Simon Donner commented in the Scientific American: ‘Right now it is clear that no one needs to immediately wall in the islands or evacuate all the inhabitants. What the people of Kiribati and other low-lying countries need instead are well-thought-out, customized adaption plans and consistent international aid — not a breathless rush for a quick fix that makes the rest of the world feel good but obliges the island residents to play the part of helpless victim.’

These same climate scientists who are conducting ongoing research in Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands acknowledge the documented fact of sea level rise in the Pacific, and the potential threat this poses. But they are making the point, as articulated by Donner, that ‘the politicized public discourse on climate change is less nuanced than the science of reef islands.’

A recent report carried in Geology, the publication of the Geological Society of America, says Tuvalu has experienced ‘some of the highest rates of sea level rise over the past 60 years.’ At the same time, ‘no islands have been lost, the majority have enlarged, and there has been a 7.3 percent increase in net island area over the past century.’

To gain international attention to climate concerns and motivate funding to respond to what is described as climate damage, political leaders from the Pacific are predicting dire consequences.

The future viability of the Marshall Islands — and all island nations — is at stake,’ Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony deBrum told the global climate meeting in Peru last December.

‘It keeps me awake at night,’ said Tuvalu Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga in a recent interview. ‘Will we survive? Or will we disappear under the sea?’

Obviously, statements of island leaders at international meetings and the observations of recent scientific reports are at odds. Does it matter?

Comments Donner: ‘Exaggeration, whatever its impetus, inevitably invites backlash, which is bad because it can prevent the nation from getting the right kind of help.’

If we want to grab headlines, the ‘disappearing island’ theme is good. But to find solutions to, for example, the increasing number of ocean inundations that are occurring requires well-thought out plans.

Scientists studying these low-lying islands should be seen as allies, whose information can be used to focus attention on key areas of need. For example, the New Zealand and Australian scientists working in Tuvalu said their results “show that islands can persist on reefs under rates of sea level rise on the order of five millimeters per year.” With sea level rates projected to double in the coming years, ‘it is unclear whether islands will continue to maintain their dynamic adjustment at these higher rates of change,’ they said. ‘The challenge for low-lying atoll nations is to develop flexible adaptation strategies that recognize the likely persistence of islands over the next century, recognize the different modes of island change, and accommodate the ongoing dynamism of island margins.’

Developing precise information on atoll nations as these scientists are doing is needed to inform policy makers and local residents as people are inundated with discussion about — and, possibly, outside donor funding for — ‘adaptation’ and ‘mitigation’ in these islands.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Nuclear Claims Tribunal in the Marshall Islands hired internationally recognized scientists and medical doctors to advise it on such things as radiation exposure standards for nuclear test clean up programs and medical conditions deserving of compensation, while evaluating U.S. government scientific studies on the Marshall Islands. These scientists and doctors provided knowledge and advice that helped inform the compensation and claims process.

It seems this nuclear test-related model would be of significant benefit to islands in the region, by linking independent climate scientists with island governments so there is a connection between science and climate policies and actions of governments.

If we want to grab headlines, the ‘disappearing island’ theme is good. But to find solutions to, for example, the increasing number of ocean inundations that are occurring requires well-thought out plans.

‘The reality is that the next few decades for low-lying reef islands will be defined by an unsexy, expensive slog to adapt,’ wrote Donner in the Scientific American. ‘Success will not come from single land purchase or limited-term aid projects. It will come from years of trial and error and a long-term investment by the international community in implementing solutions tailored to specific locales.’ He comments that a World Bank-supported adaptation program in Kiribati took eight years of consultation, training, policy development and identifying priorities to finally produce a plan of action. And even then, when they rolled out sea walls for several locations, there were design faults that need to be fixed. Donner’s observation about Kiribati could equally apply to the rest of the Pacific: “Responding to climate change in a place like Kiribati requires a sustained commitment to building local scientific and engineering capacity and learning from mistakes.”

It is excellent advice.

Image: Low-lying islands, such as Majuro Atoll pictured here, are changing due to storms, erosion, high tides, seawalls and causeways, and sea level rise. But few are disappearing. Photo credit: Isaac Marty

Recorde histórico de CO2 (Observatório do Clima)

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11/05/2015

Por Claudio Angelo, do OC –

A notícia correu o mundo nesta semana: a concentração de dióxido de carbono na atmosfera ultrapassou em março a marca simbólica de 400 partes por milhão, segundo anunciou a Noaa (Agência Nacional de Oceanos e Atmosfera dos EUA). É a primeira vez que isso acontece desde que a agência começou a medir esse gás em 40 pontos diferentes do planeta, na década de 1980.

Da última vez que houve tanto CO2 na atmosfera, provavelmente 3,5 milhões de anos atrás, não existiam seres humanos, nem gelo no polo Norte. A temperatura média global era de cerca de 3oC mais alta do que no período pré-industrial. O nível do mar era 4 a 5 metros mais alto do que hoje.

O anúncio foi tratado pela imprensa internacional como um “alerta vermelho” no ano da conferência do clima de Paris, que deveria (mas tem gente que acha que não vai) apontar o início da solução do problema do aquecimento global. Embora o recorde seja em si importante, o problema real é a tendência que ele indica.

Quatrocentas partes por milhão, ou ppm, é um número pequeno. Significa que, em cada milhão de moléculas de ar, há 400 de gás carbônico (lembre-se de que a atmosfera é composta quase totalmente de nitrogênio e oxigênio; o CO2 é um dos “gases-traço”, daqueles que juntos formam 1% da composição do ar).

Acontece que o gás carbônico faz o melhor estilo “chiquitito, pero cumplidor”: ele é extremamente eficiente em reter na atmosfera o calor que a Terra irradia em forma de radiação infravermelha. Não satisfeito, ele ajuda a elevar, por evaporação, os níveis atmosféricos de outro gás-estufa muito potente: o vapor d’água. Isso mesmo: como sua mãe já deve ter dito, até água em excesso faz mal.

As medições da concentração de CO2 na atmosfera começaram a ser feitas em 1958 pelo americano Charles Keeling no alto do vulcão Mauna Loa, no Havaí. O local foi escolhido por estar bem longe de fontes de poluição que pudessem enviesar as amostras de ar. O Mauna Loa, a 4.000 metros de altitude e no meio do Oceano Pacífico, representa bem como o CO2 está misturado à atmosfera global.

Quando as medições de Keeling começaram, a concentração de CO2 no ar estava em 315 ppm. Em 2013 elas ultrapassaram 400 ppm no Mauna Loa pela primeira vez, para caírem em seguida e fecharem o ano em 393 ppm. Os dados da Noaa mostram que o mesmo sinal foi detectado não apenas em um ponto, mas em dezenas de lugares diferentes mundo afora.

Assim como aconteceu em 2013, o valor vai cair nos próximos meses e fechar o ano abaixo de 400 ppm. A oscilação acontece porque no final do inverno no hemisfério Norte, onde está a maior parte das terras (portanto, da vegetação) do mundo, há muito carbono no ar. Ele vem da da decomposição das folhas que caíram no outono. Na primavera, a rebrota sequestra esse CO2 e a concentração cai novamente.

O problema, claro, é que essa concentração vem subindo de forma acelerada ano após ano. Em todo o período pré-industrial, a concentração de CO2 na atmosfera jamais ultrapassou 280 ppm. Do surgimento da espécie humana até o ano em que Keeling começou a fazer suas medições, o aumento foi de 12,5%, no máximo. Da primeira vitória do Brasil numa Copa do Mundo até hoje, o aumento já foi de outros 27%. A velocidade anual de crescimento dobrou entre 2000 e 2010 em relação a 1960-1970. Metade do aumento verificado desde a aurora da humanidade aconteceu depois de 1980.

A chamada "curva de Keeling", com o crescimento das concentrações de CO2 desde a década de 1950

 

Nesse ritmo, o CO2 terá dobrado em relação à era pré-industrial antes do final do século. Os modelos climáticos apontam que, com duas vezes mais CO2 no ar, o aumento da temperatura da Terra seria de cerca de 3oC, valor muito superior ao limite considerado “seguro” (e, para alguns, já inatingível) de 2oC acima da média pré-industrial. Segundo o IPCC, o painel do clima da ONU, para ter uma chance de 50% de atingir os 2oC, os níveis de CO2 precisariam estacionar em 450 ppm e depois cair.

Os 400 ppm são um número bizantino, mas importante por isso: apenas 50 ppm separam a humanidade de entrar em um território climático nunca antes explorado – e, ao que tudo indica, de forma alguma agradável. (Observatório do Clima/ #Envolverde)

* Publicado originalmente no site Observatório do Clima.

Sea level rise accelerating faster than thought (Science)

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High tides swamp a playground in coastal Wales.

DIMITRIS LEGAKIS/SPLASH NEWS/NEWSCOM. High tides swamp a playground in coastal Wales.

By  Julia Rosen

11 May 2015 11:15 am

If you’re still thinking about buying that beach house, think again. A new study suggests that sea levels aren’t just rising; they’re gaining ground faster than ever. That’s contrary to earlier work that suggested rising seas had slowed in recent years.

The result won’t come as a shock to most climate scientists. Long-term records from coastal tide gauges have shown that sea level rise accelerated throughout the 20th century. Models predict the trend will continue. However, previous studies based on satellite measurements—which began in 1993 and provide the most robust estimates of sea level—revealed that the rate of rise had slowed in the past decade compared with the one before.

That recent slowdown puzzled researchers, because sea level contributions from melting ice in Antarctica and Greenland are actually increasing, says Christopher Watson, a geodesist at the University of Tasmania in Australia. So he and colleagues took a closer look at the available satellite and tide gauge data, and tried to correct for other factors that might skew sea level measurements, like small changes in coastal elevation.

The results, published today in Nature Climate Change, show that global mean sea level rose slightly slower than previously thought between 1993 and 2014, but that sea level rise is indeed accelerating. The new findings agree more closely with other records of changing sea levels, like those produced by tide gauges and bottom-up accounting of the contributions from ocean warming and melting ice.

In the past, researchers have used tide gauges to keep tabs on the performance of satellite altimeters, which use radar to measure the height of the sea surface. The comparison allowed them to sniff out and cope with any issues that cropped up with the satellite sensors. Tide gauges themselves are not immune to problems, however; the land on which they rest can shift during earthquakes, or subside because of groundwater withdrawal or sediment settling. These processes can produce apparent changes in sea level that have nothing to do with the oceans.

So Watson’s team tried to correct for the rise and fall of tide gauge sites by using nearby GPS stations, which measure land motions. If no GPS stations were present, they used computer models to estimate known changes, such as how some regions continue to rebound from the last glaciation, when heavy ice sheets caused land to sink.

The newly recalibrated numbers show that the earliest part of the satellite record, collected between 1993 and 1999 by the first altimetry mission, known as TOPEX/Poseidon, appears to have overstated sea level rise. That’s probably because a sensor deteriorated, ultimately forcing engineers to turn on a backup instrument. When combined with data from subsequent satellite missions, those inflated TOPEX/Poseidon numbers gave the appearance that sea level rise was decelerating, even as the global climate warmed.

Also contributing to the apparent slowdown was a hiccup caused by natural climate variation, says John Church, a climate scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Hobart, Australia, and a co-author of the new study. Around 2011, “there was a major dip in sea level associated with major flooding events in Australia and elsewhere,” he says. Intense rainfall transferred water from the oceans to the continents, temporarily overriding the long-term sea level trend.

The corrected record now shows that sea level rose 2.6 millimeters to 2.9 millimeters per year since 1993, compared with prior estimates of 3.2 millimeters per year. Despite the slower rates, the study found that sea level rise accelerated by an additional 0.04 millimeters per year, although the acceleration is not statistically significant. Watson says he expects that trend to grow stronger as researchers collect more data.

The acceleration falls in line with predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Watson notes. “We’re tracking at that upper bound” of the IPCC’s business-as-usual scenario for greenhouse gas emissions, he says, which could bring up to one meter of sea level rise by 2100.

Others say it’s too early to tell. “The IPCC is looking way out in time,” says geodesist Steve Nerem of the University of Colorado, Boulder, who was not involved in the study. “This is only 20 years of data.”

In the meantime, Nerem says, the altimetry community needs to focus on continuing to improve the satellite data. He thinks Watson’s team “addressed it in the best way we can right now,” but it would be even better “to have a GPS receiver at every tide gauge, and right now that’s not the case.”

Regardless, the underlying message is clear, Church says: Sea levels are rising at ever increasing rates, and society needs to take notice.

Blessed Are the Climate Advocates (Slate)

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The Vatican and United Nations present the beatitudes of a new movement.

By 

MAY 1 2015 3:17 PM

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon after a press conference during the a climate change conference organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican on April 28, 2015

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon after a press conference during a climate change meeting organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican on April 28, 2015. Photo by Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images

This week, while at Vatican City in Rome to manage press for the first-ever meeting on climate change between Pope Francis and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, my faith in a force more powerful was renewed. I am not religious, despite being descended from a long line of Amish and Mennonite preachers. But at the climate confab, I became a believer again. And I wasn’t alone.

It wasn’t my faith in God that was renewed at the Vatican but rather a faith in our ability to get something done on climate change. And as an American, whose Congress isn’t even close to acting aggressively or quickly enough on climate change, that’s saying something. Even the Pope’s and the U.N.’s top policy officials were clearly inspired by the event, which was hosted by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Throughout the day I witnessed multiple about-faces of previously cynical staff rapidly turning toward optimism.

This Vatican moment was a game-changer. Science and religion were forcefully and unwaveringly aligning. Tuesday’s high-level session brought together multiple presidents, CEOs, academics, scientists, and all the major religions, and ended with this final, forceful statement. The event was a prelude to the Pope’s summer encyclical on climate change, and it laid a solid foundation.

But more importantly—and this is why it instilled faith in many of us—the meeting featured some of the strongest words yet from the Vatican’s Cardinal Peter Turkson, the Pope’s right-hand policy man and the drafter of the first round of what will eventually be the Pope’s climate encyclical, and from the U.N.’s Ban Ki-moon.

Beyond the expected shout-outs to the upcoming climate talks in Paris later this year and to the need for a strong Green Climate Fund, which will assist developing countries in climate adaptation, the U.N.’s Ban noted in no uncertain terms how “morally indefensible” it would be to allow a temperature rise of 4 to 5 degrees Celsius, calling on everyone to reduce their individual carbon footprint and thoughtless consumption. His pitch was more pointed than I had heard before. One of the leading rabbis, Rabbi David Rosen, took it one step further, calling out meat-intensive diets as completely unsustainable given their massive contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.

The Vatican’s Turkson, meanwhile, pulled out all the stops, saying that “a crime against the natural world is a sin,” and “to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation … are sins.” Turkson warned about how quickly we are degrading the planet’s integrity, stripping its forests, destroying its wetlands, and contaminating its waters, land, and air.

These declarations were not soft, feel-good, and vague speeches by politicos keen to be perceived as leading on the most urgent issue facing humanity. These were unequivocal, unwavering statements: “Decision mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity” and the “summit in Paris may be the last effective opportunity” to keep the planet safe.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gives a speech during the climate change conference at the Vatican on April 28, 2015

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gives a speech during the climate change conference at the Vatican on April 28, 2015. Photo by Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images

The leaders of the conference were undeterred by the hecklers who crept onto the Vatican campus. Marc Morano, for example, who is associated with the climate-skeptical Heartland Institute, snuck into the Vatican and attempted, to no avail, to disrupt the press briefing with the U.N. secretary-general while Ban was reporting on his meeting with the Pope. Morano’s account of what happened, that he was maliciously shut down after offering a benign question, misrepresents reality. Standing beside him, I can attest to what was instead a hijacking of protocol and the microphone. He said a few words about “global warming skeptics coming to talk” but coming to disrupt would be more accurate. He interrupted the secretary-general and the moderator, and was later escorted from the premises by Vatican officials.

What’s troubling about moments like this is that they work. The U.S. media reporting from the Vatican meeting felt compelled to give Morano critical space in their stories. It’s not just that he was an unexpected and therefore newsworthy interruption—giving his “side” is part of American broadcast media’s history of false balance even when there are not two legitimate sides of a story to balance. To be clear, the verdict is not still out on climate change. There’s overwhelming consensus when it comes to the science behind global warming, yet some media outlets (fewer all the time, fortunately) continue to give voice to the small percent that disagrees. Standing beside Morano, surrounded by representatives of the most powerful institutions in the world, it was quite clear to me that the Heartland Institute, though well funded by the Koch brothers, is ineffectually extreme and ultimately a minority player in society’s overall push toward climate progress.

In many ways, the Heartland emissaries proved, through their apoplectic protest, how peripheral they were to the whole process. There was no need for anyone to fight them in that moment; the majority opinion, the moral call to act on climate, was already winning the day. The global response to our conversation at the Vatican has been unequivocally positive, with every major outlet in the Western world covering the talks favorably.

As we left Vatican City this week—which is carbon-neutral thanks to solar power—there was a palpable sense that history was made within the walls of Casina Pio IV where our deliberations took place. This was no typical conference. This was a Sermon on the Mount moment, wherein the beatitudes of a new era were laid down. And we left as disciples, renewed in our faith that we must and will act in time to save humanity from itself—an agenda that would be a worthy legacy of the Pope’s Jesus.

Slamming the Anthropocene: Performing climate change in museums (reCollections)

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reCollections / Issues / Volume 10 number 1 / Papers / Slamming the Anthropocene

by Libby Robin and Cameron Muir – April 2015

The Anthropocene

Today’s museums are generally expected to use their objects and collections in ways that extend beyond exhibitions. Theatrical events, for example, can provide important complementary activities. This particularly applies to public issues such as climate change and nature conservation, which are often framed in scientific and technical terms. An exhibition is expensive to mount and demands long lead times, but a public program is ‘light on its feet’; it can respond to a topical moment such as a sudden disaster, and it can incorporate new scientific findings where relevant.

One way to make such debates inclusive and non-technical is to explore through performance the cultural and emotional dimensions of living with environmental change. Violent Ends: The Arts of Environmental Anxiety, staged at the National Museum of Australia in 2011,is an example of a one-day event that used art, film and performance to explore anxieties and public concerns about climate change. The event opened with the Chorus of Women, who sang a ‘Lament for Gaia’, and it concluded with ‘Reconciliation’, both works excerpted from The Gifts of the Furies(composed by Glenda Cloughly, 2009).[1] The performance presented  issues that are often rendered as ‘dry science’ in a way that enabled emotional responses to be included in discussions about global warming. A legacy of this event is a ‘web exhibition’ that includes podcasts, recordings and some of the art, including that of a leading Australian environmental artist, Mandy Martin, whose more recent work we discuss further below.[2] The curators of the event, Carolyn Strange (Australian National University), Libby Robin (National Museum of Australia and Australian National University), William L Fox (Director of the Center for Art+Environment, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno) and Tom Griffiths (Director of the Centre for Environmental History, Australian National University), are all scholars  with active partnerships in the arts and the museum sector. Violent Ends explored climate change through a variety of environmental arts. Since 2011, we have seen many comparable programs, in Australia and beyond.

banner image for the Violent Ends website

Thunderstorm over Paestum, after Turner, Wanderers in the Desert of the Real, 2008, used in the banner for the Violent Ends website ©Mandy Martin

In this paper, we review some recent international museum and events-based ideas emerging around the concept of the Anthropocene, the proposition that the Earth has now left the Holocene and entered a new epoch: The Anthropocene (or Age of Humans). The Anthropocene is defined by changes in natural systems that have occurred because of the activities of humans. It is an idea that emerges from earth sciences, but it is also cultural: indeed the geological epoch of the Holocene (the last 11,700 years) marks the period in which most of the world’s major civilisations and cultures have emerged; it includes both the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions. To assert that the planet has moved ‘beyond the Holocene’ is to assert that humanity (indeed all life) has entered a new cultural and physical space that has not been previously experienced. Questions of how humans live in a planet with changed atmosphere, oceans, land systems, cities and climates are moral as well as physical. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has described climate change as the greatest human rights issue of our times.[3]

The Anthropocene epoch is defined by material evidence of human activities that have affected the way biophysical systems work. The stratigraphers (geologists) who decide if the new epoch should be formalised are seeking evidence of human activities in the crust of the earth, in rock strata, as this is the way boundaries between geological eras, epochs and ages have been traditionally defined.[4] Paul Crutzen, a Nobel-Prize-winning atmospheric chemist and the author of the original proposal to name the new epoch the ‘Anthropocene’, has focused on global systems, particularly evidence such as CO2 levels in the atmosphere (showing the burning of fossil fuels) and pH factors in the oceans (showing acidification caused by agricultural outfalls).[5]

Perhaps the most important question is not whether the Holocene has ended but, if it has, how are people (and the cultural systems that have evolved in the Holocene years) to live with such change? The idea of an uncharted new Age of Humans has attracted considerable attention from creative artists, museum curators and scholars in the environmental humanities.[6] Even as the stratigraphers debate the end of the Holocene, global change is upon us, and the creative sector has tackled these questions in its own way. One art and ethnographic museum, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, hosted the most recent scientific meeting of the International Commission on Stratigraphy in October 2014.[7] HKW, with its mission to represent ‘all the cultures of the world’, recognises that the ‘people’ focus of the Anthropocene demands debate that is both cultural and scientific, and that is concerned with more than just the people of the West. The HKW Anthropocene Project and Anthropocene Curriculum have a strong artistic and museum sector focus, which we discuss further below.[8]

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, October 2014 – photograph by Libby Robin

Environmental humanities scholars of the Anthropocene emphasise the questions of justice (and injustice) embedded in planetary changes. Changes to climate, air quality and oceans, and loss of biodiversity are caused by subsets of humans (not all humanity) and their effects are felt by different people, and of course ultimately all life on Earth. The challenge for the humanities is to enable the voices of the people who suffer from the changes, or advocate on behalf of other creatures, to be part of the conversations that contribute to adapting cultural practices in response. People are already living with rapid change: the so-called ‘Great Acceleration’ of changes since the 1950s includes sharp growths in population, wealth and global financial systems, as well as biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, atmospheric carbon dioxide and inequalities between rich and poor.[9] All these changes together are unsettling, yet people are seeking positive, resilient futures in the face of ‘strange change’. This is a debate where the creative sector – design, architecture, museums and humanistic scholarship – is well-poised to make contributions to ideas for living in a changed world of the future. Artists and scientists alike want a broad-based future, not just one that simply ‘reduces the future to climate’, in the apt phrase of Mike Hulme, one of the world’s leading climate scientists.[10]

The Anthropocene is defined by its materiality. The fossil systems that trace its onset and evolution may be buried under layers of rock, lava or sea, as were the traces of earlier epochs. Stratigraphers seeking ‘markers’ for this epoch look for material that might survive the end of an age of Earth. For example, in the case of the mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, footprints in the mud and bones remain, even after the collision of the Earth with a huge meteorite. The ‘markers of the era’ are material, and particularly well preserved if the disaster is sudden and buries them (rather than slow and eroding).  University of Leicester geologist Jan Zalasiewicz and his Anthropocene stratigraphy committee are looking for things that might become ‘buried treasure’, surviving as markers of humanity, after humanity is long gone. They are considering various forms of ‘artificial rock’ – bricks and concrete, for example, are long lasting, human-made and in vast quantities. The group is also considering plastics (manufactured polymers) as ideal for forming fossils that would date this epoch as different from all before it.[11]

The materiality of the Anthropocene makes it of interest to museums, but on a very different scale from that considered by the stratigraphers. One of the alternatives to looking for material change in rock strata is to create cabinets of curiosities in our museums, spaces where objects enable conversations about what is strange change. People now have more ‘stuff’ than ever before and there is ever more waste – what does a gyre of plastic the size of a continent floating in the Pacific ocean (‘the Great Pacific Garbage Patch’), say about the Age of Humans?[12] How could it be embodied as an object or set of objects in a Museum? What are the material objects that complement abstract representations of strata, atmospheric chemical analysis, and graphs trending upwards? The challenge for museums and cultural institutions with a stake in valuing objects is to tell their stories well, and to give them rich context. If we are interested in how objects can entertain, inform and inspire, we need to present them as more than mere ‘stuff’.

The slam

In November 2014, the University of Wisconsin hosted an Anthropocene slam, an object-inspired event that brought together artists, filmmakers, scholars and performers at its campus in the state capital, Madison. The university has, since its inception, avowed a commitment to public intellectual life and the community of Wisconsin state. ‘The Wisconsin Idea’, as expressed by the university’s president, Charles Van Hise, in 1904, is quoted today in the words on the wall of the Wisconsin Seminar Room and on a centenary public memorial on the highest hill on the Madison campus: ‘I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the university reaches every home in the state’.

‘The Wisconsin Idea’ centenary public memorial

‘The Wisconsin Idea’ centenary public memorial – photograph by Libby Robin

The Wisconsin Idea expresses an aspiration that university work can inform and enrich the ‘public good’ including cultural institutions. The University of Wisconsin takes as its brief to benefit all the citizens of Wisconsin, not just those who have the privilege to be its students. As well as repaying the investment of the state in its university, the public good aspiration has come to hold strong appeal for the state’s benefactors and donors. The Chazen Art Museum in the University of Wisconsin at Madison combines an outstanding collection of modern art and a strong teaching program in art history, including curatorial education, research and leadership programs.

The Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) initiative at the university has also used the support of private donors to develop a range of ambitious programs under the banner ‘Environmental futures’. The film festival Tales from Planet Earth, which has since 2007 successfully screened all over Madison and beyond in a range of venues, including Centro Hispano, a community centre serving Madison’s Latino population, has drawn new local audiences to the university’s programs and has helped to increase diversity within the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. In November 2014, the CHE team, Gregg Mitman, William Cronon and Rob Nixon, among others, hosted a new venture, a very different sort of public event, The Anthropocene Slam: A Cabinet of Curiosities.

The ‘slam’ is a concept that originated with poetry, performance and a competitive spirit. The first poetry slam in 1984 was a poetry reading in the Get Me High lounge in Chicago. Poets performed their words and audiences voted with acclamation for the winners. The community audience was essential. The slams were noisy, theatrical and democratic – very different from ‘high art’ poetry recitation. The Anthropocene Slam borrowed the performance and entertainment idea, asking contributors to ‘pitch in a public fishbowl setting’ an object that might represent the Anthropocene in a cabinet of curiosities. From a large field of applicants, 25 objects appeared in five sessions, involving a total of 32 presenters (several objects were presented by teams). The sessions (held across three days from 8-10 November 2014) were grouped into intriguing themes:

  1. nightmares/dreams
  2. Anthropocene fossils
  3. tales and projections
  4. trespass
  5. resistance/persistence.

The aim was to find objects that might help humanity rethink ‘its relationship to time, place, and the agency of things that shape planetary change’.[13] This innovative scholarly method was designed from the start to be inclusive of scientific, artistic and practical ideas, extending what is usually possible in academic settings. One of its public outcomes was the performance event in Madison.

The slam presentations were complemented by a major public lecture from journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, drawing on her bestselling book, The Sixth Extinction.[14] An audience of more than 500 people from all over Wisconsin came out on a chilly night to hear this fluent and well-known communicator of big ideas explain the thesis that the loss of biodiversity today is on a scale equivalent to the mass extinctions evident in geological strata. The last (fifth) mass extinction ended the era of dinosaurs. The slam created a context for this important lecture.[15]

Another aspect of the slam was the building of a travelling cabinet of curiosities,to exhibit the most popular objects and stories, and to take them to local communities. Like the original Wunderkammer from the 16th and 17th centuries, the cabinet created out of the slam is as much a cabinet of conversations and global connections as one of objects.[16] The purpose of the slam was to discover objects that might travel to a cabinet in another context: the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, the largest science and technology museum in the world. One item from the cabinet even made it to opening night on 4 December 2014 of Willkommen im Anthropozän, the world’s first gallery exhibition of the Anthropocene.[17]

There will be a more formal reception for the cabinet and its objects in July 2015, in an Anthropocene Objects and Environmental Futures workshop, a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin, the Rachel Carson Center at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), the Deutsches Museum and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm.[18] The cabinet will also be available to travel elsewhere, including to Sweden, where the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory hosted an international variation on the Tales from Planet Earth film festival in 2014.[19]

The ‘call for objects’ drafted by Gregg Mitman and Rob Nixon was rather different from a standard conference or workshop ‘call’:

We are in the midst of a great reawakening to questions of time – across the spans of geological, ecological, evolutionary, and human history. It is a reawakening precipitated, not by a nostalgia for the past, but by a sense of urgency about the future. The Anthropocene, coined in 2000 by ecologist Eugene Stoermer and popularized by Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, is one of the most resonant examples of how the urgency of the future has prompted scientists, artists, humanities scholars and social scientists to engage creatively with the emerging legacy of our geomorphic and biomorphic powers. The advent of this new scientific object – the Anthropocene – is altering how we conceptualize, imagine and inhabit time. The Anthropocene encourages us to re-envisage (in Nigel Clark’s phrase) future and past relations between ‘earthly volatility and bodily vulnerability’. What images and stories can we create that speak with conceptual richness and emotional energy to our rapidly changing visions of future possibility? For in a world deluged with data, arresting stories and images matter immeasurably, playing a critical role in the making of environmental publics and the shaping of environmental policy.

The Anthropocene is just one among many moments in time when new scientific objects have altered humanity’s relationship to the past, present, and future. The coming-into-being of scientific objects such as fossils, radioactivity, genetic mutations, toxic pesticides, and ice cores, to name a few, have precipitated different narratives and imaginings of the human past and the human future. What might a cabinet of curiosities for the age of the Anthropocene look like? What objects might jolt us into reimagining environmental time across diverse scales, from the recent past to deep history? How might certain kinds of objects make visible the differential impacts – past, present, and future – that have come to shape the relationships among human and non-human beings, living in an era of extreme hydrocarbon extraction, extreme weather events, and extreme economic disparity?

… How is the appearance and impact of homo sapiensas a geomorphic force registered in the sediments of history, the objects around us, and the things yet to be? What emotionally layered Anthropocene objects can surprise, disturb, startle or delight us into new ways of thinking and feeling? What objects speak to resilience or adaptation, to vanishing biota or emerging morphologies?[20]

The cabinet also explored ‘future imaginaries’, both ‘utopian and apocalyptic’, considering the ideas of art and science, literature and film, history and policy. This wider Environmental Futures project opened a transnational and interdisciplinary conversation, with a focus on material objects and on the emotional responses (for example, hopes and fears) that they invoked. The challenge for the objects and their presenters was to:

… comprehend and portray environmental change that occurs imperceptibly and over eons of time – and that inflicts slow violence upon future generations – when media, corporate, and political cultures thrive on the short-term.[21]

Cabinets of curiosities

The Wunderkammer started life in German as a ‘room of wonder’, rather than the English ‘curiosity’. The cabinet of curiosities evoked awe. Rather than evoking rational curiosity, a cabinet should enable enchantment, according to political ecologist Jane Bennett:

Thirteenth-century writer Albertus Magnus described wonder as, like fear, ‘shocked surprise’ … but fear cannot dominate if enchantment is to be … it is a state of interactive fascination, not fall to your knees awe.’[22]

‘Awe’ was a word laden with moral and religious overtones in pre-Enlightenment times. In the 21st century, the objects of a cabinet stir questions about the ‘ethical relevance of human affect’.[23]

The rarity of objects in the era of the Wunderkammer added much to their value. In 1500, the average Middle European household had just 30 objects. By 1900, such households contained 400 objects. The proliferation of objects continued throughout the 20th century, rising to 12,000 objects per household in 2010.[24] The sheer number of objects in modern life changes them: they are no longer precious but rather just ‘stuff’, too many to count or care about. An Anthropocene-era cabinet of curiosities rediscovers objects that can stir wonder, curiosity and care, even for a jaded 21st-century viewer, whose home is burdened with an excess of objects. Each object’s story needs to be evocative, remarkable, perhaps even luminous. Even a prosaic object can carry a big story. This can be assisted by a great ‘pitch’ or performance that breathes life into the story.

When objects have lost their stories and their place in the lives of their owners, they are just stuff. When the stories are remembered and embraced with the object, they stimulate memories and reflection. These can even have clinical value for those suffering from memory loss. Keeping the context of the object simple and clear is often better for stimulating memory than cluttering it with high-tech apps.[25]

Restoring enchantment to objects demands retelling their stories, making individual objects special and important to identity again. The slam was a deliberate strategy to foster engagement and to enliven and reinvigorate objects, to sponsor a ‘sense of play’. It was a technique that could ‘hone sensory receptivity to the marvellous specificity of things’ and, above all, that could ‘resist the story of the disenchantment of modernity’, in Jane Bennett’s words.[26] The challenge of the Anthropocene is its scale. It may seem so large and frightening that it makes people feel they can do nothing about it. The performance event is a strategy for keeping open possibilities for adaptive strategies in the face of rapid change, allowing objects to explore facets of a bigger story in smaller, playful ways.

Neil MacGregor’s History of the World in 100 Objects is one attempt to tell human history ‘from out of Africa to the credit card’. He argues for the levelling power of objects: not all societies have text to tell their stories, but objects may survive to speak from cultures beyond the written word. A history created from objects can include the 95 per cent of human history that is only told in stone. [27] While organic objects cannot survive indefinitely, and fragile objects are more likely to be lost than robust ones, the survival of an object is not just physical: it is also testimony to a cultural context where someone cared enough to protect this object – perhaps in a grave, perhaps in a pocket. Small objects may survive better than large. Edmund de Waal’s imaginative memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes, told through his global family’s netsuke collection, shows just how powerful a small and special object can become. Netsuke are tiny Japanese ceramic, wood and ivory carvings (originally merely a functional addendum that enabled men to carry a tobacco pouch on a kimono). The de Waal collection of netsuke moved through generations and over a century of extraordinary international events, holding the family memories across time and space, and encapsulating his family’s history.[28]

If we follow Neil MacGregor’s notion of a museum as a place that enables ‘the study of things [which] can lead to a truer understanding of the world’[29], then we have a particular new challenge to find the poignancy of objects in a time when there are too many of them. Which objects might enchant audiences and museum visitors in a world marked by the proliferation of things? How can we learn to wonder or be curious about ‘stuff’? The answer, in Mitman’s vision, is that we select and perform or present just a few objects, juxtaposed with others that can carry the Anthropocene story in quirky ways. When the idea of global change is too big and abstract for human comprehension, a small cabinet can act as a microcosm to enable an imaginative and active response. Each object is there for its own story. Together in a cabinet they become a chorus of stories.

The object

One of the 25 objects ‘performed’ at the Anthropene Slam and subsequently selected for the Deutsches Museum’s Anthropocene Wunderkammer was a domestic pesticide applicator. The familiar bike-pump-sized pesticide sprayer was a popular household item from the 1920s to the 1950s. In the United States the Standard Oil Company’s ‘Flit’ brand of insecticide became synonymous with the spray pump. Other countries had their own brands: in Australia it was Mortein.

‘Flit’ branded handheld pesticide spray pump

‘Flit’ branded handheld pesticide spray pump, 1928 – Hamburg Museum

The pesticide pump sprayer speaks of a faith in science to improve lifestyles, and the hubris of humanity’s desire to control nature. The sprayer’s genealogy links to both the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions, each a break in time that has been argued to mark the Anthropocene.[30] It is an object born of the demographic shift towards large urban populations, and the demands for greater intensification and efficiencies in food growing that make that shift possible. Until the mid-20th century (the likely date stratigraphers will use for the dawn of the Anthropocene[31]), most older-generation pesticides had been available for hundreds of years. Soaps, oils, salt, sulphur, and more toxic substances, such as those derived from arsenic, lead and mercury, were applied in all manner of ways. It was the social and economic changes of the 19th century, however, that drove sprayer development, as growers sought to cover plants and trees on a larger scale, with more efficiency.

Bellows syringe sprayer

Bellows syringe sprayer, 1874 – The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser

As early as the 1870s, American Agriculturalist reported a French horticulturalist using bellows across a nozzle to disperse insecticide. The article explains that the device and its production of ‘liquid dust’ use the same principles of fluid dynamics as a perfume sprinkler or medical atomiser.[32] A fine spray could cover all of a tree more easily, quickly and without wasting pouring liquid or dusting. By the 1890s the use of portable and horsedrawn pesticide sprayers was so common that the New South Wales Minister for Mines and Agriculture held a field competition in December 1890 at Parramatta to determine the best and most efficient commercial insecticide sprayer. The Australian-made ‘Farrington’ machine was fitted on a cart and could spray 500 gallons per day. Some needed two operators but others could be used by a single person, pumping with one hand and holding the sprayer with the other. The Lowe’s machine had a three-in-one action: it could spray, fumigate and expel a hot vapour of sulphur and steam near its nozzle. Observers noted that cross-winds often wasted the fumigant, so some orchardists proposed enveloping trees in tents that could ensure the expensive fumes were trapped where they were needed. On the day, the most impressive sprayer was a new machine from the United States. It was compact and used compressed air rather than a hand pump to create the hydraulic pressure, so ‘all that the orchardist has to do is stand at the nozzle and blaze away at pest and disease’.[33] It was the fastest of the sprayers in the competition, dressing a tree in just two-and-a-half minutes.

At the same time that chemical companies were advertising pesticide formulas to landholders in the late 19th century, they were adapting agricultural sprayers to deliver chemicals for domestic gardens and inside the home.[34] From the 1920s, when better sprayer design and pervasive chemical industry advertising combined with higher household incomes and campaigns for improved domestic hygiene and ‘mothercraft’, the familiar home pump sprayer became widely used. After the Second World War, the sprayer formulas became longer lasting and more effective, with new synthetic chemicals. Less than two decades later, the public began to discover that the miracle chemicals were not as safe as they had been led to believe.

Performing the object

A ten-minute ‘slam’ format presents a challenge to historians in particular, who by their nature and training, are dedicated to providing context. How much story, information and reflection is possible in ten minutes? The format shaped the form and selection of story – the performance had to provoke and begin a conversation. It would not be possible to explain everything. The invited presenters, Michelle Mart and Cameron Muir, opened their performance by playing characters, two archetypes associated with the use of chemicals in different contexts – domestic, urban, wealthy on the one hand, and industrial, rural and poor on the other.[35]

An immaculate housewife waits at the door to greet her husband

An immaculate housewife waits at the door to greet her husband, 1953 – H Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Corbis

Michelle Mart appeared as a 1950s housewife, a stereotype from the period’s advertising posters come to life, complete with lipstick, pearls and twin-set. She advocated the convenience and virtues of a bug-free household, as images projected in the background showed advertising and stylised scenes of the suburban ideal. Successful domestic management, or orderliness, cleanliness, and wholesomeness: perfect weed-free lawns, insect-free kitchens, and unblemished fruit and vegetables. Mart was the woman who stood on the veranda of a neat, architecturally designed house to welcome her husband home from work. Her home was managed with a pump spray that dispersed DDT through the kitchen cupboards, just like in the military, where officers were photographed spraying DDT down a fellow serviceman’s shirt. Some of the men came home from being sprayed in wartime service to the new peacetime spraying on the suburban frontier.

A US soldier is demonstrating DDT hand-spraying equipment while applying the insecticide

A US soldier is demonstrating DDT hand-spraying equipment while applying the insecticide – Centres for Disease Control Public Health Image Library

Advertising urged homeowners to use chemicals for the sake of the family’s health (some thought polio was spread by the housefly), while another has fruit and vegetables singing, ‘DDT is good for me-e-e!’ Mart’s 1950s character proclaimed she is ‘lucky to live at a time when the wonders of modern technology and chemistry have transformed our lives’, and best of all, the new chemicals are ‘safe for everybody’.[36]

‘DDT is good for m-e-e’ advertisement, Penn Salt Chemicals

‘DDT is good for m-e-e’ advertisement, Penn Salt Chemicals, 1947 – Collector’s Weekly

At this point the second character entered: Cameron Muir was an agricultural worker in a white, full-body chemical hazmat suit, including hood, gloves, goggles and face mask, and carrying a large knapsack pump sprayer adorned with lurid red-and-black warnings about its toxicity. We have moved beyond the innocence of postwar hubris in scientific and industrial expertise, but users are exposed to more chemicals than ever. The agricultural worker character speaks of his brother, who blames the pesticides for illnesses and behavioural problems in his children. He wants to leave the job of spraying but he can’t find work elsewhere. The worker fears local complaints about the chemicals will endanger their relationship with the company employing them.

Woman in Metema community, Ethiopia, using knapsack sprayer

Woman in Metema community, Ethiopia, using knapsack sprayer, 2010 – International Livestock Research Institute

The images projected in the background show the faces of individual agricultural works in developing countries, some of them disfigured by pesticide exposure and light aircraft spraying vast fields. Amidst health concerns and well-informed anxiety about spraying pesticides, industrial agriculture has scaled up again in the 21st century.

Crop duster plane flying over Imperial Valley farms

Crop duster plane flying over Imperial Valley farms, May 1972 – Charles O’Rear/The US National Archives

The object and performance as provocateur

Who owns the story of pesticides? The narrative of triumphant technological progress and control of nature continues to hold influence even in the face of startling costs and unintended consequences. Social and political commentators still attempt to discredit Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring 50 years later, while the chemical and seed industries sell promises of control, simplicity and safety to farmers wracked by the reality of an unpredictable nature and markets. More powerful than earnestness and statistics, Mart and Muir’s performance gave the voice to the Flit spray can and used it to retell the stereotypical narrative of technological progress. Humour, irony and juxtaposition can be more effective than numbers in exposing hubris in the failed narrative. The presentation made its point not just by telling, but by showing. It is a human story. The archetypal characters, images and objects spoke for themselves; each member of the audience actively made their own interpretations and connections.

Towards the end of the presentation, Mart and Muir stepped out of character and spoke to the audience directly, personally. The ‘pitch’ or telling mode was reserved until the object story and its historical frames had been performed beforehand. The background or hypertext for the performance included the bigger scale, Anthropocene stories: since the Second World War humans have released more than 80,000 chemical compounds that no organism had previously encountered in the 3.5-billion-year history of life on earth.[37] This profound change will persist in the geological record and in our genetic legacies. Everyone is still exposed to this chemical soup. Researchers in the Lancet Neurology have declared we are in the midst of a ‘global, silent pandemic of neurodevelopmental toxicity’.[38] It’s even worse for those who farm or who live in the world’s most polluted places. The presentation ended with a provocative set of images. In the 1990s anthropologist Elizabeth Guillette asked children from the Yaqui Valley in Mexico to draw simple pictures – one group was from the agricultural lowlands, the other from the pesticide-free highlands. The children from the agricultural region could barely form shapes.[39] The difference in the drawings was a striking visualisation of what is largely an invisible agent of harm. It was also an illustration of the geographic inequality of toxic burdens.

The chorus

The domestic pesticide applicator object was one of 25 performed in the Madison Chorus. It has now been chosen to travel on to the Deutsches Museum, where a new cabinet of curiosities will be re-assembled in July 2015 with some of the Madison objects and some new, locally chosen Anthropocene objects. Global changes are everywhere, but human responses are personal, local, and the slam was an event for Madison. Munich is another context: another language, a science and technology museum, and the juxtaposition of the cabinet with a whole gallery of ideas and objects for the Anthropocene.[40] What the Madison cabinet brings is an event and a set of objects that can interrogate the gallery project for the Deutsches Museum and its university partner, the Rachel Carson Center. It also invites local content – objects that have resonance in Munich. The slam-style event works to collect together the object stories and to draw out patterns and sympathies between them.

The Anthropocene Slam created a chorus of objects that worked together in Madison, juxtaposed with each other and the performances of their presenters. In fact, the audience was reluctant to vote for ‘best object’ in each section; these were not solo objects or voices, but rather notes that together created chords of global change stories, stories that were layered together with others. It didn’t make sense to pick out the ‘tenor’ or ‘soprano’ line for special attention. The poetry slam is usually a competition with a cash prize. The Anthropocene Slam resisted the competitive framework. Rather, it invited scholarly collaboration in a playful context. The shift from competition to chorus was its great success, enabling collaboration and partnerships and the reflections arising from some very different objects.

The global and the local

The Anthropocene Slam suggested one way to scale the abstract and global through personal objects. It created an object-conversation that worked for all ages and in intergenerational contexts. Educating citizens about living with global change is not a task for schools alone. This story affects every generation. As the Deutsches Museum has already realised, museums can be partners in this global education, and are ideally suited to intergenerational conversations: grandchildren and grandparents already often visit a museum together.

HKW took the scholarly mission to educate people about the Anthropocene as its focus, as part of a two-year Anthropocene Project. For 11 days in November 2014, HKW created an international ‘Anthropocene Campus’, where its galleries showcased the exhibitions, video documentaries and artworks developed through its Anthropocene Project. Campus participants worked to develop a ‘curriculum’, including textbook and online teaching materials, through seminars and workshops on approaches to the ideas of the Anthropocene. Nearly 30 presenters worked with more than 100 interested participants, doctoral and postdoctoral scholars and practising artists.[41] Most of the presenters came from scientific disciplines leading Anthropocene discussions (especially earth, atmospheric and ocean sciences). Participants included a significant number of designers, museum specialists and visual artists, as well as scholars of earth sciences and environmental humanities. The boundaries between science and humanities dissolved in the intense program; the need to communicate and to teach and learn demanded clear, non-technical language and strong images. The overwhelming thrust of the curriculum materials was to develop human and emotional responses to the Anthropocene, as well as ways to converse beyond disciplinary silos to work together to solve problems and engage audiences.

Thinking with museums

How can we slow down the future to enable a sense of control? What is globally curious? What will we ‘wonder’ at in future? What sort of objects should we collect now for museums of the future? These are all urgent present problems as we imagine how museums will work in the changing circumstances of the Anthropocene. For Collecting the Future, a museum event at the American Museum of Natural History in October 2013, Jennifer Newell, Libby Robin and Kirsten Wehner specifically investigated what communities might collect for community museums of the future in local places that are changing fastest. What objects and stories can travel from depopulating Pacific Islands (where people are confronted with salinising ground water and rising seas) to their new communities in New Zealand or New York? These practical questions about living with climate change can bring communities into museums to use their collections in new ways. Community museums, national museums, science museums and art museums are all members of the Museums and Climate Change network of exchange that emerged from this event.[42]

In Australia, as elsewhere, the arts have been engaging with ideas for imaginative futures through local museums and events. Climarte is one such group that ‘harnesses the creative power of the Arts to inform, engage and inspire action on climate change’.[43] It is an arts-led partnership including prominent artists, Nobel-Prize-winning scientist Peter Doherty and directors of key galleries, Maudie Palmer (founding director of Heide Museum of Modern Art and TarraWarra Museum of Art) and Stuart Purves (director of Australian Galleries, Australia’s longest and most established commercial art gallery). Australian Galleries will host the 2015 Climarte Festival’s opening exhibition, The Warming, curated by Mandy Martin, who was one of the international artists attending the Wisconsin Anthropocene Slam. The exhibition brings together eight artists from Australian Galleries with 17 additional artists who have been invited to contribute an ‘Anthropocene cabinet of curiosities’, a plinth of objects at the heart of the show. Some of the artists will also pitch their ‘curious object’ briefly at a special event on 3 May 2015, and there will be responses from moderators, Peter Christoff (from the University of Melbourne and formerly Victorian Commissioner for the Future), William L Fox and Libby Robin. The aim is to create an event to inspire new thinking about what the arts can do in a future beyond the Holocene.

The future is often constructed through the lens of economic expertise. For example, the Australian Treasury has issued a 2015 Intergenerational Report that focuses exclusively on the economic burdens that the present generation places on those living in 2055.[44] Sometimes it is earth system scientists, or climate modellers who describe futures – for example, under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios of 2 or 4 or 6 degrees of warming. Yet the future is also about cultural and moral choices, not just economics and environment. The worlds of 2055 and beyond will be more than just climate spaces and economies. The museum sector is poised to treat the future as a ‘cultural fact’, in Arjun Appadurai’s terms. Appadurai writes of a future that includes ‘imagination, anticipation and aspiration’.[45] The future is not just about imagining nature or anticipating economic conditions, it is also about aspiration. While ‘probable’ futures are generated by mathematical models of nature and economics, such models often offer little hope. An alternative is to look to museums, to objects and to the creative dialogues of personal visits and performance events to foster qualitative possible futures. The future is not just a technical or neutral space: it is ‘shot through with affect and sensation’.[46] Science and scholarship alone often lack important sensations for imagining the future: ‘awe, vertigo, excitement, disorientation’. Rather than just measuring change in our world – or denying that there is any – we can take a third way that acknowledges change, including, but not only, climate change. Cultural institutions have an important role in enabling communities to get on with living positively with the changes of the Anthropocene. Culture works through ‘the traction of the imagination’, expanding the possibilities for ways to live with the future as it unfolds.[47]

This paper has been independently peer-reviewed.

Endnotes

1 www.chorusofwomen.org.

2 Violent Ends: The Arts of Environmental Anxiety.

3 www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/21/desmond-tutu-climate-change-is-the-global-enemy.

4 Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N Waters, Mark Williams et al., ‘When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal’, Quaternary International, 12 January 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2014.11.045.

5 PJ Crutzen, ‘Geology of mankind’, Nature, vol. 415, no. 6867, 2002, 23.

6 Christian Schwägerl, The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How it Shapes the Planet, Synergetic Press, Santa Fe/London, 2014; Luke Keogh & Nina Möllers, ‘Pushing the boundaries: Curating the Anthropocene at the Deutsches Museum’, in Fiona Cameron & Brett Neilson (eds), Climate Change, Museum Futures: The Roles and Agencies of Museums and Science Centers, Routledge, London, 2014, pp. 78–89.

7 Currently chaired by Jan Zalasiewicz, who has worked extensively with humanities scholars (at the University of Chicago and the University of Sydney), and has supervised art projects such as the French artist Yesenia Thibault-Picazo’s Cabinet of Future Geology, currently showing at the Deutsches Museum, Munich, until 2016. In 2015 another version of Thibault-Picazo’s work will be part of the Globale Festival in the New Media Museum, Karlsruhe, Germany.

8 Bernd Scherer (ed.), The Anthropocene Project: A Report, HKW, Berlin, 2014; Libby Robin, Dag Avango, Luke Keogh, Nina Möllers, Bernd Scherer & Helmuth Trischler, ‘Three galleries of the Anthropocene’, Anthropocene Review, vol. 1, no. 3,  207–24.

9 W Steffen, J Grinevald, P Crutzen & J McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and historical perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A,vol. 369, 2011, 842–67.

10 Mike Hulme, ‘Reducing the future to climate: A story of climate determinism and reductionism’, Osiris, vol. 26, 2011, 245–66, p. 245.

11 Jan Zalasiewicz, ‘Buried treasure’, in Geoff Manaugh (ed.), Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions, Nevada Museum of Art and Actar, Reno, 2013, pp. 258–61.

12 Susan L Dautel, ‘Transoceanic trash: International and United States strategies for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal, vol. 3, no. 1, 2009, 181–208. This sort of global phenomenon (which grew and changed shape dramatically after the tsunami that struck Japan in 2011) has been very effectively illustrated in museums through ‘Science on a Sphere’ technology created by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Alaska State Museum, Juneau, http://juneauempire.com/stories/050109/ent_435381904.shtml#.VRTsEfmUeCc.

13 From the ‘Call for objects’ (distributed through H-Net online 2013), www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/download/events/cfps/cfp_cabinet-of-curiosities.pdf.

14 Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2014.

15 Crutzen, ‘Geology of mankind’ (p. 23).

16 Oliver Impey & Arthur MacGregor (eds) The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985.

17 Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands (in English). The exhibition gallery opened 4 December 2014, and will run till 2016; Nina Möllers, Christian Schwägerl & Helmuth Trischler (eds) Willkommen im Anthropozän: Unsere Verantwortung für die Zukunft der Erde, Deutsches Museum, Munich, 2014; see also Libby Robin, Dag Avango, Luke Keogh, Nina Möllers, Bernd Scherer & Helmuth Trischler, ‘Three galleries of the Anthropocene’, Anthropocene Review, vol. 1, no. 3, 2014, 207–24, doi:10.1177/2053019614550533.

18 Munich, 5–7 July 2015, www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/events_conf_seminars/calendar/ws_anthropocene-objects/index.html.

19 www.kth.se/en/abe/inst/philhist/historia/2.45962/2.60531/tales.

20 nelson.wisc.edu/che/anthroslam/about/index.php.

21 From Environmental Futures unpublished prospectus (‘Call for papers’), 2013; see also Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2011.

22 Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2001, p. 5, emphasis added.

23 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke UP, Durham, 2010, p. xi.

24 Christof Mauch, ‘The Great Acceleration of Objects’, Plenary panel, Anthropocene Slam, UW Madison, 10 November 2014.

25 Charles Leadbeater, ‘The disremembered’, Aeon Magazine, March 2015, http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/where-does-identity-go-once-memory-falters-in-dementia.

26 Bennett, Enchantment,p. 4.

27 Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects, Penguin, London, 2012 (1st edn 2010), p. xix.

28 Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, Vintage, London, 2011.

29 MacGregor, History of the World, p. xxv.

30 William F Ruddiman, ‘The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago’, Climatic Change, vol. 61, no. 3, 2003; Crutzen, ‘Geology of mankind’.

31 Zalasiewicz, Waters, Williams et al., ‘When did the Anthropocene begin?’.

32 ‘Destroying insects – Bellows-Syringe’, Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, 28 March 1874.

33 ‘Death to fruit pests and diseases: Experiments with appliances’, Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate (Parramatta, NSW), 13 December 1890.

34 Will Allen, The War on Bugs, Chelsea Green, White River Junction, Vt, 2008.

35 Michelle Mart (Pennsylvania State University) and Cameron Muir (Australian National University), both former fellows of the Rachel Carson Center, Munich, independently suggested the sprayer. They were both among the group selected to present at the slam, and since they had the same object, they were asked to work together on it.

36 Michelle Mart & Cameron Muir, ‘Flit sprayer’, Anthropocene Slam presentation, 8 November 2014, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.

37 Mariann Lloyd-Smith & Bro Sheffield-Brotherton, ‘Children’s environmental health: Intergenerational equity in action – a civil society perspective’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 11, no. 1140, 2008, 190–200.

38 Philippe Grandjean & Philip J Landrigan, ‘Neurobehavioural effects of developmental toxicity’, Lancet Neurology, vol. 13, no. 3, 2014, 330–8.

39 Elizabeth A Guillette, Maria Mercedes Meza, Maria Guadalupe Aquilar, Alma Delia Soto & Idalia Enedina Garcia, ‘An anthropological approach to the evaluation of preschool children exposed to pesticides in Mexico’, Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 106, 1998, 347–53.

40 Robin et al., ‘Three galleries’.

41 Scherer et al., The Anthropocene Project; see also Robin et al., ‘Three galleries’, esp. p. 215, doi:10.1177/2053019614550533.

42 Museums and Climate Change Network, www.amnh.org/our-research/anthropology/projects/museums-and-climate-change-network; Collecting the Future event, www.amnh.org/our-research/anthropology/news-events/collecting-the-future; Jennifer Newell, Libby Robin & Kirsten Wehner (eds), Curating the Future,University of Hawaii Press, Hawaii, forthcoming.

43 http://climarte.org/category/climarte-archive.

44 www.treasury.gov.au/PublicationsAndMedia/Publications/2015/2015-Intergenerational-Report.

45 Arjun Appadurai, The Future as a Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition, Verso, London, 2013, p. 286.

46 ibid.

47 ibid.

Flavorwire Exclusive: Civilization Is Doomed! McKenzie Wark Takes on the Anthropocene (Flavorwire)

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By Jonathon Sturgeon – Apr 29, 2015 12:00pm

In the below excerpt, drawn from the conclusion of his energizing new book Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark confesses that “we all know this civilization can’t last.” Nevertheless! Wark asserts that our imaginations are up to the standard of describing a new and better world, and so he sets out to consider what metaphors we might use to define a future that will “undo the workings of the Anthropocene.” The industriousness and intellectual range you see here defines Molecular Red, a brilliant and persistently entertaining book that considers everything from cyborgs to Russian intellectuals and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Marstrilogy.

From the conclusion to Molecular Red:

There is still some low theory work to do, to transmit the metaphor of the Anthropocene between domains, but in that process, those labor processes will change it. Rather than “interrogate” Crutzen’s Anthropocene—and where did that metaphor come from?—perhaps it is better to see it as what it is: a brilliant hack. The Anthropocene introduces the labor point of view—in the broadest possible sense—into geology. Perhaps the challenge is then to find analogous but different ways to hack other specialized domains of knowledge, to orient them to the situation and the tasks at hand.

Let’s invent new metaphors! Personally, I like the #misanthropocene, but don’t expect it to catch on. Jason Moore prefers the Capitalocene, Jussi Parikka the Anthrobscene. Kate Raworth suggests Manthropocene, given the gender make-up of the Anthropocene Working Group considering it as a name for a geological era. Donna Haraway offers to name it the Chthulucene, a more chthonic version of Cthulhu, the octopoid monster of H. P. Lovecraft’s weird stories. “Chthulucene does not close in on itself; it does not round off; its contact zones are ubiquitous and continuously spin out loopy tendrils.”

Haraway notes the strikingly parallel evolution of new meta- phorical tools in both humanities and biologies, where competitive individualism is no longer a given. In Bogdanovite terms, perhaps it is because in both domains, producing knowledge got strangely complex, collaborative, and mediated by apparatuses. A new breed of basic metaphor is at least partly at work and in play, one which in the biologies could be described as a “multi-species becoming-with.”

Haraway wants to both “justify and trouble” the language of the Anthropocene. As Edwards does with climate science, she insists on the embeddedness in an infrastructure that makes the global appear as a work-object to those natural scientists for whom the Anthropocene makes sense as a metaphor. She points to the limits of its basic metaphors, which still think one-sidedly of competition between populations or genes, where success equals reproduction. More symbiotic—dare we say comradely?—kinds of life hardly figure in such metaphors. But perhaps, as Haraway says, “we are all lichens now”—cyborg lichens.

After Robinson, the task is not debating names or trading stories, but making comradely alliances. Is not Crutzen one of those curious scientist-intellectuals that Robinson’s fiction trains us to look out for? Crutzen and his colleagues in the earth sciences have flagged something that needs to shape the agenda for knowledge, culture, and organization. For those of us seeking to respond from the left, I think the authors presented in Molecular Red offer some of the best ways of processing that information. Bogdanov and Platonov would not really be surprised by the Anthropocene. They were vulgar enough to think aspects of it already.

So let’s pop the following tools into the dillybag for future use:

Something like an empirio-monism has its uses, because it is a way of doing theory that directs the tendency to spin out webs of metaphoric language to the task at hand. It steers the language arts toward agendas arising out of working processes, including those of sciences. It is agnostic about which metaphors best explain the real, but it sees all of them as substitutions which derive from the forms of labor and apparatus of the time.

Something like proletkult has its uses, as the project for the self-organization of the labor point of view. It filters research into past culture and knowledge through the organizational needs of the present. Those needs put pressure on the traditional category of labor, opening it toward feminist standpoints, not to mention our queer cyborg entanglements.

Something like a tektology has its uses, as a way of coordinating labor other than through exchange or hierarchy, or the new infra- structure of corporatized “networks.” It communicates between labor processes poetically and qualitatively. It is a training of the metaphoric wiliness of language toward particular applications which correspond to and with advances in labor technique.

Lastly, something like the utopia of Red Star has its uses, in motivating those working in separate fields to think beyond the fetishistic habits of the local and toward comradely goals. In the absence of a single counter-hegemonic ideology, perhaps something like a meta-utopia might be more useful, and more fun. Meta-utopia offers not so much an imaginary solution to real problems as a real problematizing of how to navigate the differences between the imaginal that corresponds to each particular labor points of view.

And so, to conclude with the slogan with which we began. It might be the slogan of a Cyborg International. One which already possesses in imagination the means and the will to undo the workings of the Anthropocene. One with nothing for it but to build the new living world within the ruins of the old one. We all know this civilization can’t last. Let’s make another.

WORKINGS OF THE WORLD UNTIE! YOU HAVE A WIN TO WORLD!

Comissão mista discutirá posição do Brasil em torno de novo acordo do clima (Agência Senado)

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A COP 21 será realizada em Paris no final deste ano com a missão de chegar a um acordo global sobre mudanças climáticas para substituir o Protocolo de Kyoto

A Comissão Mista Permanente sobre Mudanças Climáticas (CMMC) promoverá na quarta-feira (29) audiência pública sobre a COP 21 e as possibilidades de negociações em torno de um novo acordo climático global.

Foram convidados para o debate o embaixador José Antonio Marcondes de Carvalho, subsecretário-geral de Meio Ambiente, Energia, Ciência e Tecnologia do Ministério das Relações Exteriores; Tasso Azevedo, coordenador do Observatório do Clima; e um representante do Ministério do Meio Ambiente.

Na Conferência das Partes (COP), são realizados os encontros dos países que assinaram os acordos sobre biodiversidade e mudanças climáticas na Rio 92.

A COP 21 será realizada em Paris no final deste ano com a missão de chegar a um acordo global sobre mudanças climáticas para substituir o Protocolo de Kyoto, de 1997. O acordo deve entrar em vigor em 2020 e a conferência deve adotar um tratado que inclua todos os países.

O Protocolo de Kyoto não foi assinado pelos Estados Unidos, o que desobrigou os países em desenvolvimento de reduzir as emissões de gases de efeito estufa, responsáveis pelo aquecimento global e pelas mudanças climáticas.

A audiência pública começa às 14h30, na sala 13 da Ala Senador Alexandre Costa.

(Agência Senado)

http://www12.senado.leg.br/noticias/materias/2015/04/24/comissao-mista-discutira-posicao-do-brasil-em-torno-de-novo-acordo-do-clima

Mudanças Climáticas – Plano de adaptação sai até julho e terá metas (Observatório do Clima)

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7/4/2015 – 12h18

por Clauido Angelo, do Observatóri do Clima

Izabella Teixeira fala em São Paulo. Foto: MMA

Conservação e recuperação de ecossistemas serão adotadas como medidas para atenuar impactos da mudança climática

A ministra do Meio Ambiente, Izabella Teixeira, prometeu nesta quinta-feira (23/04) que o país terá um plano nacional de adaptação às mudanças climáticas em consulta pública até julho. E afirmou que é “claro” que ele terá metas.

“Você já viu plano sem meta? Não é plano, é carta de intenção”, declarou a ministra a jornalistas, durante o seminário Gestão de Água em Situações de Escassez, encerrado nesta sexta-feira em São Paulo.

Embora não tenha adiantado que metas serão essas, a ministra afirmou que, no caso da água, elas dialogarão com o Plano Nacional de Segurança Hídrica e com o CAR (Cadastro Ambiental Rural), que estabelece os parâmetros para a recuperação de áreas degradadas e desmatadas, como matas ciliares – fundamentais para a manutenção dos recursos hídricos.

“As pessoas degradam as nascentes a 200 quilômetros daqui e acham que não tem consequência”, disse Izabella. “Tem CAR para ser feito, vamos recuperar nascentes, cabeceiras de rio, tem que fazer o que outros países fizeram”, prosseguiu, citando a experiência de Nova York. A megalópole americana evitou uma crise hídrica ao pagar fazendeiros de uma região montanhosa próxima para preservar as matas ciliares em torno dos rios onde a água da cidade é captada.

O Plano Nacional de Adaptação estabelecerá as medidas que o Brasil deverá adotar ao longo dos próximos anos para evitar os piores efeitos das mudanças climáticas. Vários países têm inserido metas para adaptação em suas INDCs (Contribuições Nacionalmente Determinadas Pretendidas), as propostas de combate ao aquecimento global que cada país está fazendo para o acordo de Paris, no fim do ano.

A lógica é que, mesmo que o mundo tenha sucesso em cortar emissões de carbono, muitos efeitos da mudança do clima são inevitáveis e as sociedades devem adaptar-se a eles.

No Brasil, conforme indicam dados do estudo Brasil 2040, que até março vinha sendo conduzido pela Secretaria de Assuntos Estratégicos, esses efeitos incluem redução de áreas agrícolas e de vazão de rios que alimentam algumas das principais hidrelétricas do país, na Amazônia e no Sudeste/Centro-Oeste.

Conduzido pelo Ministério do Meio Ambiente, o PNA (Plano Nacional de Adaptação à Mudança do Clima) deverá propor ações em pelo menos dez grandes áreas: energia, zona costeira, recursos hídricos, desastres naturais, segurança alimentar/agropecuária, ecossistemas, cidades, transporte e logística, indústria e saúde.

O desenho preliminar do plano vinha sendo criticado dentro do próprio governo por não conter metas objetivas – apenas diretrizes gerais para a elaboração de metas de adaptação pelos Estados. O esboço do capítulo de Ecossistemas, por exemplo, fazia uma recapitulação de políticas públicas já existentes e traçava uma série de diretrizes genéricas, como “incluir a perspectiva de adaptação à mudança do clima nos Planos de Prevenção e Controle do Desmatamento e no Plano de Recuperação da Vegetação Nativa”. Ainda não se sabe como ficará o plano final para que ele não seja apenas uma “carta de intenções”, como definiu a ministra do Meio Ambiente.

Resiliência verde

Um dos elementos que deverão integrar o PNA é a chamada adaptação baseada em ecossistemas. Trata-se de uma série de medidas de baixo custo para usar serviços de ecossistemas como escudo contra impactos da mudança do clima.

Um caso clássico dessa modalidade de adaptação é a recuperação de manguezais como forma de proteger zonas costeiras de ressacas, que estão ficando mais fortes devido à elevação do nível do mar.

“É muito mais vantajoso do que construir estruturas de concreto, como quebra-mares”, disse Guilherme Karam, da Fundação Grupo Boticário de Proteção à Natureza. Ele é coautor de um estudo publicado no ano passado pela fundação e pelo Iclei – Governos Locais pela Sustentabilidade que identifica oportunidades de adaptação baseada em ecossistemas para o Brasil.

O estudo mapeou cem experiências dessa modalidade de adaptação no mundo todo, 11 delas no Brasil, e mostrou que é possível adotar ações em ecossistemas em todas as áreas do PNA. Isso é especialmente evidente em cidades, onde o reflorestamento pode ajudar a mitigar enchentes e ilhas de calor urbanas, em desastres naturais e em água e energia – por meio da restauração de áreas de preservação permanente.

No caso da água, aponta Karam, a recuperação de áreas naturais dá mais resultado do que investimentos na chamada “infraestrutura cinza” (obras de engenharia) e a um custo menor. Nem sempre isso é verdade, porém, alerta o pesquisador: há casos na Ásia nos quais se constatou que a infraestrutura cinza dá mais resultado, apesar de custar muito mais, então o ideal é combinar as duas abordagens.

O Ministério do Meio Ambiente decidiu incorporar as recomendações do estudo ao plano nacional. (Observatório do Clima/ #Envolverde)

* Publicado originalmente no site Observatório do Clima.

Experts Warn of “Cataclysmic” Changes as Planetary Temperatures Rise (Truthout)

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Monday, 27 April 2015 00:00 By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report 

Two unprecedentedly high temperatures were recorded in Antarctica, providing an ominous sign of accelerating ACD as one of the readings came in at just over 63 degrees Fahrenheit. (Photo: Iceberg via Shutterstock)

Two unprecedentedly high temperatures were recorded in Antarctica, providing an ominous sign of accelerating climate change as one of the readings came in at just more than 63 degrees Fahrenheit. (Photo: Iceberg via Shutterstock)

Climate Disruption DispatchesThis month’s anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) dispatch begins with the fact that recently released National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data show that this March was, by far, the hottest planetary March ever recorded, and the hottest January to March period on record as well.

We are watching unprecedented melting of glaciers across the planet, increasingly high temperature records and epic-level droughts that are now becoming the new normal: Planetary distress signals are increasing in volume.

One of these took place recently in Antarctica, of all places, where two unprecedentedly high temperatures were recorded, providing an ominous sign of accelerating ACD as one of the readings came in at just over 63 degrees Fahrenheit.

“We’re going to be out of water.”

A fascinating recent report shows that approximately 12 million people living in coastal areas will be displaced during the next 85 years, with areas along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States seeing some of the most dramatic impacts.

In the US, another report shows that the Navajo Nation is literally dying of thirst, with one of the nation’s leaders flatly sounding the alarm by stating, “We’re going to be out of water.”

A study just published in Geophysical Research Lettersbolsters the case that a period of much faster ACD is imminent, if it hasn’t already begun.

On that note, leading climate researchers recently saidthere is a possibility that the world will see a 6-degree Celsius temperature increase by 2100, which would lead to “cataclysmic changes” and “unimaginable consequences for human civilization.”

With these developments in mind, let us take a look at recent developments across the planet since the last dispatch.

Earth

Signs of ACD’s impact across this sector of the planet are once again plentiful, and the fact that the Amazon is suffering is always a very loud alarm buzzer, given that every year the world’s largest rainforest cycles through 18 billion tons of carbon when its 6 million square kilometers of trees breathe in carbon dioxide and then release it back into the atmosphere when they die. This is twice the amount of carbon that fossil fuel burning emits in an entire year. A recent report shows that while the Amazon is continuing to absorb more carbon than it is releasing, a tipping point is coming, and likely soon, as deforestation, drought and fires there continue to remove precious trees at a frightful rate. With 1.5 acres of rainforest lost every single second, somewhere around the world, the situation in the Amazon does not bode well for our future.

In the United States, in Harvard Forest, located 70 miles west of the university’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hemlock trees are dying at an alarming rate. Harvard Forest is a case study, as it is part of a network of 60 forests around the world called the Center for Tropical Forest Science-Forest Global Earth Observatories, where they are being studied for their response to ACD and other anthropogenic issues. Kristina Anderson-Teixeira, an ecologist with the network, said its forests are “being impacted by a number of different global change factors. We do expect more of this, be it pests or pathogens or droughts or heat waves or thawing permafrost.”

Another report from April revealed that Russia has been losing an amount of forest the size of Switzerland (16,600 square miles of tree cover) every year, for three years running.

Without ice in the summer, polar bears will starve and die off.

Terrestrial animals continue to struggle to survive in many areas. It should come as no surprise that in the Arctic, a recent studyshows that the theory that polar bears will be able to adapt to ice-free seas in the summer by eating on land has been debunked. Without ice in the summer, polar bears will starve and die off.

Another study shows that ACD is threatening mountain goats, due to the warming that is occurring even at the higher elevations where the goats live, as the rate of warming there is two to three times faster than the rest of the planet. According to the study, due to the warming, the goats’ future is now uncertain.

In California, sea lion strandings have already reached more than 2,250 for this year alone, which is a record. The worsening phenomenon is being blamed on warming seas that are disrupting the food supply of marine mammals.

Across the United States, hunters are seeing their traditions being changed by ACD. “I could point you to a million different forums online where hunters are complaining about the season and how hunting is terrible,” said one hunter in a recent report. “At the end of the day, it’s changing weather patterns. Winters around here are not as cold as they used to be.”

A March report from a researcher in Rhode Island showed that the growth and molting rates of juvenile lobsters are decreasing “significantly” due to oceans becoming increasingly acidic from ACD. This makes the animals more vulnerable to predations, thus leading to fewer adult lobsters and an overall rapidly declining population.

Air

There have been a few major developments recently in this sector of our analysis.

Interestingly, some of the more commonly used anesthetics are apparently accumulating in the planet’s atmosphere, thus contributing to warming of the climate, according to a report in April. It is a small amount, mind you, but the volume is increasing.

US greenhouse gas pollution increased 2 percent over the previous year in 2013.

Bad news on the mitigation front comes in the form of a study that revealed that ongoing urban sprawl and auto exhaust is hampering cities’ best efforts toward lowering carbon dioxide emissions. If people continue to drive as much as they are, and development continues apace, the push to build more dense housing, better transit systems and more bike lanes in urban centers will be for naught.

Speaking of lack of mitigation, the US Environmental Protection Agency recently announced that US greenhouse gas pollution increased 2 percent over the previous year in 2013.

Drought plagued California gets more bad news in this sector, as recently released data shows that the state continues to have its warmest year ever recorded, with statewide temperatures coming in nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the previous record, which was set in 2014. The state is quite literally baking.

Another study showed that the frozen soil (permafrost) of the planets’ northern polar regions that holds billions of tons of organic carbon is melting and that melting is being sped up by ACD, hence releasing even more carbon into our already carbon dioxide-supersaturated atmosphere.

Lastly in this section, those who believe in technological fixes for our predicament received some bad news in April, which came in the form of a report that shows that any attempts to geoengineer the climate are likely to result in “different” climate disruption, rather than an elimination of the problem. The most popular proposed idea of solar radiation management that would utilize stratospheric sulfate aerosols to dim the sun has been proven to be, well, destructive. Using a variety of climate models, Ken Caldeira from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, has investigated the likely consequences of such geoengineering on agriculture across the globe.

According to a report on the matter:

His research showed that while dimming could rapidly decrease global temperatures, high carbon dioxide levels would be expected to persist, and it is the balance between temperature, carbon dioxide, and sunlight that affects plant growth and agriculture. Exploring the regional effects, he finds that a stratospherically dimmed world would show increased plant productivity in the tropics, but lessened plant growth across the northerly latitudes of America, Europe and Asia. It is easy to see how there might be geopolitical shifts associated with changes in regional food production across the globe. “It’s probably the poor tropics that stand to benefit and the rich north that stands to lose,” said Prof Caldeira.

Hence, given that the results would be detrimental to the “rich north,” which by far and away has pumped more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the “poor tropics,” the results of geoengineering would indeed be karmic.

Water

In the United States, California’s epic drought continues to lead in the water sector of analysis.

For the first time in California’s history, mandatory water use reductions have been imposed on residents after a winter of record-low snowfalls, and hence a record-low snowpack. “People should realize we are in a new era,” Gov. Jerry Brown said at a news conference there in April, standing on a patch of brown and green grass that would normally be thick with snow that time of year. “The idea of your nice little green lawn getting watered every day, those days are past.”

Climate scientists also recently announced, disconcertingly, that California’s record-breaking drought is merely a preview of future ACD-generated megadroughts.

Shortly after Brown announced the mandatory water restrictions for his state, another study was released showing that California will also be facing more extreme heat waves, along with rising seas, caused by increasingly intense impacts from ACD. According to the study, the average number of days with temperatures reaching 95 degrees will double or even triple by the end of this century. Simultaneously, at least $19 billion worth of coastal property will literally disappear as sea levels continue to rise.

Experts also announced in April that in “drought-era” California, “every day” should now be considered “fire season.” NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert said of California, “We are in an incendiary situation.”

California’s state climatologist, Michael Anderson, issued a very stark warning in April when he said the state faces dust bowl-like conditions, as he compared the water crisis in California to the legendary US dustbowl. “You’re looking on numbers that are right on par with what was the Dust Bowl,” he said.

Forty out of the 50 US states will face a water shortage within the next 10 years.

As aforementioned, this year’s dry, warm winter has left the entire western United States snowpack at record-low levels. Given that this is a critical source of fresh surface water for the entire region, this will only exacerbate the already critical water shortages that are plaguing the region.

One ramification of this is exampled by how the once-powerful Rio Grande River has been reduced to a mere trickle still hundreds of miles from its destination at the end of its 1,900-mile journey to the Gulf of Mexico, thanks to the increasing impacts of ACD. Farmers and residents who rely on it for water are in deep trouble.

And it’s not just California and the US Southwest that are dealing with major water shortages. The Government Accountability Office recently released a report showing that 40 out of the 50 US states will face a water shortage within the next 10 years.

Meanwhile, up in Alaska, that state’s iconic Iditarod sled dog race has been reduced to having mushers have their dogs drag their sleds across large swaths of mud that spanned over 100 miles in some areas, due to warmer temperatures there melting snow and ice that used to cover the course. “I love the challenge, being able to overcome anything on the trail,” said four-time winner Martin Buser of the new conditions. “But if this is a new normal, I’m not sure I can sustain it.”

In this writer’s backyard, glaciers are melting away at dramatic rates in Olympic National Park. Pictures tell the story, which was also addressed in detail recently at a talk given at the park by University of Washington research professor Michelle Koutnik, who was part of a team monitoring the park’s Blue Glacier. By way of example, an entire section of the lower Blue Glacier that existed in 1989 was completely gone by 2008, and melt rates are increasing. A sobering “before and after” look at the photographic evidence should not be missed.

A recent study gave another grim report on glaciers, this one focusing on Canada where glaciers in British Columbia and Alberta are projected to shrink by at least 70 percent by the end of this century, and of course ACD was noted as the main driving force behind the change. “Most of that is going to go,” one of the researchers said of Canada’s glaciers. “And most seems to be on its way out.”

A study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that as the Arctic Ocean warms and loses its sea ice cover, phytoplankton populations will explode. This creates another positive feedback loop for ACD, as it further amplifies warming in a region that is already heating up twice as fast as the rest of the globe.

On the other end of the water spectrum, rising seas continue to afflict Venice, where the city is seeing dramatic changes. According to a recent report: “In the 1920s, there were about 400 incidents of acqua alta, or high water, when the right mix of tides and winds drives the liquid streets up into homes and shops in the lowers parts of the city. By the 1990s, there were 2,400 incidents – and new records are set every year.”

Fire

An April report shows that ACD is predicted to bring more fires and less snow to the iconic Yellowstone National Park. These changes will likely fuel catastrophic wildfires, cause declines in mountain snows and threaten the survival of animals and plants, according to the scientists who authored the report. It shows that expected warming over the US West over the next three decades will transform the land in and around Yellowstone from a wetter, mostly forested Rocky Mountain ecosystem into a more open landscape, more akin to the arid US Southwest.

“Ecological Implications of Climate Change on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem,” compiled by more than 20 university and government scientists, said that such dry conditions in that area have not been seen for the last 10,000 years, and extremely destructive wildfires like the one in 1988 that burned thousands of acres of the park are going to become more common, while years without major fires will become rare.

Denial and Reality

The climate disruption deniers have been barking loudly over the last month, which should be expected as irrefutable evidence of ACD continues in an avalanche.

Following Florida’s lead, Wisconsin officially became the next state to censor its employees’ work regarding climate disruption. Wisconsin has banned its employees from working on ACD, after Florida banned the use of the terms “climate change” and “global warming.”

Perhaps this is what played a role in inspiring acclaimed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to proclaim that politicians denying science is “the beginning of the end of an informed democracy.”

Facing a loss of high-profile corporate sponsors, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), now tired of being accused of ACD denial, has threatened actionagainst activist groups that accuse it of denying ACD. This “action” could come in the form of lawsuits.

The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication released very interesting county-by-county maps of the United States, which show the various levels of ACD denial across the country and are worth examining.

Over the last four years, extreme weather events in the US caused 1,286 fatalities and $227 billion in economic losses.

Not to be outdone by fellow Republican ACD-denying presidential candidates, Marco Rubio voluntarily donned the dunce cap by stating that scientists have not determined what percentage of ACD is due to human activities compared to natural climate variability, and added brilliantly, “climate is always changing.”

This year has seen us cross yet another milestone in the Arctic – this one being that sea ice covering the top of the world reached the lowest maximum extent yet observed during the winter. This means, ominously, that in just the last four years Arctic sea ice has seen a new low both for its seasonal winter peak (2015) and for its summer minimum (2012). While most sane people would see this as a gut-wrenching fact to have to process emotionally, Robert Molnar, the CEO of the Sailing the Arctic Race, is busily planning an “extreme yacht race” for the summer and fall of 2017 there. “The more ice that’s being melted, the more free water is there for us to be sailing,” he said.

In stark contrast, US Secretary of State John Kerry is visiting the Arctic amid concerns over the melting ice, and some of the mainstream media, in this case The Washington Post, are running op-eds claiming that ACD deniers are actually now in retreat due to their own outlandish comments.

In a historic move, even oil giant BP’s shareholders voted overwhelmingly to support a resolution that would force the company to disclose some of its ACD-related risks.

Also on the reality front, recently released analysis shows that densely populated Asian islands and countries like Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines are likely to face even more intense climatic events in the future.

Another report, this one titled “An Era of Extreme Weather” by the Center for American Progress, shows that major weather events across the United States in 2014 cost an estimated $19 billion and caused at least 65 human fatalities. The report also shows that over the last four years, extreme weather events in the US caused 1,286 fatalities and $227 billion in economic losses spanning 44 states.

US President Barack Obama formally submitted to the UN a commitment to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by up to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. Critics believe this is far too little, too late, but at least it is a move in the right direction.

In an interesting twist of fate, while many Florida Republican lawmakers are busily denying ACD, other Florida Republicans are busy working to protect their state’s coastal areas from rising seas resulting from advancing ACD.

Lastly in this month’s dispatch, a recently published study shows that acidic oceans helped fuel the largest mass extinction event in the history of the planet, which wiped out approximately 90 percent of all life on earth.

The carbon released that was one of the primary drivers of that extinction event was found to have been released at a similar rate to modern emissions. Dr. Matthew Clarkson, one of the authors of the study, commented: “Scientists have long suspected that an ocean acidification event occurred during the greatest mass extinction of all time, but direct evidence has been lacking until now. This is a worrying finding, considering that we can already see an increase in ocean acidity today that is the result of human carbon emissions.”

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission. 

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Conservative think tank seeks to change Pope Francis’s mind on climate change (The Guardian)

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Heartland Institute wants to lobby Vatican before pope delivers a moral call to climate action this summer

pope francis vatican

Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment and moral duty is expected to be released this summer followed by a meeting with the United Nations. Photograph: Massimo Valicchia/Demotix/Corbis

 in Rome

Friday 24 April 2015 20.43 BSTLast modified on Saturday 25 April 2015 06.58 BST

A US activist group that has received funding from energy companies and the foundation controlled by conservative activist Charles Koch is trying to persuade the Vatican that “there is no global warming crisis” ahead of an environmental statement by Pope Francis this summer that is expected to call for strong action to combat climate change.

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based conservative thinktank that seeks to discredit established science on climate change, said it was sending a team of climate scientists to Rome “to inform Pope Francis of the truth about climate science”.

“Though Pope Francis’s heart is surely in the right place, he would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate,” Joseph Bast, Heartland’s president, said in a statement.

Jim Lakely, a Heartland spokesman, said the thinktank was “working on” securing a meeting with the Vatican. “I think Catholics should examine the evidence for themselves, and understand that the Holy Father is an authority on spiritual matters, not scientific ones,” he said.

A 2013 survey of thousands of peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals found that 97.1% agreed that climate change is caused by human activity.

The lobbying push underlines the sensitivity surrounding Pope Francis’s highly anticipated encyclical on the environment, whose aim will be to frame the climate change issue as a moral imperative.

While it is not yet clear exactly what the encyclical will say, Pope Francis has been an outspoken advocate for action on the issue. In a speech in March, Cardinal Peter Turkson, who has played a key role in drafting the document, said Pope Francis was not attempting a “greening of the church”, but instead would emphasise that “for the Christian, to care for God’s ongoing work of creation is a duty, irrespective of the causes of climate change”.

The encyclical is expected to be released in June or July, and Pope Francis is expected to use a planned address before the United Nations in September to discuss the statement.

Any push by the Vatican on climate change could prove politically challenging for conservative Catholic lawmakers in the US who have denied the veracity of climate change science and fought against regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions, including the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner.

The American Petroleum Institute, the biggest lobby group representing oil companies in Washington, declined to respond directly to questions from the Guardian about whether it was lobbying the Vatican on the issue.

But – in a sign of how energy groups and those who oppose greenhouse gas regulations are framing their argument to the Vatican – it said that “fossil fuels are a a vital tool for lifting people out of poverty around the world, which is something we’re committed to”.

Heartland has also targeted its argument to appeal to the pope’s views on poverty. It said in a press release that the world’s poor would “suffer horribly if reliable energy – the engine of prosperity and a better life – is made more expensive and less reliable by the decree of global planners”.

The group’s trip to Rome is designed to coincide with a workshop hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Tuesday called Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity, which will feature speeches by Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general, and Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs.

The Vatican declined to comment.

The Heartland Institute says it is a non-profit organisation that seeks to promote “free-market solutions” to social and economic problems. It does not disclose its donors, but says on its website that it has received a single donation of $25,000 in 2012 from the Charles G Koch Foundation, which was for the group’s work on health care policy. Charles Koch is the billionaire co-owner of Koch Industries, an oil refining and chemicals group, and is a major donor to Republicans causes and politicians.

Heartland said contributions from oil and tobacco groups have never amounted to more than 5% of its income.

Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and US churches

University offering free online course to demolish climate denial (The Guardian)

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The University of Queensland’s course examines the science of climate science denial

David Attenborough signs his new book 'Life in the Air' at the Natural Hisory Museum in London. Attenborough is among the big names interviewed in the University of Queensland MOOC.

David Attenborough signs his new book ‘Life in the Air’ at the Natural Hisory Museum in London. Attenborough is among the big names interviewed in Denial101x. Photograph: Sarah Lee/Sarah Lee

Tuesday 21 April 2015 14.59 BSTLast modified on Tuesday 21 April 2015 15.46 BST

Starting 28 April, 2015, the University of Queensland is offering a free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) aimed at “Making Sense of Climate Science Denial”.

 Denial101x summary.

The course coordinator is John Cook, University of Queensland Global Change Institute climate communication fellow, and founder of the climate science myth debunking website Skeptical Science. Cook’s research has primarily focused on the psychology of climate science denial. As he explains,

97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming; however, less than half of Australians are aware of humanity’s role in climate change, while half of the US Senate has voted that humans aren’t causing global warming. This free course explains why there is such a huge gap between the scientific community and the public. Our course looks at what’s driving climate science denial and the most common myths about climate change. 

The course includes climate science and myth debunking lectures by the international team of volunteer scientific contributors to Skeptical Science, including myself, and interviews with many of the world’s leading climate science and psychology experts. Making Sense of Climate Science Denial is a seven-week program featuring interviews with 75 scientific experts, including Sir David Attenborough, Katharine Hayhoe, Richard Alley, Michael Mann, and Naomi Oreskes.

The course incorporates lessons in both climate science and psychology to explain the most common climate myths and to detail how to respond to them. Research has shown that myth debunking is most effective when people understand why the myth originated in the first place. For example, cherry picking (focusing on a small bit of convenient data and ignoring the rest) is one of the most common fallacies behind climate science myths.

The lectures in the University of Queensland MOOC not only explain the science, but also the fallacies underpinning each myth. This is a unique and important feature to this course, because understanding their origins effectively acts to inoculate people against myths.

Thousands of students from more than 130 countries have already enrolled in Making Sense of Climate Science Denial. The goal is for the students to come out of the course with a stronger understanding of climate science, myth debunking, and the psychology of science denial that’s become so pervasive and dangerous in today’s world.

Extending climate predictability beyond El Niño (Science Daily)

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Date: April 21, 2015

Source: University of Hawaii – SOEST

Summary: Tropical Pacific climate variations and their global weather impacts may be predicted much further in advance than previously thought, according to research by an international team of climate scientists. The source of this predictability lies in the tight interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere and among the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. Such long-term tropical climate forecasts are useful to the public and policy makers, researchers say.

This image shows inter-basin coupling as a cause of multi-year tropical Pacific climate predictability: Impact of Atlantic warming on global atmospheric Walker Circulation (arrows). Rising air over the Atlantic subsides over the equatorial Pacific, causing central Pacific sea surface cooling, which in turn reinforces the large-scale wind anomalies. Credit: Yoshimitsu Chikamoto

Tropical Pacific climate variations and their global weather impacts may be predicted much further in advance than previously thought, according to research by an international team of climate scientists from the USA, Australia, and Japan. The source of this predictability lies in the tight interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere and among the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. Such long-term tropical climate forecasts are useful to the public and policy makers.

At present computer simulations can predict the occurrence of an El Niño event at best three seasons in advance. Climate modeling centers worldwide generate and disseminate these forecasts on an operational basis. Scientists have assumed that the skill and reliability of such tropical climate forecasts drop rapidly for lead times longer than one year.

The new findings of predictable climate variations up to three years in advance are based on a series of hindcast computer modeling experiments, which included observed ocean temperature and salinity data. The results are presented in the April 21, 2015, online issue of Nature Communications.

“We found that, even three to four years after starting the prediction, the model was still tracking the observations well,” says Yoshimitsu Chikamoto at the University of Hawaii at Manoa International Pacific Research Center and lead author of the study. “This implies that central Pacific climate conditions can be predicted over several years ahead.”

“The mechanism is simple,” states co-author Shang-Ping Xie from the University of California San Diego. “Warmer water in the Atlantic heats up the atmosphere. Rising air and increased precipitation drive a large atmospheric circulation cell, which then sinks over the Central Pacific. The relatively dry air feeds surface winds back into the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. These winds cool the Central Pacific leading to conditions, which are similar to a La Niña Modoki event. The central Pacific cooling then strengthens the global atmospheric circulation anomalies.”

“Our results present a paradigm shift,” explains co-author Axel Timmermann, climate scientist and professor at the University of Hawaii. “Whereas the Pacific was previously considered the main driver of tropical climate variability and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean its slaves, our results document a much more active role for the Atlantic Ocean in determining conditions in the other two ocean basins. The coupling between the oceans is established by a massive reorganization of the atmospheric circulation.”

The impacts of the findings are wide-ranging. “Central Pacific temperature changes have a remote effect on rainfall in California and Australia. Seeing the Atlantic as an important contributor to these rainfall shifts, which happen as far away as Australia, came to us as a great surprise. It highlights the fact that on multi-year timescales we have to view climate variability in a global perspective, rather than through a basin-wide lens,” says Jing-Jia Luo, co-author of the study and climate scientist at the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia.

“Our study fills the gap between the well-established seasonal predictions and internationally ongoing decadal forecasting efforts. We anticipate that the main results will soon be corroborated by other climate computer models,” concludes co-author Masahide Kimoto from the University of Tokyo, Japan.

Journal Reference:

  1. Yoshimitsu Chikamoto, Axel Timmermann, Jing-Jia Luo, Takashi Mochizuki, Masahide Kimoto, Masahiro Watanabe, Masayoshi Ishii, Shang-Ping Xie, Fei-Fei Jin. Skilful multi-year predictions of tropical trans-basin climate variability. Nature Communications, 2015; 6: 6869 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7869

Media files on the Anthropocene

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Confronting the ‘Anthropocene’ (Dot Earth, New York Times)

By 

MAY 11, 2011 9:39 AM 

London from orbit

NASA Donald R. Pettit, an astronaut, took this photograph of London while living in the International Space Station.

LONDON — I’m participating in a one-day meeting at the Geological Society of London exploring the evidence for, and meaning of, the Anthropocene. This is the proposed epoch of Earth history that, proponents say, has begun with the rise of the human species as a globally potent biogeophysical force, capable of leaving a durable imprint in the geological record.

This recent TEDx video presentation by Will Steffen, the executive director of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute, lays out the basic idea:

There’s more on the basic concept in National Geographic and from the BBC. Paul Crutzen, the Nobel laureate in chemistry who, with others, proposed the term in 2000, and Christian Schwägerl, the author of “The Age of Man” (German), described the value of this new framing for current Earth history in January in Yale Environment 360:

Students in school are still taught that we are living in the Holocence, an era that began roughly 12,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. But teaching students that we are living in the Anthropocene, the Age of Men, could be of great help. Rather than representing yet another sign of human hubris, this name change would stress the enormity of humanity’s responsibility as stewards of the Earth. It would highlight the immense power of our intellect and our creativity, and the opportunities they offer for shaping the future. [Read the rest.]

I’m attending because of a quirky role I played almost 20 years ago in laying the groundwork for this concept of humans as a geological force. A new paper from Steffen and three coauthors reviewing the conceptual and historic basis for the Anthropocene includes an appropriately amusing description of my role:

Biologist Eugene F. Stoermer wrote: ‘I began using the term “anthropocene” in the 1980s, but never formalized it until Paul [Crutzen] contacted me’. About this time other authors were exploring the concept of the Anthropocene, although not using the term. More curiously, a popular book about Global Warming, published in 1992 by Andrew C. Revkin, contained the following prophetic words: ‘Perhaps earth scientists of the future will name this new post-Holocene period for its causative element—for us. We are entering an age that might someday be referred to as, say, the Anthrocene [sic]. After all, it is a geological age of our own making’. Perhaps many readers ignored the minor linguistic difference and have read the new term as Anthro(po)cene!

If you’ve been tracking my work for a while, you’re aware of my focus on the extraordinary nature of this moment in both Earth and human history. As far as science can tell, there’s never, until now, been a point when a species became a planetary powerhouse and also became aware of that situation.

As I first wrote in 1992, cyanobacteria are credited with oxygenating the atmosphere some 2 billion years ago. That was clearly a more profound influence on a central component of the planetary system than humans raising the concentration of carbon dioxide 40 percent since the start of the industrial revolution. But, as far as we know, cyanobacteria (let alone any other life form from that period) were neither bemoaning nor celebrating that achievement.

It was easier to be in a teen-style resource binge before science began to delineate an edge to our petri dish.

We no longer have the luxury of ignorance.

We’re essentially in a race between our potency, our awareness of the expressed and potential ramifications of our actions and our growing awareness of the deeply embedded perceptual and behavioral traits that shape how we do, or don’t, address certain kinds of risks. (Explore “Boombustology” and “Disasters by Design” to be reminded how this habit is not restricted to environmental risks.)

This meeting in London is two-pronged. It is in part focused on deepening basic inquiry into stratigraphy and other branches of earth science and clarifying how this human era could qualify as a formal chapter in Earth’s physical biography. As Erle C. Ellis, an ecologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, put it in his talk, it’s unclear for the moment whether humanity’s impact will be long enough to represent an epoch, or will more resemble “an event.” Ellis’s presentation was a mesmerizing tour of the planet’s profoundly humanized ecosystems, which he said would be better described as “anthromes” than “biomes.”

Ellis said it was important to approach this reality not as a woeful situation, but an opportunity to foster a new appreciation of the lack of separation of people and their planet and a bright prospect for enriching that relationship. In this his views resonate powerfully with those of Rene Dubos, someone I’ll be writing about here again soon.

Through the talks by Ellis and others, it was clear that the scientific effort to define a new geological epoch, while important, paled beside the broader significance of this juncture in human history.

In my opening comments at the meeting, I stressed the need to expand the discussion from the physical and environmental sciences into disciplines ranging from sociology to history, philosophy to the arts.

I noted that while the “great acceleration” described by Steffen and others is already well under way, it’s entirely possible for humans to design their future, at least in a soft way, boosting odds that the geological record will have two phases — perhaps a “lesser” and “greater” Anthropocene, as someone in the audience for my recent talk with Brad Allenby at Arizona State University put it.

I also noted that the term “Anthropocene,” like phrases such as “global warming,” is sufficiently vague to guarantee it will be interpreted in profoundly different ways by people with different world views. (As I explained, this is as true for Nobel laureates in physics as it is for the rest of us.)

Some will see this period as a “shame on us” moment. Others will deride this effort as a hubristic overstatement of human powers. Some will argue for the importance of living smaller and leaving no scars. Others will revel in human dominion as a normal and natural part of our journey as a species.

A useful trait will be to get comfortable with that diversity.

Before the day is done I also plan on pushing Randy Olson’s notion of moving beyond the “nerd loop” and making sure this conversation spills across all disciplinary and cultural boundaries from the get-go.

There’s much more to explore of course, and I’ll post updates as time allows. You might track the meeting hash tag, #anthrop11, on Twitter.

*   *   *

8/16/2014 @ 1:05PM – James Conca

The Anthropocene Part 1: Tracking Human-Induced Catastrophe On A Planetary Scale (Forbes)

For almost 30 years, we geologists have been having a debate about what Geologic Epoch we find ourselves in right now. It is presently called the Holocene, but some want to add another epoch and call it the Anthropocene.

Anthropocene combines the Greek words for humanand recent time period, to denote the period of time since human activity went global and we became an important geologic process in our own right (In These Times; see also UN video http://vimeo.com/39048998).

In other words, what should we call this period of time when we started trashing the planet? And when did it begin?

You might know some of the big Geologic Ages, Epochs, Periods, Eras and Eons. The dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago in the Maastrichtian Age in the Late Epoch of the Cretaceous Period in the Mesozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon.

The sum of Earth’s history, divided up into these different sections, is called the Geologic Time Scale and geologists have been defining and refining it for about 150 years (Geologic Society of America). The latest deliberation concerns the epoch from the present stretching back to about 12,000 years.  The term Anthropocene was popularized fourteen years ago by atmospheric scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, to more decisively focus discussion on human global effects to the whole planet.

The Geologic Time Scale - the sectioning up of 4.6 billion years of Earth’s history into manageable time periods bounded by significant geological events. The present debate is - do we want to call the present epoch we are in the Anthropocene to reflect humanity’s global effect on the planet? Click on the link in the text for the full image. Source: The Geological Society of America

To Judith Wright, a chemostratigrapher, this is not just an academic exercise for the Ivory Tower (Ocean Redox Variations Through Time). There are obvious political and social implications, not the least being the role of human activities in climate change, wholesale extinctions of species unlike anytime in history, and the accelerating environmental destruction on a planetary scale that could spell our own doom.

What we call something matters. It sets the scale of importance and pushes the discussion in the direction that we need these debates to go.

The scientific decision on whether to incorporate the term Anthropocene into the geologic lexicon falls to a carefully deliberative group called the International Commission on Stratigraphy, particularly its Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy which has formed an Anthropocene Working Group. There is a rumor they may arrive at a decision after only several years of debate, making this deliberation downright hasty.

This discussion concerns not just what to name it, but when it started. There is always some defining characteristic to one of these epochs or periods. Often a huge extinction event marks the end of an epoch, like the end of the Triassic Period 200 million years ago when half of all life perished. Or the appearance of something new in evolution, like the beginning of the Cambrian Period when organisms learned how to grow shells, bones, teeth and other hard parts from the increased dissolved minerals in seawater, providing huge survival advantages.

Sometimes there is a chemical marker, or layer, that is unique to that time or process, like the iridium layer that is one of the singular markers of the huge meteorite impact that finally stressed the dinosaurs’ environment to the point of extinction.

But why do stratigraphers get to decide this question? In the geologic sciences, stratigraphy is the study of rock layers on the Earth – how they relate to each other and to relative and absolute time, how they got there, and what they tell us about Earth history. Stratigraphy can be traced to the beginnings of modern geology in the 17th century with Nicholas Steno and his three stratigraphic rules:

–   the law of superposition (younger rocks lay on top of older ones)

–   the principle of original horizontality (all sedimentary and volcanic layers are originally laid down horizontally, or normal to the Earth’s gravitational field)

–   the principle of lateral continuity (sedimentary layers generally continue for a long distance as most were laid down in the ocean, and an abrupt edge indicates that something happened to break it off, like a fault or surface erosion).

These were profound observations and fundamentally changed how we understood time and geologic processes like flooding and earthquakes. In fact, the unique perspective that geology brings to humans is the understanding of time at all levels.

According to Patricia Corcoran and co-workers (GSA), material being laid down across the Earth in our present time is the most bizarre mix of chemicals and materials the Earth has ever seen, some compounds of which have never occurred in nature. Maybe compounds that could not have been produced naturally would make a good marker for the Anthropocene.

But defining a geologic time period requires a sufficiently large, clear and distinctive set of geologic characteristics to be useful as a global geologic boundary and that will also survive throughout geologic time.

We presently find ourselves in the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period in the Cenozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon, defined as starting from the end of the last glacial retreat, an obvious event that led to our present global range in climate and other characteristics we define as the Earth today. The problem is, humans have dominated this entire epoch in many ways, from the dawn of agriculture, to smelting of iron and lead, burning of forests and finally the effects of the industrial revolution.

As in all environmental issues, it’s the number of people on Earth that’s the problem. For over 100,000 years, the global human population was steady at about 10 million. Then civilization appeared, fueled by the many significant developments that humans had begun to apply en masse including agriculture, domesticated animals, tools, serious engineering, and various uses of fire, fibers and the wheel.

Our population began to increase about 2000 years ago, at the beginning of the Common Era, rising to 300 million during the Middle Ages and to a billion at the beginning of the Industrial Age. Then 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1999 and 7 billion in 2011. This exponential rise is textbook for a bacterial colony in a petri dish, right before it dies from outpacing its food sources and generating too much waste. It’s also eerily analogous for people on the petri dish of Earth.

Humans now comprise the largest mass of vertebrate matter on land on the entire Earth. The rest is almost all our food and friends, mainly the animals we domesticated over the last 50,000 years, plus a bunch of xenobiotics we’ve transported far from their habitats (Cornell University). Only a small percentage of all vertebrate mass on land is wild or natural (In These Times).

Let that sink in for a minute. Most of what people see in National Geographic or on the Discovery Channel or in movies about animals, IS ALMOST ALL GONE. Humans have dammed a third of the world’s rivers, have covered, destroyed or altered almost half of the world’s land surface. We use up most of the fresh water faster than it can be replenished. And we extinct about 30,000 species every year.

Whether from deforestation, agriculture, urbanization, roads, mining activities, aquatic farming, moving xenobiotic species around the world that destroy native species, dumping huge amounts of waste on land, in the ocean and in the atmosphere, and all other human activities, we have decimated the natural environment without thinking about what effect it has on global ecosystems and what it takes for our own species to survive.

There is a point where humans, our pets, our food animals and our food crops cannot survive without some aspects of a wild nature. Much of our crops need pollinators. The oxygen on this planet comes mainly from organisms in the top 300 feet of the ocean. Biodiversity is not just an environmental catch-phrase, it’s a necessity for survival.

So when did the Anthropocene begin?

Was it when agriculture began, when we started burning forests to clear land? Was it during the Iron Age when we clear-cut the northern forests to smelt iron ore?

Was it the advent of civilization, particularly the rise in agriculture and mining activities around the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans, signified by a rise in environmental Pb levels (Shotyk et al, 1998) that continued until just recently?

Was it the 19th century when our population passed a billion and we began burning fossil fuels that has made carbon itself a global marker? Was it the 20thcentury when humans passed plate tectonics as the primary mechanism for moving rock and dirt on this planet?

Access to huge amounts of chemical energy trapped in fossil fuels allowed human populations to explode and allowed human effects to really go global. This is why most researchers point to the mid-19th century as the obvious time to start the Anthropocene.

One popular idea for the start of the Anthropocene is the beginning of the atomic age. Above-ground nuclear tests spread unique radionuclides like Pu around the world, elements that have not been seen in our solar nebula for six billion years, but now show up in surface sediments and ice cores, albeit in minute concentrations.

Crutzen recently gave his support for this point in time. However, the atomic age is just another aspect of the modern age of humans not associated with a particular change in a global characteristic. It cannot be seen in the field and marks no special geologic event, and would be more of a political or sociological marker than a geological one.

Perhaps we should wait until the end of this century when the worst effects will be upon us and the world will barely be recognizable to anyone living today. We might be able to just point to the time “when there used to be forests.”

In the end, this debate might be shear hubris since when we are gone, future geologists, of whatever species, will decide for themselves where they want to place the beginning of this particular catastrophe.

So…what’s your vote for when we start the Anthropocene?

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2/29/2012 @ 11:55PM 487 views – Jayne Jung

On The Anthropocene Age (Forbes)

Original caption from NASA: "S103-E-5037 ...

Image via Wikipedia

The term, the Anthropocene Age, is now common. It represents the time since the early 1800s when man began to have an impact on the Earth’s climate. There is still some debate about its use though. Scientists have traditionally called the current period the Holocene Age, meaning entirely new. The Holocene Age started around 10,000 BC, after the last glacial period when there was significant glacier movement.

From the German newspaper Spiegel Online, interview with British geologist Jan Zalasiewicz:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The idea of mankind as the owner of Earth — is that not disconcerting?

Zalasiewicz: While we now may be said to “own” the planet, that is not the same as controlling it. Our global experiment with CO2 is something that virtually every government would like to see brought under control, and yet collectively we are, at present, unable to do so. That seems to call for feelings of something other than hubris.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you see more to Anthropocene than just a geological term? Is it a new way of thinking about mankind’s role on Earth?

Zalasiewicz: That is almost certainly part of the attraction of the term for the wider public. The term does encapsulate and integrate a wide range of phenomena that are often considered separately. It also provides a sense of the scale and significance of anthropogenic global change. It emphasizes the importance of the Earth’s long geological history as a context within which to better understand what is happening today.

Interview conducted by Christian Schwägerl

From the New York Times‘ editorial “The Anthropocene”:

Other species are embedded in the fossil record of the epochs they belong to. Some species, like ammonites and brachiopods, even serve as guides — or index fossils — to the age of the rocks they’re embedded in. But we are the only species to have defined a geological period by our activity — something usually performed by major glaciations, mass extinction and the colossal impact of objects from outer space, like the one that defines the upper boundary of the Cretaceous.

Humans were inevitably going to be part of the fossil record. But the true meaning of the Anthropocene is that we have affected nearly every aspect of our environment — from a warming atmosphere to the bottom of an acidifying ocean.

From Yale’s website “The Anthropocene Debate: Marking Humanity’s Impact” by Elizabeth Kobert:

One argument against the idea that a new human-dominated epoch has recently begun is that humans have been changing the planet for a long time already, indeed practically since the start of the Holocene. People have been farming for 8,000 or 9,000 years, and some scientists — most notably William Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia — have proposed that this development already represents an impact on a geological scale. Alternatively, it could be argued that the Anthropocene has not yet arrived because human impacts on the planet are destined to be even greater 50 or a hundred years from now.

“We’re still now debating whether we’ve actually got to the event horizon, because potentially what’s going to happen in the 21st century could be even more significant,” observed Mark Williams, a member of the Anthropocene Working Group who is also a geologist at the University of Leicester.

I personally do not want to know what that “event horizon” is.

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APRIL 14, 2014

The Dawning of the Age of Anthropocene (In These Times)

By altering the earth, have humans ushered in a new epoch?

BY JESSICA STITES

By inviting awe rather than—or along with—terror, the Anthropocene may offer a way to grapple with climate change rather than deny it.

Scientists have been clanging the alarm about human-caused climate change, trying to bring around the 33 percent of Americans who don’t believe the earth is warming and the 18 percent of believers in global warming who think the process is “natural.” But as climate scientists race against time to convince the resisters, another branch of science, geology, is taking the tortoise approach. For more than a decade, geologists have been debating whether to officially declare the existence of a new epoch, the “Anthropocene,”to acknowledge that humans are radically reshaping the earth’s surface. Some geologists see the Anthropocene model as a way to widen the lens on human impact on the earth and cut through both the alarmism and the resistance to spur concrete policy solutions.

Geologists divide the earth’s 4.5 billion-year history into eons, which are subdivided into eras, periods and epochs. Each division is marked by a discernable change in the earth’s strata, such as a new type of fossil representing a major evolutionary shift. On this global scale, humans are relative infants, just 200,000 years old. Civilization has sprung up only during the most recent epoch, the relatively warm interglacial Holocene, spanning the past 11,700 years.

But the Holocene’s days may be numbered. In 2000, the late biologist Eugene F. Stoermer and Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen made a radical proposal in the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme newsletter: that the Industrial Revolution’s explosion of carbon emissions had ushered in a new epoch, the Anthropocene, marked by human impact. In 2009, the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy assembled an Anthropocene Working Group, which in 2016 will issue a recommendation on whether to formally adopt the term.

For stratigraphers, this is “breakneck speed,” says University of Leicester paleobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz, the head of the working group. The geological time scale is as fundamental to the discipline as the periodic table is to chemistry. The last official change, when the Ediacaran Period supplanted the Vendian in 2004, came after 20 years of debate and shook up a scale that had been static for 120 years.

Whether or not the term is formalized, Zalasiewicz believes in the Anthropocene’s potential to alter perception, for geologists and non-geologists alike. “ ‘Anthropocene’ places our environmental situation in a different perspective,” he says. “You look at it sideways, as it were.”

Certainly, you look at it from a broader perspective. Zooming out to an aeonic scale is a sober way to assess the significance of climate change. Overall, human emissions have driven up global temperatures about 0.85 degrees Celsius since the 19th century, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Deniers are fond of noting that Earth’s current temperatures are not the highest they’ve been, and that the earth cyclically warms and cools. That’s true. There have been several “hyperthermal” events when carbon dioxide has been released by the ton from the ground or the ocean, and the earth’s temperature has spiked. However, as Zalasiewicz and colleague Mark Williams note in a recent paper in the Italian journal Rendiconti Lincei, carbon is being released today more than 10 times faster than during any of these events. And when the other hyperthermal events began, the earth was already relatively warm, without today’s ice-capped poles that threaten to melt and pump up sea levels. Already, warming has eroded Arctic sea ice and altered the territory of climate-sensitive species—effects potentially stark enough by themselves to declare an Anthropocene.

But even if we set aside climate change, there are still plenty of arguments for an Anthropocene, says Zalasiewicz. Take mineral traces: He calculates that humans have purified a half-billion tons of aluminum, enough to cover the United States in tinfoil. We’ve also made never-before-seen alloys, like the boron carbide used in bullet-proof vests and the tungsten carbide that forms the balls in ballpoint pens. And then there are plastics—more than 250 million tons are now produced annually. Zalasiewicz and his colleagues term these various human-made objects “technofossils.”

Technofossils aren’t the only things that humans scatter; we’ve also spread germs, seaweed, strawberries, sparrows, rats, jicama, cholera … the list goes on. You might see us as bees pollinating the earth or, less flatteringly, dung beetles scuttling our shit around. Today, according to a 1999 Cornell study, 98 percent of U.S. food—both animal-and plant-derived—is non-native.

Then there’s the population explosion. Humans now make up nearly one-fourth of total land vertebrate biomass, and most of the rest is our food animals, with wild animals—the lions, tigers and bears—making up a mere 3 percent. Those proliferating people suck up resources: According to calculations by Stanford geology PhD student Miles Traer, humans use the equivalent of 13 barrels of oil per person every year, and the United States consumes 345 billion gallons of fresh water a day, enough to drain all of Lake Michigan every 10 years.

In the face of all this, few geologists deny that stratigraphers a billion years from now (either human or alien, depending on your level of optimism) will see our current period as a major shift in the geological record. So the main question facing the Anthropocene Working Group is when the Anthropocene began, or in geological parlance, where to plant “the golden spike.” Four possibilities are under consideration.

One camp favors the 1800s, when megacities began to emerge and form unique strata of compressed rubble and trash heaps. London was the first, with a population of 3 million in 1850. With megacities came industrialization and a sudden escalation in CO2 emissions that began to push up global temperatures.

A second group, including many archeologists, argues for an earlier date. University of Virginia paleoclimatology professor William F. Ruddiman calculates that the first Agricultural Revolution, which began some 12,000 years ago, caused greater climate effects than have yet to be seen from the Industrial Revolution. Due to the widespread preindustrial use of fire to clear forests, Ruddiman believes that emissions of greenhouse gases, coupled with the loss of forests’ cooling effect, caused the earth’s temperature to be 1.3 to 1.4 degrees Celsius higher than if humans had never existed, warding off an overdue Ice Age.

However, where to plant the golden spike in this model isn’t entirely clear, since the changes happened over thousands of years. One option would be the mass extinction of large animals in the Americas some 12,500 years ago, believed to be caused by humans. In that case, the Anthropocene would supplant the Holocene.

A third school believes the Anthropocene should be dated to the mid-20th century, when the “Great Acceleration” began and population, urbanization, globalization and CO2 emissions took off. The past 60-odd years have seen a doubling of the human population and the release of three-quarters of all human-caused CO2 emissions. Zalasiewicz favors this hypothesis because of the sharpness of the acceleration and the synchronicity of the changes. The automobile, for instance, proliferated worldwide in less than a century, the blink of a geologic eye. This time period contains a dramatic option for the “golden spike”: the first A-bomb tests of the 1940s, which left radionuclidic traces across the earth that are readily detectable in ice core samples pulled from the poles. Astrobiologist David Grinspoon, a proponent of the nuclear-testing golden spike, writes, “The symbolism is so potent—the moment we grasped that terrible Promethean fire that, uncontrolled, could consume the world.”

The fourth and final camp is made up of the “not yets,” who point out that everything is still accelerating—population, technofossil production, CO2 emissions—with no reason to believe things will stabilize and some reason to expect dramatic upheavals. Many geologists predict that the next two centuries will bring a mass extinction event of a magnitude seen only five times before (e.g., the dinosaur die-off ). A number of drastic changes triggered by climate change may lie in store, according to an IPCC report released March 31—not only extinctions, but also food and water shortages, irreversible loss of coral reefs and Arctic ice, and “abrupt or drastic changes” like Greenland melting or the Amazon rainforest drying.

It’s here that the conversation veers from the scientific into the panicked, which does not sit well with Mike Osborne, a Stanford Ph.D student in earth sciences and the creator of the “Generation Anthropocene” podcast. More comfortable with data and description than prediction, Osborne eschews apocalyptic thinking, and he doesn’t like the vitriol and politicization of the climate-change debate.

But of course, the issue is political, because it’s inseparable from human choices. A forthcoming peer-reviewed study funded by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center warns of the potential for “irreversible” collapse of civilization in the next few decades and stresses that the key factors are both environmental and social. The study says that the enormous consumption of resources is dangerous specifically because it is paired with “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor]”—noting that these two features were common to the toppling of numerous empires, from Han to Roman, over the last 5,000 years.

The issue is also emotional. One side calls the other “alarmist” and “hysterical,” which may be code for “I can’t handle hearing this.” Even for believers, there seems to be a gap between apprehending the problem and believing in a solution. Pew found that 62 percent of Americans understand that climate change is happening and 44 percent believe it’s human-caused, but when Pew asked Americans in another survey what our government’s top priority should be, climate change ranked 19th of 20 issues, just above global trade.

Osborne says he “hesitate[s] to be overly optimistic or pessimistic,” even though, with his first child just born, the earth’s future weighs on his mind. “The Anthropocene’s great utility for me in terms of imagination,” he says, “is that at its best, it comes with a sense of awe: Holy cow, the world is freaking huge and amazing and beautiful and scary.”

By inviting awe rather than—or along with—terror, the Anthropocene may offer a way to grapple with climate change rather than deny it.“The pace of change seems to be ever accelerating, but so does the response. I am loathe to underestimate human ingenuity,” says Osborne. Zalasiewicz and Osborne both think that certain effects of the Anthropocene, like warming and biodiversity loss, warrant environmentalist solutions, such as measures to curb CO2 emissions, and wildlife preserves on both land and sea.

Whatever the working group proposes in 2016—which must then be affirmed by three higher bodies—Zalasiewicz believes the concept of the Anthropocene is here to stay. “If it wasn’t useful, if it was a catchphrase, it would have quite quickly fallen by the wayside,” he says. “It packages up a whole range of different isolated phenomena—ocean acidification, landscape change, biodiversity loss—and integrates them into a common signal or trend or pattern.”

Perhaps the data-driven, methodical approach of geology is what this debate needs. To Osborne, the Anthropocene is exciting because it forces us to look closely at what’s really happening and challenges our tendency to think in a nature/human divide. In the Anthropocene model, the earth’s workings and fate are intertwined with our own. Indeed, science theorist Bruno Latour goes so far as to say that the Anthropocene could mark “the final rejection of the separation between Nature and Human that has paralyzed science and politics since the dawn of modernism.”

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Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’? (The Guardian)

Natural and social scientists develop new model of how ‘perfect storm’ of crises could unravel global system

This NASA Earth Observatory released on

This Nasa Earth Observatory image shows a storm system circling around an area of extreme low pressure in 2010, which many scientists attribute to climate change. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Friday 14 March 2014 18.28 GMTLast modified on Tuesday 3 June 2014 08.41 BST

A new study partly-sponsored by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of ‘collapse’ are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.” Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to “precipitous collapse – often lasting centuries – have been quite common.”

The independent research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary ‘Human And Nature DYnamical’ (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The HANDY model was created using a minor Nasa grant, but the study based on it was conducted independently. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.

It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:

“The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.”

By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.

These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity”; and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor]” These social phenomena have played “a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse,” in all such cases over “the last five thousand years.”

Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with “Elites” based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:

“… accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels.”

The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency:

“Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use.”

Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from “increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput,” despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period.

Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharrei and his colleagues conclude that under conditions “closely reflecting the reality of the world today… we find that collapse is difficult to avoid.” In the first of these scenarios, civilisation:

“…. appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature.”

Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that “with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites.”

In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most “detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners”, allowing them to “continue ‘business as usual’ despite the impending catastrophe.” The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how “historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases).”

Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that:

“While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory ‘so far’ in support of doing nothing.”

However, the scientists point out that the worst-case scenarios are by no means inevitable, and suggest that appropriate policy and structural changes could avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a more stable civilisation.

The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth:

“Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion.”

The NASA-funded HANDY model offers a highly credible wake-up call to governments, corporations and business – and consumers – to recognise that ‘business as usual’ cannot be sustained, and that policy and structural changes are required immediately.

Although the study based on HANDY is largely theoretical – a ‘thought-experiment’ – a number of other more empirically-focused studies – by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for instance – have warned that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a ‘perfect storm’ within about fifteen years. But these ‘business as usual’ forecasts could be very conservative.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

  • This article was amended on 26 March 2014 to reflect the nature of the study and Nasa’s relationship to it more clearly.

Imagining the Anthropocene (AEON)

Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

The Anthropocene idea has been embraced by Earth scientists and English professors alike. But how useful is it?

Jedediah Purdy is Professor of Law at Duke University in North Carolina. His forthcoming book is After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene.

Edited by Ross Andersen

Officially, for the past 11,700 years we have been living in the Holocene epoch. From the Greek for ‘totally new’, the Holocene is an eyeblink in geological time. In its nearly 12,000 years, plate tectonics has driven the continents a little more than half a mile: a reasonably fit person could cover the scale of planetary change in a brisk eight-minute walk. It has been a warm time, when temperature has mattered as much as tectonics. Sea levels rose 115 feet from ice melt, and northern landscapes rose almost 600 feet, as they shrugged off the weight of their glaciers.

But the real news in the Holocene has been people. Estimates put the global human population between 1 million and 10 million at the start of the Holocene, and keep it in that range until after the agricultural revolution, some 5,000 years ago. Since then, we have made the world our anthill: the geological layers we are now laying down on the Earth’s surface are marked by our chemicals and industrial waste, the pollens of our crops, and the absence of the many species we have driven to extinction. Rising sea levels are now our doing. As a driver of global change, humanity has outstripped geology.

This is why, from the earth sciences to English departments, there’s a veritable academic stampede to declare that we live in a new era, the Anthropocene – the age of humans. Coined by the ecologist Eugene Stoermer in the 1980s and brought to public attention in 2000 by the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen, the term remains officially under consideration at the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London.

The lack of an official decision has set up the Anthropocene as a Rorschach blot for discerning what commentators think is the epochal change in the human/nature relationship. The rise of agriculture in China and the Middle East? The industrial revolution and worldwide spread of farming in the Age of Empire? The Atomic bomb? From methane levels to carbon concentration, from pollen residue to fallout, each of these changes leaves its mark in the Earth’s geological record. Each is also a symbol of a new set of human powers and a new way of living on Earth.

The most radical thought identified with the Anthropocene is this: the familiar contrast between people and the natural world no longer holds. There is no more nature that stands apart from human beings. There is no place or living thing that we haven’t changed. Our mark is on the cycle of weather and seasons, the global map of bioregions, and the DNA that organises matter into life. The question is no longer how to preserve a wild world from human intrusion; it is what shape we will give to a world we can’t help changing.

The discovery that nature is henceforth partly a human creation makes the Anthropocene the latest of three great revolutions: three kinds of order once thought to be given and self-sustaining have proved instead to be fragile human creations. The first to fall was politics. Long seen as part of divine design, with kings serving as the human equivalents of eagles in the sky and oaks in the forest, politics proved instead a dangerous but inescapable form of architecture – a blueprint for peaceful co‑existence, built with crooked materials. Second came economics. Once presented as a gift of providence or an outgrowth of human nature, economic life, like politics, turned out to be a deliberate and artificial achievement. (We are still debating the range of shapes it can take, from Washington to Greece to China.) Now, in the Anthropocene, nature itself has joined the list of those things that are not natural. The world we inhabit will henceforth be the world we have made.

The revolution in ideas that the Anthropocene represents is rooted in hundreds of eminently practical problems. The conversation about climate change has shifted from whether we can keep greenhouse-gas concentrations below key thresholds to how we are going to adapt when they cross those thresholds. Geo‑engineering, deliberately intervening in planetary systems, used to be the unspeakable proposal in climate policy. Now it is in the mix and almost sure to grow more prominent. As climate change shifts ecological boundaries, issues such as habitat preservation come to resemble landscape architecture. We can’t just pen in animals to save them; they need landscape-scale corridors and other help in migrating as their habitats move. There is open talk in law-and-policy circles about triage in species preservation – asking what we can save, and what we most want to save.

What work is this idea of the Anthropocene doing in culture and politics? As much as a scientific concept, the Anthropocene is a political and ethical gambit. Saying that we live in the Anthropocene is a way of saying that we cannot avoid responsibility for the world we are making. So far so good. The trouble starts when this charismatic, all-encompassing idea of the Anthropocene becomes an all-purpose projection screen and amplifier for one’s preferred version of ‘taking responsibility for the planet’.

Peter Kareiva, the controversial chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, uses the theme ‘Conservation in the Anthropocene’ to trash environmentalism as philosophically naïve and politically backward. Kareiva urges conservationists to give up on wilderness and embrace what the writer Emma Marris calls the ‘rambunctious garden’. Specifically, Kareiva wants to rank ecosystems by the quality of ‘ecosystem services’ they provide for human beings instead of ‘pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake’. He wants a pro‑development stance that assumes that ‘nature is resilient rather than fragile’. He insists that: ‘Instead of scolding capitalism, conservationists should partner with corporations in a science-based effort to integrate the value of nature’s benefits into their operations and cultures.’ In other words, the end of nature is the signal to carry on with green-branded business as usual, and the business of business is business, as the Nature Conservancy’s partnerships with Dow, Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, J P Morgan, Goldman Sachs and the mining giant Rio Tinto remind us.

Kareiva is a favourite of Andrew Revkin, the roving environmental maven of The New York Times Magazine, who touts him as a paragon of responsibility-taking, a leader among ‘scholars and doers who see that new models for thinking and acting are required in this time of the Anthropocene’. This pair and their friends at the Breakthrough Institute in California can be read as making a persistent effort to ‘rebrand’ environmentalism as humanitarian and development-friendly (and capture speaking and consultancy fees, which often seem to be the major ecosystem services of the Anthropocene). This is itself a branding strategy, an opportunity to slosh around old plonk in an ostentatiously shiny bottle.

Elsewhere in The New York Times Magazine, you can enjoy the other end of the Anthropocene projection screen, from business-as-usual to this-changes-everything. In his essay ‘Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene’ (2013), the Princeton scholar and former soldier Roy Scranton writes: ‘this civilisation is already dead’ (emphasis original) and insists that the only way forward is ‘to realise there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves’ and therefore ‘get down to the hard work … without attachment or fear’. He concludes: ‘If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.’

Other humanists bring their own preoccupations to a sense of gathering apocalypse. In his influential essay ‘The Climate of History’ (2008), Dipesh Chakrabarty, a theory-minded historian at the University of Chicago, proposes that the Anthropocene throws into question all received accounts of human history, from Whiggish optimism to his own post-colonial postmodernism. He asks anxiously: ‘Has the period from 1750 to the present been one of freedom or that of the Anthropocene?’ and concludes that the age requires a new paradigm of thought, a ‘negative universal history’.

In their introduction to Ecocriticism (2012), a special issue of American Literature, the English scholars Monique Allewaert of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Michael Ziser of the University of California Davis describe the Anthropocene as best captured in ‘a snapshot of the anxious affect of the modern world as it destroys itself – and denies even its own traces’.

The Anthropocene does not seem to change many minds. But it does turn them up to 11

All of these people (except for the branding opportunists) are trying, with more or less success, to ask how the Anthropocene changes the projects to which they’ve given chunks of their lives. Some far-ranging speculation and sweeping summaries are to be expected, and forgiven. Nonetheless, something in the Anthropocene idea seems to provoke heroic thinking, a mood and rhetoric of high stakes, of the human mind pressed up against the wall of apocalypse or arrived at the end of nature and history.

In this provocative defect, Anthropocene talk is a discourse of responsibility, to borrow a term from Mark Greif’s study of mid-20th-century American thought, The Age of the Crisis of Man (2015). Greif argues that a high-minded (but often middle-brow) strain of rhetoric responded to the horrors of the world wars and the global struggles thereafter with a blend of urgent language and sweeping concepts (or pseudo-concepts): responsibility, the fate of man, the urgency of now. Greif describes discourses of responsibility as attempts to turn words and thoughts, uttered in tones of utmost seriousness, into a high form of action. All of this is recognisable in Anthropocene talk. The Anthropocene does not seem to change many minds, strictly speaking, on point of their cherished convictions. But it does turn them up to 11.

On the whole, this is the inevitable and often productive messiness that accompanies a new way of seeing, one that unites many disparate events into a single pattern. As an offer to unify what might seem unrelated, ‘the Anthropocene’ is an attempt to do the same work that ‘the environment’ did in the 1960s and early ’70s: meld problems as far-flung as extinction, sprawl, litter, national parks policy, and the atom bomb into a single phenomenon called ‘the ecological crisis’. Such a classification is always somewhat arbitrary, though often only in the trivial sense that there are many ways to carve up the world. However arbitrary, it becomes real if people treat it as real, by forming movements, proposing changes, and passing laws aimed at ‘the environment’.

We know what the concept ‘the environment’ has wrought but what will the Anthropocene be like? To put this over-dramatised idea in the least heroic garb possible, what will the weather be like in the Anthropocene? And how will we talk about the weather there?

For all the talk of crisis that swirls around the Anthropocene, it is unlikely that a changing Earth will feel catastrophic or apocalyptic. Some environmentalists still warn of apocalypse to motivate could-be, should-be activists; but geologic time remains far slower than political time, even when human powers add a wobble to the planet. Instead, the Anthropocene will be like today, only more so: many systems, from weather to soil to your local ecosystem, will be in a slow-perennial crisis. And where apocalyptic change is a rupture in time, a slow crisis feels normal. It feels, in fact, natural.

So the Anthropocene will feel natural. I say this not so much because of the controversial empirics-cum-mathematics of the climate-forecasting models as because of a basic insight of modernity that goes back to Rousseau: humanity is the adaptable species. What would have been unimaginable or seemed all but unintelligible 100 years ago, let alone 500 (a sliver of time in the evolutionary life of a species), can become ordinary in a generation. That is how long it took to produce ‘digital natives’, to accustom people to electricity and television, and so on for each revolution in our material and technological world. It takes a great deal of change to break through this kind of adaptability.

This is all the more so because rich-country humanity already lives in a constant technological wrestling match with exogenous shocks, which are going to get more frequent and more intense in the Anthropocene. Large parts of North America regularly experience droughts and heat waves that would devastate a simpler society than today’s US. Because the continent is thoroughly engineered, from the water canals of the West to the irrigation systems of the Great Plains to air conditioning nearly everywhere, these are experienced as inconvenience, as mere ‘news’. The same events, in poorer places, are catastrophes.

Planetary changes will amplify the inequalities that sort out those who get news from those who get catastrophes; but these inequalities, arising as they do from a post-natural nature, will feel as if they were built into the world itself. Indeed, nature has always served to launder the inequalities that humans produce. Are enslaved people kept illiterate and punished brutally when they are not servile? Then ignorance and servility must be in their nature, an idea that goes back in a continuous line to Aristotle. The same goes for women, with some edits to their nature: docile, nurturing, delicate, hysterical, etc. It was not until Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill worked together on The Subjection of Women (published under his name alone in 1869), that English-language philosophy produced a basic challenge to millennia of nature-talk about sexual difference.

The expulsion of Native Americans was ‘justified’ on several versions of nature. Maybe they were racially different. Maybe their climate made them weak and irrational, unable to cultivate the land or resist European settlement. (Colonists briefly embraced this idea, then grew uneasy when they realised that the North American climate was now theirs; by the time of American independence, they raced to reject climatic theories of racial character.) Maybe Native Americans had simply failed to fulfil the natural duty of all mankind, to clear and plant the wilderness and make it bloom like an English garden, an idea that many theorists of natural law advanced in the 17th and 18th centuries. One way or another, nature was a kind of ontological insurance policy for human injustice.

And now? Well, it’s common wisdom that rising sea levels will first affect some of the world’s poorest people, notably in Bangladesh and coastal India. But it’s much worse than that grim geographic coincidence. Wealth has always meant some protection from nature’s cruel measures. In fact, that is the first spur to technology and development of all kinds: not to be killed. Tropical diseases with changing range will find some populations well-equipped with vaccination and medicine, others struggling with bad government and derelict health systems. When seas rise fast, even the feckless but rich US will begin adapting fast, and coastal flooding will be classified in the rich-world mind as a catastrophe of the poor.

So will starvation. A legal regime of unequal Anthropocene vulnerability is well underway. Take the vast, long-term leases that Chinese companies have entered into for some of Africa’s richest farmland. When drought, soil exhaustion or crop crisis puts a pinch on global food supply, contracts and commerce will pull trillions of calories to fat-and-happy Beijing. This is, of course, only the latest chapter in centuries of imperialism and post-imperial, officially voluntary global inequality. But it is the chapter that we the living are writing.

Neoliberal environmentalism aims to bring nature fully into the market, merging ecology and economy

For the moment, Anthropocene inequality has a special affinity with neoliberalism, the global extension of a dogmatic market logic and increasingly homogenous market forms, along with an accompanying ideology insisting that, if the market is not beyond reproach, it is at least beyond reform: there is no alternative. Where previous episodes of global ecological inequality took place under direct imperial administration – witness the Indian famines of the late 19th century, suffered under British rule – ours is emerging under the sign of free contract. Anthropocene inequality is thus being doubly laundered: first as natural, second as the voluntary (and presumptively efficient) product of markets. Because human activity now shapes the ‘natural’ world at every point, it is especially convenient for that world-shaping activity to proceed in its own pseudo-natural market.

But Anthropocene problems also put pressure on the authority of economics. Much of environmental economics has been built on the concept of the externality, economist-speak for a side-effect, a harm or benefit that has no price tag, and so is ignored in market decisions. Air pollution – free to the polluter – is the classic bad side-effect, or ‘negative externality’. Wetlands – not valued on the real-estate market, but great sources of filtration, purification and fertility, which would otherwise cost a lot to replicate – are the model positive externality. So neoliberal environmentalism, which Kareiva’s Nature Conservancy has been cultivating, aims to bring nature fully into the market, finding a place in the bottom line for all former side-effects, and fully merging ecology and economy.

In a climate-changed Anthropocene, the side-effects overwhelm the ‘regular’ market in scale and consequence. And there is no ‘neutral’, purely market-based way to put a value on side-effects. Take the example of carbon emissions. It is possible to create a market for emissions, as Europe, California and other jurisdictions have done; but at the base of that market is a political decision about how to value the economic activity that emits carbon against all the (uncertain and even speculative) effects of the emissions. The same point holds for every (post-)natural system on an Anthropocene planet. Ultimately, the question is the value of life, and ways of life. There is no correct technocratic answer.

The shape of the Anthropocene is a political, ethical and aesthetic question. It will answer questions about what life is worth, what people owe one another, and what in the world is awesome or beautiful enough to preserve or (re)create. Either the answers will reproduce and amplify existing inequality or they will set in motion a different logic of power. Either the Anthropocene will be democratic or it will be horrible.

A democratic Anthropocene would start from a famous observation of the economics Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen: no minimally democratic society has ever suffered a famine. Natural catastrophes are the joint products of natural and human systems. Your vulnerability to disaster is often a direct expression of your standing in a political (and economic) order. The Anthropocene stands for the intensifying merger of ecology, economics and politics, and one’s standing in those systems will increasingly be a single question.

But talk of democracy here is – like much about the Anthropocene – in danger of becoming abstract and moralising. Reflecting on a democratic Anthropocene becomes an inadvertent meditation on the devastating absence of any agent – a state, or even a movement – that could act on the scale of the problem. Indeed, it reveals that there is no agent that could even define the problem. If the Anthropocene is about the relationship between humanity and the planet, well, there is no ‘humanity’ that agrees on any particular meaning and imperative of climate change, extinction, toxification, etc. To think about the Anthropocene is to think about being able to do nothing about everything. No wonder the topic inspires compensatory fantasies that the solution lies in refining the bottom line or honing personal enlightenment – always, to be sure, in the name of some fictive ‘we’.

This returns us to the basic problem that the Anthropocene drives home: as Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the idea of human rights – such as the right to democratic standing in planetary change – is a chimera and a cruel taunt without a political community that can make it good through robust institutions and practices. The Anthropocene shows how far the world is from being such a polity, or a federation of such polities, and how much is at stake in that absence. The world is too much with us. Worse, there is no ‘we’ to be with it.

In the face of all these barriers, what could all this talk about the Anthropocene possibly accomplish? Ironically, a useful comparison lies in Arendt’s target, the mere idea of human rights. While mere ideas are in fact sorry comforts in an unmanageable situation, they can be the beginning of demands, projects, even utopias, that enable people to organise in new ways to pursue them. The idea of human rights has gained much of its force this way, as a prism through which many efforts are focused and/or refracted.

A democratic Anthropocene is just a thought for now, but it can also be a tool that activists, thinkers and leaders use to craft challenges and invitations that bring some of us a little closer to a better possible world, or a worse one. The idea that the world people get to inhabit will only be the one they make is, in fact, imperative to the development of a political and institutional programme, even if the idea itself does not tell anyone how to do that. There might not be a world to win, or even save, but there is a humanity to be shaped and reshaped, freely and always in partial and provisional ways, that can begin intending the world it shapes.

31 March 2015

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Climate change: Embed the social sciences in climate policy (Nature)

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David Victor

01 April 2015

David G. Victor calls for the IPCC process to be extended to include insights into controversial social and behavioural issues.

Illustration by David Parkins

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is becoming irrelevant to climate policy. By seeking consensus and avoiding controversy, the organization is suffering from the streetlight effect — focusing ever more attention on a well-lit pool of the brightest climate science. But the insights that matter are out in the darkness, far from the places that the natural sciences alone can illuminate.

With the ink barely dry on the IPCC’s latest reports, scientists and governments are planning reforms for the next big assessment1, 2. Streamlining the review and writing processes could, indeed, make the IPCC more nimble and relevant. But decisions made at February’s IPCC meeting in Nairobi showed that governments have little appetite for change.

The basic report-making process and timing will remain intact. Minor adjustments such as greater coverage of cross-cutting topics and more administration may make the IPCC slower. Similar soul searching, disagreement, indecision and trivial procedural tweaks have followed each of the five IPCC assessments over the past 25 years3.

This time needs to be different. The IPCC must overhaul how it engages with the social sciences in particular (see go.nature.com/vp7zgm). Fields such as sociology, political science and anthropology are central to understanding how people and societies comprehend and respond to environmental changes, and are pivotal in making effective policies to cut emissions and collaborate across the globe.

The IPCC has engaged only a narrow slice of social-sciences disciplines. Just one branch — economics — has had a major voice in the assessment process. In Working Group III, which assesses climate-change mitigation and policy, nearly two-thirds of 35 coordinating lead authors hailed from the field, and from resource economics in particular. The other social sciences were mostly absent. There was one political scientist: me. Among the few bright spots in that report compared with earlier ones is greater coverage of behavioural economics and risk analysis. In Working Group II, which assesses impacts and adaptation, less than one-third of the 64 coordinating lead authors were social scientists, and about half of those were economists.

Bringing the broader social sciences into the IPCC will be difficult, but it is achievable with a strategy that reflects how the fields are organized and which policy-relevant questions these disciplines know well. It will require big reforms in the IPCC, and the panel will have to relinquish part of the assessment process to other organizations that are less prone to paralysis in the face of controversy.

Tunnel vision

The IPCC walks a wavering line between science, which requires independence, and diplomacy, which demands responsiveness to government preference. Although scientists supply and hone the material for reports, governments have a say in all stages of assessment: they adopt the outline for each chapter, review drafts and approve the final reports.

“Insights such as which policies work (or fail) in practice are skirted.”

Such tight oversight creates incentives for scientists to stick to the agreed scope and strip out controversial topics. These pressures are especially acute in the social sciences because governments want to control statements about social behaviour, which implicate policy. This domain covers questions such as which countries will bear the costs of climate change; schemes for allocating the burden of cutting emissions; the design of international agreements; how voters respond to information about climate policy; and whether countries will go to war over climate-related stress. The social sciences can help to provide answers to these questions, key for effective climate policy. In practice, few of these insights are explored much by the IPCC.

The narrowness of what governments will allow the IPCC to publish is particularly evident in the summary for policy-makers produced at the end of each assessment. Governments approve this document line-by-line with consensus. Disagreements range from those over how to phrase concepts such as a ‘global commons’ that requires collective action to those about whole graphs, which might present data in ways that some governments find inconvenient.

For example, during the approval of the summary from Working Group III last April, a small group of nations vetoed graphs that showed countries’ emissions grouped according to economic growth. Although this format is good science — economic growth is the main driver of emissions — it is politically toxic because it could imply that some countries that are developing rapidly need to do more to control emissions4.

Context dependent

The big problem with the IPCC’s output is not the widely levelled charge that it has become too policy prescriptive or is captivated by special interests5. Its main affliction is pabulum — a surfeit of bland statements that have no practical value for policy. Abstract, global numbers from stylized, replicable models get approved because they do not implicate any country or action. Insights such as which policies work (or fail) in practice are skirted. Caveats are buried or mangled.

Readers of the Working Group III summary for policy-makers might learn, for instance, that annual economic growth might decrease by just 0.06 percentage points by 2050 if governments were to adopt policies that cut emissions in line with the widely discussed goal of 2 °C above pre-industrial levels6. They would have to wade through dense tables to realize that only a fraction of the models say that the goal is achievable, and through the main report to learn that the small cost arises only under simplified assumptions that are far from messy reality.

Source: Ref. 6

That said, the social sciences are equally culpable. Because societies are complex and are in many ways harder to study than cells in a petri dish, the intellectual paradigms across most of the social sciences are weak. Beyond a few exceptions — such as mainstream economics — the major debates in social science are between paradigms rather than within them.

Consider the role of international law. Some social scientists treat law like a contract; others believe that it works mainly through social pressures. The first set would advise policy-makers to word climate deals precisely — to include targets and timetables for emissions cuts — and to apply mechanisms to ensure that countries honour their agreements. The second group would favour bold legal norms with clear focal points — striving for zero net emissions, for example7. Each approach could be useful in the right context.

Multiple competing paradigms make it hard to organize social-science knowledge or to determine which questions and methods are legitimate. Moreover, the incentives within the social sciences discourage focusing on particular substantive topics such as climate change — especially when they require interdisciplinary collaboration. In political science, for example, research on political mobilization, administrative control and international cooperation among other specialities are relevant. Yet no leading political-science department has a tenured professor who works mainly on climate change8.

The paradigm problem need not be paralysing. Social scientists should articulate why different intellectual perspectives and contexts lead to different conclusions. Leading researchers in each area can map out disagreement points and their relevance.

Climate scientists and policy-makers should talk more about how disputes are rooted in different values and assumptions — such as about whether government institutions are capable of directing mitigation. Such disputes help to explain why there are so many disagreements in climate policy, even in areas in which the facts seem clear9.

Unfortunately, the current IPCC report structure discourages that kind of candour about assumptions, values and paradigms. It focuses on known knowns and known unknowns rather than on deeper and wider uncertainties. The bias is revealed in how the organization uses official language to describe findings — half of the statements in the Working Group III summary were given a ‘high confidence’ rating (see ‘Confidence bias’).

Wider vista

Building the social sciences into the IPCC and the climate-change debate more generally is feasible over the next assessment cycle, which starts in October and runs to 2022, with efforts on the following three fronts.

First, the IPCC must ask questions that social scientists can answer. If the panel looks to the social-sciences literature on climate change, it will find little. But if it engages the fields on their own terms it will find a wealth of relevant knowledge — for example, about how societies organize, how individuals and groups perceive threats and respond to catastrophic stresses, and how collective action works best.

Dieter Telemans/Panos

The solar-powered Barefoot College in Rajasthan, India, trains rural villagers in how to install, build and repair solar technologies.

As soon as the new IPCC leadership is chosen later this year, the team should invite major social-sciences societies such as the American Political Science Association, the American and European societies of international law, the American Sociological Association and the Society for Risk Analysis to propose relevant topics that they can assess and questions they can answer. Multidisciplinary scientific organizations in diverse countries — such as the Royal Society in London and the Third World Academy of Sciences — would round out the picture, because social-sciences societies tend to be national and heavily US-based.

These questions should guide how the IPCC scopes its next reports. The agency should also ask such societies to organize what they know about climate by discipline — how sociology examines issues related to the topic, for example — and feed that into the assessment.

Second, the IPCC must become a more attractive place for social-science and humanities scholars who are not usually involved in the climate field and might find IPCC involvement daunting. The IPCC process is dominated by insiders who move from assessment to assessment and are tolerant of the crushing rounds of review and layers of oversight that consume hundreds of hours and require travel to the corners of the globe. Practically nothing else in science service has such a high ratio of input to output. The IPCC must use volunteers’ time more efficiently.

Third, all parties must recognize that a consensus process cannot handle controversial topics such as how best to design international agreements or how to govern the use of geoengineering technologies. For these, a parallel process will be needed to address the most controversial policy-relevant questions.

This supporting process should begin with a small list of the most important questions that the IPCC cannot handle on its own. A network of science academies or foundations sympathetic to the UN’s mission could organize short reports — drawing from IPCC assessments and other literature — and manage a review process that is truly independent of government meddling. Oversight from prominent social scientists, including those drawn from the IPCC process, could give the effort credibility as well as the right links to the IPCC itself.

The list of topics to cover in this parallel mechanism includes how to group countries in international agreements — beyond the crude kettling adopted in 1992 that split the world into industrialized nations and the rest. The list also includes which kinds of policies have had the biggest impact on emissions, and how different concepts of justice and ethics could guide new international agreements that balance the burdens of mitigation and adaptation. There will also need to be a sober re-assessment of policy goals when it becomes clear that stopping warming at 2 °C is no longer feasible10.

The IPCC has proved to be important — it is the most legitimate body that assesses the climate-related sciences. But it is too narrow and must not monopolize climate assessment. Helping the organization to reform itself while moving contentious work into other forums is long overdue.

Nature 520, 27–29 (02 April 2015), doi:10.1038/520027a

References

  1. IPCC. Future Work of the IPCC: Chairman’s Vision Paper on the Future of the IPCC (IPCC, 2015).
  2. IPCC. Future Work of the IPCC: Consideration of the Recommendations by the Task Group on Future Work of the IPCC (IPCC, 2015).
  3. Committee to Review the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change Assessments: Review of the Processes and Procedures of the IPCC (InterAcademy Council, 2010).
  4. Victor, D. G., Gerlagh, R. & Baiocchi, G. Science 345, 34–36 (2014).
  5. Hulme, M. et al. Nature 463, 730–732 (2010).
  6. IPCC. Summary for Policymakers in Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (eds Edenhofer, O. et al.) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014).
  7. Hafner-Burton, E. M., Victor, D. G. & Lupu, Y. Am. J. Intl Law 106, 47–97 (2012).
  8. Keohane, R. O. PS: Political Sci. & Politics 48, 19–26 (2015).
  9. Hulme, M. Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009).
  10. Victor, D. G. & Kennel C. F. Nature 514, 30–31 (2014).

Anthropocene: The human age (Nature)

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Momentum is building to establish a new geological epoch that recognizes humanity’s impact on the planet. But there is fierce debate behind the scenes.

Richard Monastersky

11 March 2015

Illustration by Jessica Fortner

Almost all the dinosaurs have vanished from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. The fossil hall is now mostly empty and painted in deep shadows as palaeobiologist Scott Wing wanders through the cavernous room.

Wing is part of a team carrying out a radical, US$45-million redesign of the exhibition space, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution. And when it opens again in 2019, the hall will do more than revisit Earth’s distant past. Alongside the typical displays of Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, there will be a new section that forces visitors to consider the species that is currently dominating the planet.

“We want to help people imagine their role in the world, which is maybe more important than many of them realize,” says Wing.

This provocative exhibit will focus on the Anthropocene — the slice of Earth’s history during which people have become a major geological force. Through mining activities alone, humans move more sediment than all the world’s rivers combined. Homo sapiens has also warmed the planet, raised sea levels, eroded the ozone layer and acidified the oceans.

Given the magnitude of these changes, many researchers propose that the Anthropocene represents a new division of geological time. The concept has gained traction, especially in the past few years — and not just among geoscientists. The word has been invoked by archaeologists, historians and even gender-studies researchers; several museums around the world have exhibited art inspired by the Anthropocene; and the media have heartily adopted the idea. “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” The Economist announced in 2011.

The greeting was a tad premature. Although the term is trending, the Anthropocene is still an amorphous notion — an unofficial name that has yet to be accepted as part of the geological timescale. That may change soon. A committee of researchers is currently hashing out whether to codify the Anthropocene as a formal geological unit, and when to define its starting point.

But critics worry that important arguments against the proposal have been drowned out by popular enthusiasm, driven in part by environmentally minded researchers who want to highlight how destructive humans have become. Some supporters of the Anthropocene idea have even been likened to zealots. “There’s a similarity to certain religious groups who are extremely keen on their religion — to the extent that they think everybody who doesn’t practise their religion is some kind of barbarian,” says one geologist who asked not to be named.

The debate has shone a spotlight on the typically unnoticed process by which geologists carve up Earth’s 4.5 billion years of history. Normally, decisions about the geological timescale are made solely on the basis of stratigraphy — the evidence contained in layers of rock, ocean sediments, ice cores and other geological deposits. But the issue of the Anthropocene “is an order of magnitude more complicated than the stratigraphy”, says Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester, UK, and the chair of the Anthropocene Working Group that is evaluating the issue for the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS).

Written in stone

For geoscientists, the timescale of Earth’s history rivals the periodic table in terms of scientific importance. It has taken centuries of painstaking stratigraphic work — matching up major rock units around the world and placing them in order of formation — to provide an organizing scaffold that supports all studies of the planet’s past. “The geologic timescale, in my view, is one of the great achievements of humanity,” says Michael Walker, a Quaternary scientist at the University of Wales Trinity St David in Lampeter, UK.

Walker’s work sits at the top of the timescale. He led a group that helped to define the most recent unit of geological time, the Holocene epoch, which began about 11,700 years ago.

Sources: Dams/Water/Fertilizer, IGBP; Fallout, Ref. 5; Map, E. C. Ellis Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369, 1010–1035 (2011); Methane, Ref. 4

The decision to formalize the Holocene in 2008 was one of the most recent major actions by the ICS, which oversees the timescale. The commission has segmented Earth’s history into a series of nested blocks, much like the years, months and days of a calendar. In geological time, the 66 million years since the death of the dinosaurs is known as the Cenozoic era. Within that, the Quaternary period occupies the past 2.58 million years — during which Earth has cycled in and out of a few dozen ice ages. The vast bulk of the Quaternary consists of the Pleistocene epoch, with the Holocene occupying the thin sliver of time since the end of the last ice age.

When Walker and his group defined the beginning of the Holocene, they had to pick a spot on the planet that had a signal to mark that boundary. Most geological units are identified by a specific change recorded in rocks — often the first appearance of a ubiquitous fossil. But the Holocene is so young, geologically speaking, that it permits an unusual level of precision. Walker and his colleagues selected a climatic change — the end of the last ice age’s final cold snap — and identified a chemical signature of that warming at a depth of 1,492.45 metres in a core of ice drilled near the centre of Greenland1. A similar fingerprint of warming can be seen in lake and marine sediments around the world, allowing geologists to precisely identify the start of the Holocene elsewhere.

“The geologic timescale, in my view, is one of the great achievements of humanity.”

Even as the ICS was finalizing its decision on the start of the Holocene, discussion was already building about whether it was time to end that epoch and replace it with the Anthropocene. This idea has a long history. In the mid-nineteenth century, several geologists sought to recognize the growing power of humankind by referring to the present as the ‘anthropozoic era’, and others have since made similar proposals, sometimes with different names. The idea has gained traction only in the past few years, however, in part because of rapid changes in the environment, as well as the influence of Paul Crutzen, a chemist at the Max Plank Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.

Crutzen has first-hand experience of how human actions are altering the planet. In the 1970s and 1980s, he made major discoveries about the ozone layer and how pollution from humans could damage it — work that eventually earned him a share of a Nobel prize. In 2000, he and Eugene Stoermer of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor argued that the global population has gained so much influence over planetary processes that the current geological epoch should be called the Anthropocene2. As an atmospheric chemist, Crutzen was not part of the community that adjudicates changes to the geological timescale. But the idea inspired many geologists, particularly Zalasiewicz and other members of the Geological Society of London. In 2008, they wrote a position paper urging their community to consider the idea3.

Those authors had the power to make things happen. Zalasiewicz happened to be a member of the Quaternary subcommission of the ICS, the body that would be responsible for officially considering the suggestion. One of his co-authors, geologist Phil Gibbard of the University of Cambridge, UK, chaired the subcommission at the time.

Although sceptical of the idea, Gibbard says, “I could see it was important, something we should not be turning our backs on.” The next year, he tasked Zalasiewicz with forming the Anthropocene Working Group to look into the matter.

A new beginning

Since then, the working group has been busy. It has published two large reports (“They would each hurt you if they dropped on your toe,” says Zalasiewicz) and dozens of other papers.

The group has several issues to tackle: whether it makes sense to establish the Anthropocene as a formal part of the geological timescale; when to start it; and what status it should have in the hierarchy of the geological time — if it is adopted.

When Crutzen proposed the term Anthropocene, he gave it the suffix appropriate for an epoch and argued for a starting date in the late eighteenth century, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Between then and the start of the new millennium, he noted, humans had chewed a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, doubled the amount of methane in the atmosphere and driven up carbon dioxide concentrations by 30%, to a level not seen in 400,000 years.

When the Anthropocene Working Group started investigating, it compiled a much longer long list of the changes wrought by humans. Agriculture, construction and the damming of rivers is stripping away sediment at least ten times as fast as the natural forces of erosion. Along some coastlines, the flood of nutrients from fertilizers has created oxygen-poor ‘dead zones’, and the extra CO2 from fossil-fuel burning has acidified the surface waters of the ocean by 0.1 pH units. The fingerprint of humans is clear in global temperatures, the rate of species extinctions and the loss of Arctic ice.

The group, which includes Crutzen, initially leaned towards his idea of choosing the Industrial Revolution as the beginning of the Anthropocene. But other options were on the table.

Some researchers have argued for a starting time that coincides with an expansion of agriculture and livestock cultivation more than 5,000 years ago4, or a surge in mining more than 3,000 years ago (see ‘Humans at the helm’). But neither the Industrial Revolution nor those earlier changes have left unambiguous geological signals of human activity that are synchronous around the globe (see ‘Landscape architecture’).

This week in Nature, two researchers propose that a potential marker for the start of the Anthropocene could be a noticeable drop in atmospheric CO2 concentrations between 1570 and 1620, which is recorded in ice cores (see page 171). They link this change to the deaths of some 50 million indigenous people in the Americas, triggered by the arrival of Europeans. In the aftermath, forests took over 65 million hectares of abandoned agricultural fields — a surge of regrowth that reduced global CO2.

Landscape architecture

A model of land use, based on human-population estimates, suggests that people modified substantial parts of the continents even thousands of years ago.

Land used intensively by humans.

8,000 years before present (bp)

8,000 years before present (bp)

1,000 years before present (bp)

anthropocene-slideshow-5

Present

anthropocene-slideshow-10

Source: E. C. Ellis Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369, 1010–1035 (2011).

In the working group, Zalasiewicz and others have been talking increasingly about another option — using the geological marks left by the atomic age. Between 1945 and 1963, when the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty took effect, nations conducted some 500 above-ground nuclear blasts. Debris from those explosions circled the globe and created an identifiable layer of radioactive elements in sediments. At the same time, humans were making geological impressions in a number of other ways — all part of what has been called the Great Acceleration of the modern world. Plastics started flooding the environment, along with aluminium, artificial fertilizers, concrete and leaded petrol, all of which have left signals in the sedimentary record.

In January, the majority of the 37-person working group offered its first tentative conclusion. Zalasiewicz and 25 other members reported5 that the geological markers available from the mid-twentieth century make this time “stratigraphically optimal” for picking the start of the Anthropocene, whether or not it is formally defined. Zalasiewicz calls it “a candidate for the least-worst boundary”.

The group even proposed a precise date: 16 July 1945, the day of the first atomic-bomb blast. Geologists thousands of years in the future would be able to identify the boundary by looking in the sediments for the signature of long-lived plutonium from mid-century bomb blasts or many of the other global markers from that time.

A many-layered debate

The push to formalize the Anthropocene upsets some stratigraphers. In 2012, a commentary published by the Geological Society of America6 asked: “Is the Anthropocene an issue of stratigraphy or pop culture?” Some complain that the working group has generated a stream of publicity in support of the concept. “I’m frustrated because any time they do anything, there are newspaper articles,” says Stan Finney, a stratigraphic palaeontologist at California State University in Long Beach and the chair of the ICS, which would eventually vote on any proposal put forward by the working group. “What you see here is, it’s become a political statement. That’s what so many people want.”

Finney laid out some of his concerns in a paper7 published in 2013. One major question is whether there really are significant records of the Anthropocene in global stratigraphy. In the deep sea, he notes, the layer of sediments representing the past 70 years would be thinner than 1 millimetre. An even larger issue, he says, is whether it is appropriate to name something that exists mainly in the present and the future as part of the geological timescale.

“It’s become a political statement. That’s what so many people want.”

Some researchers argue that it is too soon to make a decision — it will take centuries or longer to know what lasting impact humans are having on the planet. One member of the working group, Erle Ellis, a geographer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, says that he raised the idea of holding off with fellow members of the group. “We should set a time, perhaps 1,000 years from now, in which we would officially investigate this,” he says. “Making a decision before that would be premature.”

That does not seem likely, given that the working group plans to present initial recommendations by 2016.

Some members with different views from the majority have dropped out of the discussion. Walker and others contend that human activities have already been recognized in the geological timescale: the only difference between the current warm period, the Holocene, and all the interglacial times during the Pleistocene is the presence of human societies in the modern one. “You’ve played the human card in defining the Holocene. It’s very difficult to play the human card again,” he says.

Walker resigned from the group a year ago, when it became clear that he had little to add. He has nothing but respect for its members, he says, but he has heard concern that the Anthropocene movement is picking up speed. “There’s a sense in some quarters that this is something of a juggernaut,” he says. “Within the geologic community, particularly within the stratigraphic community, there is a sense of disquiet.”

Zalasiewicz takes pains to make it clear that the working group has not yet reached any firm conclusions.“We need to discuss the utility of the Anthropocene. If one is to formalize it, who would that help, and to whom it might be a nuisance?” he says. “There is lots of work still to do.”

Any proposal that the group did make would still need to pass a series of hurdles. First, it would need to receive a supermajority — 60% support — in a vote by members of the Quaternary subcommission. Then it would need to reach the same margin in a second vote by the leadership of the full ICS, which includes chairs from groups that study the major time blocks. Finally, the executive committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences must approve the request.

At each step, proposals are often sent back for revision, and they sometimes die altogether. It is an inherently conservative process, says Martin Head, a marine stratigrapher at Brock University in St Catharines, Canada, and the current head of the Quaternary subcommission. “You are messing around with a timescale that is used by millions of people around the world. So if you’re making changes, they have to be made on the basis of something for which there is overwhelming support.”

Some voting members of the Quaternary subcommission have told Nature that they have not been persuaded by the arguments raised so far in favour of the Anthropocene. Gibbard, a friend of Zalasiewicz’s, says that defining this new epoch will not help most Quaternary geologists, especially those working in the Holocene, because they tend not to study material from the past few decades or centuries. But, he adds: “I don’t want to be the person who ruins the party, because a lot of useful stuff is coming out as a consequence of people thinking about this in a systematic way.”

If a proposal does not pass, researchers could continue to use the name Anthropocene on an informal basis, in much the same way as archaeological terms such as the Neolithic era and the Bronze Age are used today. Regardless of the outcome, the Anthropocene has already taken on a life of its own. Three Anthropocene journals have started up in the past two years, and the number of papers on the topic is rising sharply, with more than 200 published in 2014.

By 2019, when the new fossil hall opens at the Smithsonian’s natural history museum, it will probably be clear whether the Anthropocene exhibition depicts an official time unit or not. Wing, a member of the working group, says that he does not want the stratigraphic debate to overshadow the bigger issues. “There is certainly a broader point about human effects on Earth systems, which is way more important and also more scientifically interesting.”

As he walks through the closed palaeontology hall, he points out how much work has yet to be done to refashion the exhibits and modernize the museum, which opened more than a century ago. A hundred years is a heartbeat to a geologist. But in that span, the human population has more than tripled. Wing wants museum visitors to think, however briefly, about the planetary power that people now wield, and how that fits into the context of Earth’s history. “If you look back from 10 million years in the future,” he says, “you’ll be able to see what we were doing today.”

Nature 519, 144–147 (12 March 2015), doi:10.1038/519144a

References

  1. Walker, M. et al. J. Quat. Sci. 24, 3–17 (2009).
  2. Crutzen, P. J. & Stoermer, E. F. IGBP Newsletter 41, 17–18 (2000).
  3. Zalasiewicz. J. et al. GSA Today 18(2), 4–8 (2008).
  4. Ruddiman, W. F. Ann. Rev. Earth. Planet. Sci. 41, 45–68 (2013).
  5. Zalasiewicz, J. et al. Quatern. Int. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2014.11.045 (2015).
  6. Autin, W. J. & Holbrook, J. M. GSA Today 22(7), 60–61 (2012).
  7. Finney, S. C. Geol. Soc. Spec. Publ. 395, 23–28 (2013).

Climate denial is immoral, says head of US Episcopal church (The Guardian)

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Climate change is a moral challenge threatening the rights of the world’s poorest people and those who deny it are not using God’s gift of knowledge, says presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori

Episcopal presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has called climate denial a ‘blind’ position. Photograph: Ed Ou/AP

The highest ranking woman in the Anglican communion has said climate denial is a “blind” and immoral position which rejects God’s gift of knowledge.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal church and one of the most powerful women in Christianity, said that climate change was a moral imperative akin to that of the civil rights movement. She said it was already a threat to the livelihoods and survival of people in the developing world.

“It is in that sense much like the civil rights movement in this country where we are attending to the rights of all people and the rights of the earth to continue to be a flourishing place,” Bishop Jefferts Schori said in an interview with the Guardian. “It is certainly a moral issue in terms of the impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable around the world already.”

In the same context, Jefferts Schori attached moral implications to climate denial, suggesting those who reject the underlying science of climate change were turning their backs on God’s gift of knowledge.

“Episcopalians understand the life of the mind is a gift of God and to deny the best of current knowledge is not using the gifts God has given you,” she said. “In that sense, yes, it could be understood as a moral issue.”

She went on: “I think it is a very blind position. I think it is a refusal to use the best of human knowledge, which is ultimately a gift of God.”

The sense of urgency around the issue has been deepened by Pope Francis forceful statements on global warming, which he is expected to amplify in a papal encyclical in June and during an address to the US Congress in September.

The Episcopalian church will host a webcast on 24 March to kick off a month-long action campaign designed to encourage church members to reduce their own carbon footprints and lobby government and international corporations to fight climate change.

An oceanographer before she was ordained at the age of 40, Bishop Jefferts Schori said she hoped to use her visibility as a church leader to help drive action on climate change.

As presiding bishop, she oversees 2.5m members of the Episcopal church in 17 countries, and is arguably one of the most prominent women in Christianity. The two largest denominations in the US, Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists, do not ordain women.

“I really hope to motivate average Episcopalians to see the severity of this issue, the morality of this issue,” she said. “Turning the ship in another direction requires the consolidated efforts of many people who are moving in the same direction.”

She acknowledged that the challenge was deepened by the strain of climate denial in American politics, and by continued resistance to science in American classrooms.

“It’s hard work when you have a climate denier who will not see the reality of scientific truth,” she said.

However, she, like a number of church leaders, said they had seen an uptick in climate activism in recent months, spurred by the pope’s comments last January, and the conjunction later this year of United Nations conferences on development and climate change.

Evangelical churches – once seen as a conservative force – were now taking up the climate cause, largely because of growing awareness of its threat to the poor.

“One of the significant changes in particular has been the growing awareness and activism among the evangelical community who at least somewhat in the more distant past refused to encounter this issue, refused to deal with it,” Jeffers Schori said. “The major evangelical groups in this country have been much more forward in addressing this issue because they understand that it impacts the poor.”

A number of denominations have also joined the growing fossil fuel divestment movement which is encouraging organisations to move their investments out of coal, oil and gas companies. The United Methodist church, the third largest denomination, dumped coal companies from its pension fund.

The Unitarian church and the United church of Christ have also voted to divest, according to Reverent Fletcher Harper of Green Faith. And the World Council of Churches has pledged not to invest in fossil fuels. A number of individual congregations have also divested from fossil fuels.

The Guardian launched a campaign on Monday to encourage the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust to divest from fossil fuels.

The Episcopal church has also come under pressure to withdraw its fossil fuel holdings. A number of diocese are pressing for divestment, and will bring the issue to a vote at the church’s annual convention this summer.

Jefferts Schori opposes fossil fuel divestment. “If you divest you lose any direct ability to influence the course of a corporation’s behavior,” she said. “I think most pragmatists realise that we can’t close the spigot on the oil wells and close the coal mines immediately without some other energy source to shift to.”

World Council of Churches rules out fossil fuel investments

Climate change: at last a breakthrough to our catastrophic political impasse? (The Guardian)

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Expecting the Paris talks to succeed is a pious hope: but the Oslo principles, launched today, argue that governments are already in flagrant breach of their legal obligations to the planet

climate change conference in peru 2014

‘The dismal pace of international negotiations is why the Guardian has thrown its weight behind a divestment campaign.’ The South Korea delegation are all smiles at the 2014 UN climate change conference in Peru, intended to produce a draft deal to be adopted in Paris in December. Photograph: Rodrigo Abd/AP

 and 

Monday 30 March 2015 16.34 BST / Last modified on Monday 30 March 2015 16.36 BST

Today a group of eminent jurists accuse governments and enterprises of being in clear and flagrant breach of their legal obligations on climate change – under human rights law, international law, environmental law, and tort law.

Human ravaging of our planet and climate through relentless fossil fuel extraction and greenhouse gas emissions is undoubtedly the defining existential challenge of our time. Our collective failure to commit to meaningful reductions in emissions is a political and moral travesty, with catastrophic implications, particularly for the poorest and most marginalised, domestically and globally.

The dismal pace of international negotiations – and the prospect of yet more disappointment at the UN Paris conference in December – is why the Guardian has thrown its weight behind a divestment campaign, pressurising moral investors to take a stand against those responsible for the greatest emissions. After all, two-thirds of all greenhouse emissions come from just 90 coal, oil and gas companies.

But in the Oslo Principles on Global Climate Change Obligations – launching in London today – a working group of current and ex-judges, advocates and professors, drawn from each region of the world, argue that any new international agreement will just be a coda to obligations already present, pressing and unavoidable in existing law.

What the Oslo principles offer is a solution to our infuriating impasse in which governments – especially those from developed nations, responsible for 70% of the world’s emissions between 1890 and 2007 – are in effect saying: “We all agree that something needs to be done, but we cannot agree on who has to do what and how much. In the absence of any such agreement, we have no obligation to do anything.” The Oslo principles bring a battery of legal arguments to dispute and disarm that second claim. In essence, the working group asserts that governments are violating their legal duties if they each act in a way that, collectively, is known to lead to grave harms.

Governments will retort that they cannot know their obligations to reduce emissions in the absence of an international agreement. The working group’s response is that they can know this, already, and with sufficient precision.

There is a clear answer to the question of each country’s reasonable share, based on a permissible quantum of emissions per capita that never threatens the perilous 2C mean temperature increase that would profoundly and irreversibly affect all life on earth. This reasonable share is what nations owe on the basis of their common but differentiated responsibilities for contributing to climate change. The Oslo principles duly incorporate mechanisms to accommodate the differential impacts and demands on nations and enterprises, particularly in the least developed countries.

Backed by distinguished international lawyers, professors and judges, the principles are a template for courts, advocates and lawmakers to act swiftly, embodying the urgency, conviction and black-letter reasoning required if humanity is to turn the corner before it is too late.

The document is the product of an independent, rigorous, multi-year effort led by Yale University’s Professor Thomas Pogge, and Jaap Spier, the advocate-general of the Netherlands supreme court. It is championed by, among others, Antonio Benjamin, the Brazilian high court justice; Michael Kirby, a former Australian high court justice; Dinah Shelton, a former president of the inter-American commission on human rights; and Elisabeth Steiner, a judge at the European court of human rights.

These principles deserve detailed consideration by lawyers, scientists, advocates and – critically – the policymakers engaged in last-ditch negotiations in Paris in December to divert us from the path towards climate catastrophe. They provide some opinio juris that allows judges to prohibit conduct that, practised by many or all states, will cause enormous damage to people and the planet.

But the working group’s core message is that we simply cannot wait in the pious hope that short-term-minded governments and enterprises will save us; and that when we act it must be on the basis of equity and justice, according to law. Every year that we miss increases the challenge and risk. We’ve squandered decades already, and our window for action is closing. We must act now.