Mountaintop removal eliminates the mountain and fills the valley below

I have been waiting for the documentary “The Last Mountain” to be released to my  Netflix streaming queue for sometime and then it suddenly showed up, so I watched it a few nights ago. Directed by Bill Haney, it tells the gripping story of the fight to keep Coal River Mountain West Virginia from being destroyed by the Massey Energy  Company.  The residents of Coal River Valley have been threatened for years by mountain top removal in a region of the state that has breath-taking, tree-covered hills and valleys; this region however has been progressively destroyed by coal mining through the technique of  mountaintop removal, based on massive, mechanized  machinery and explosives. Although Robert Kennedy played a major role as an activist and adviser in the documentary, and clearly adds a sense of national urgency to the issues addressed, the story is also about how local residents of Coal River Valley got together and formed an activist resistance to the Massey Coal Company’s plan to remove Coal River Mountain, a mountain that serves as a watershed for residents of the valleys below.  Many other mountains in the region have already been destroyed by coal mining, such that Coal River Mountain was and is the “last mountain standing”  of significance for the region. The removal of this mountain will destroy the water system of people living downstream and increase the severity of flooding, two well-known, obligatory features of mountaintop removal.  Many residents believe that Massey Coal wants to depopulate the Coal River Valley and eliminate downstream community occupancy, to give them more space for strip-mining. It is a very ugly process.

While the Obama administration has been more sensitive to the destruction of the water supply by mountaintop coal mining and violations of environmental laws, the original permits to remove Coal River Mountain were given during the Bush administration and Massey Coal has proceeded to execute its march towards mountain destruction. However, in a somewhat duplicitous manner, the Obama administration continues to issue permits for more mountaintop removal in the region. An interesting feature of this controversy was revealed in the documentary based on studies  that raise the feasibility of putting windmill generators across the top of Coal River Mountain. Those who have studied this suggest that wind power generation would produce more jobs and give the neighboring communities more long-term income through power generation and improvements in the tax base, when compared to the resources generated by the Massey mountaintop removal project,  which  of course will end at some time in the future. The demonstrations, sit-ins and tree sitting by environmentalists and residents are greeted with hostility by the miners who still have jobs working for Massey Coal. Oddly enough, I didn’t see many of the mountain top removal defenders (50 percent of our electricity comes from coal) argue that the future of the industry depends on the development of new clean coal technologies, none of which were on display or even discussed. Many coal-based power plants claim that they are ready for “carbon-capture” technology when it becomes available. But that possibility is very remote because once in service, the public will not tolerate retrofitting for carbon-capture, even if the technique becomes feasible, as it would add enormous costs to existing energy production. If carbon-capture or some similar clean coal technology ever comes along, it is likely to increase the cost of coal-based power plants to a prohibitively high level. Coal is currently the worst source of air pollution and the long list of its pollution offenses  goes beyond carbon dioxide and includes such things as mercury contamination, which accounts for warnings we get about eating fish too often because of their high mercury content. Mercury is toxic to the brain and impacts on brain development. It might be that Republicans have been eating too much fish.

Robert Kennedy is articulate in pointing out that the impact of Massey Coal has been to increase the poverty of the region, first by destroying the unions in the 1980s (companies close mines, send unionized workers home and then reopened the mines with non-union miners, complete with reduced salary and benefits) and second, by reducing the labor force through automation and modernization of equipment and techniques: strip mining is replacing deep hole mining, with a reduction in the labor force needed.  But if the true cost of coal mining was reflected in the price of coal, including the serious health care costs and safety issues, the cost of this form of energy would be prohibitively expensive. We are not just trapped by the history of the region as a long-standing coal-mining center, but also by the powerful lobbying interests of coal mining and transportation (trains) that thrive on their operations in West Virginia and other coal-intensive states.  One can add that Wall Street has billions invested in these companies because they are profitable and seem to be free from serious regulatory control. Add to that formula the corrupt organization of the state’s environmental protection agency, which allows coal companies to violate water and air quality standards without fines, and you have an updated version of “Love Canal.”

The environmental damage does not stop with a disappearing mountain top. The heavy coal mining leads to toxic waste sites in the mountain regions above the valleys, created from the water used to wash the coal before it is shipped and these sites leak and pollute the water supply downstream, carrying highly toxic material.  Several websites have been put up to monitor the mining operation, but the state and Federal Government seem to collude as obstacles for better environmental regulation. The trouble is that while wind energy might be successful for the future of local inhabitants, how will the energy needs of others be met who receive the coal over long distance railroad shipments? You have to decommission these coal plants one at a time, when you have a suitable alternative and until that can be achieved, the forces promoting mountaintop removal will keep going with few obstacles in sight that can stop them. If you had only two solutions to our energy needs, nuclear power and coal mining, the preferred choice would be obvious.  The solution at hand is to build a new, modern transcontinental power grid that collects electricity from all forms of power generated in different ways and distribute that power efficiently to homes and businesses. This is an infrastructure issue. Yes, it would be better to replace coal-fired power plants with natural gas in the short-run, and it seems obvious that the wind turbine option for the people of Coal River Valley makes far more economic and environmental sense, but how to resolve the challenges of implementing this new technology in place of coal is something we can only achieve through the force of a national government, not a state government, which, in the case of West Virginia seems hopelessly corrupt and entirely devoted to the private, rather than the public interest.

RFM

Fig. 1 Planet Earth (NASA)

Every educated person on the planet has heard about the threats to human existence imposed by Global Warming. Yet, few of us are knowledgeable enough to explain the basic mechanisms that determine our climate, especially when talking to those among whom are doubting members of the choir. Understanding the essential elements of Global Warming requires effort and an intellectual expenditure, but you can converse intelligently on the subject, while stopping short of explaining the situation on the basis of a thermodynamic theory of equilibrium. Besides, the earth’s climate has never truly been in any form of equilibrium–some positive or negative driving force or energy imbalance has always been trying to change our climate, though, until now, such changes have taken place over millenia, not over the two hundred plus years of the industrial revolution.  Our climate has always been changing, even though the time constants for change are way beyond a human lifetime, and lie properly scaled and recorded within the geological and paleoclimatological record, which gives up its secrets slowly. But once properly deciphered that record reveals a surprisingly coherent history for those willing to put the effort into interpreting the scrolls, or to be more accurate, deciphering the core drillings of oceans and glaciers. Of course, we don’t yet have a complete story. There are large gaps in our knowledge, but we know enough already to be mesmerized by our planetary history and the forces that have shaped our climate. And we should know enough to be alarmed and very wary about our future.

It is now clear that never before in our climate history have we witnessed the kind of experiment now underway–the forcing of our planet to go through something it has never experienced before–a sharp, man-made increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide that is now taking place and pushing us towards a climatological precipice that we might not be able to escape. But if we act quickly, this experiment is still under our control, depending on whether we can muster the political will to curb our use of fossil fuels and restore energy balance to keep the planet as it was, with atmospheric carbon dioxide at 350 parts per million (ppm) or less ; it is now at 387 ppm and rising at a rate of about 2 ppm per year. The alternative is that we run the risk of higher levels of carbon dioxide that will trigger the melting of Greenland and the polar ice caps and eventually raise our sea level by 270 feet! We are probably not at risk for a sea level increase of that magnitude during this century, but we do run the risk of having this kind of sea level rise take place, and once it starts, there will be nothing we can do to stop it. Not only will this massive ice melting proceed out of our control, it will cool the local regions where the melting takes place, impact our weather systems and change the driving forces for oceanic currents. The emergency we must address now has been created by the fact that the carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere has a very long half-life and its actions on our planet will be with us for a  very long time. Couple this reality to the fact that we are already seeing weather patterns that reflect Global Warming and you inescapably conclude that our short-term climate does not look good–it will inescapably be more violent. But, we can still do something for the long-term, by acting soon and now is not too early. There is little doubt that if we continue to burn fossil fuels through a business-as-usual mode, our planet will be markedly different and our planetary future will be seriously in doubt. In many ways, that’s the shock–not only that the climate is never in equilibrium, but that it is also super-sensitive to the very fuels we have chosen as our cheapest form of energy. For too long we have assumed constancy in our climate lives: that luxury has now gone, at least the assumption part of it.

Until Homo sapiens came along and started adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, climate change took place over thousands or millions of years and every hundred thousand years or so, we would go through another ice age, created by changes in the tilting of the planet on its axis and slight changes in the elliptical pattern of our annual trek around the sun. These two precession parameters change the amount of sun that radiates to earth (insolation), increasing with greater axis tilt and decreasing with less. Planetary alignments within our solar system create these different elliptical shapes and the axial rotational wobbling–the earth spins like a wobbly top–but wobbles on a very long time scale. The axis of the Earth’s rotation is actually becoming more vertical now, so we would normally expect to see another ice age, perhaps in 7,000 years or so. However, our carbon loading of the atmosphere precludes that possibility. Until humans brought the industrial revolution, the planetary environment changed on a very different time scale, usually thousands of years, even though cataclysmic events in our climate history have been known to happen. The question for our generation is whether we have put in motion a new and ultra-rapid set of events that we will not be able to control. Most climatologists say at best, it will be a close call if we are going to avoid a tipping point, after which it won’t matter what we do. But saving the planet as we have known it is still possible and the science is at a point where only non-scientists or discredited ones believe otherwise.

The value of knowing more about climate change is not to convince those like the Tea Party members, because they are beyond hope. The real function of becoming more knowledgeable about this issue is to convince ourselves and other like-minded colleagues that we are facing an imminent global catastrophe if we don’t act quickly. This is one branch of science we can’t afford to be cautious about. We have enough knowledge about our climate future that we should be ready to support a WW II-like mobilization strategy to begin shaping the new economy that will be required if we are going to ride this thing out and eventually reverse the 250 year trend of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.  This dire need for a cooperative spirit to save the planet should greatly reduce the international barriers for interactive productivity towards this end.  And we need to get beyond simplicity. You can’t summarize the anticipated changes with simple phrases. Phraseology for climate change is dead–it’s silly to think in those terms. A warmer earth means a drier earth in some places and at some times, but also a wetter earth in some places at some times. And it means rising sea levels because the polar and Greenland ice pacts are melting, even though we don’t understand at what rate that will be happening and over what time–that’s the new threat! Almost none of the projections in our future are what we have been used to in the past and the threats that confront us all point to a fragility of our climate that, until now, completely escaped our attention. Fortunately, the science underlying our climate change has been advancing with new insights and theories appearing on a regular basis. This is still an intense on-going topic of investigation and insight. But, the science has passed judgment on our basic future and now it’s up to the public to catch up with their vision. Although it is already late, it is not too late to save the planet and preserve decent lives for our children and grandchildren. But it is in their future interests and well being that we must act now. So, an essential grasp of these concepts is increasingly important if we, as humans, are going to avoid falling off a cultural survival cliff that lies in our future if we don’t think and act more decisively to curb the new summers of our discontent.  The first person we have to mobilize is ourselves and after that, we can worry about our neighbors and friends. There are plenty of reasonable people out there that need to be convinced about the alarming situation that confronts us and the best way to do that is begin by developing our own educational skills about climate change and the emergency we face. We must quickly rid ourselves of coal-burning sources of electricity and put the kibosh on the use of Canadian tar sand sources. We need to reach a point where we leave the remaining energy in the ground and stop destroying mountain tops for coal.

Although it’s a common default cause for the media, we can no longer blame our current and future weather on El Nino/ La Nino or even a Super El Nino that climatologists talk about. There is some speculation that El Nino could become a permanent fixture to the environmental makeup. It used to be that these special events, which can bring about disastrous drought and flood conditions (depending on where you are), happened every ten years or so, but now they are more frequent, occurring about every four years. We have skewed the climate curve and most of us don’t know how or why, but increasingly we think it’s serious and we have to engage the rest of the world on a rational basis for believing that action needs to begin now and inaction will be a crime against humanity’s future.  Actually, we don’t have to convince the rest of the world–they already get it. We have to convince the rest of America and we have to begin to assume a leadership role in planetary revivalism. The new more violent weather patterns we have been seeing throughout the planet point an uncomfortable finger towards the unavoidable: there is more energy in the atmosphere and that excess energy needs to dissipate itself in some new, often more violent way. A small part of that expression will be in the form of dust storms that we have seen recently in the Phoenix Haboob and before that in the monstrous dust storm that moved across Australia (A NASA image of the Australian dust storm of 2009 is in the second figure). These dust storms are not unlike the dust bowl storms of the 1930s in the American and Canadian prairie lands, though they have a different origin this time around (dust storms of the 1930s have been attributed to soil erosion whereas global warming storms express increased energy in the atmosphere unleashed by condensation). Concurrent collisions between two storm centers can generate massive, uplifting air currents, scooping up dust and throwing it high enough into the atmosphere to be easily seen from satellites. More moisture in the air creates more storms and they will get more violent  In many ways, Australia and New Zealand are like Global Warming laboratories which illustrate both extremes of climate-warming weather gyrations, including severe droughts and record-breaking floods in 2010, in which a region the size of Germany and France combined, was under water, with the storm actions centered in Queensland. Global Warming weather is here and it will not go away.

The concepts that underlie Global Warming need to be learned and instilled among students in all of our public schools at all ages and we need to enlist the young  in experiments that can teach them about climate science and the emergency we find ourselves in. The students then need to bring this scientific knowledge into their homes and educate and invigorate their parents. The new generation needs to face the threats of climate change like no other generation before it. Until now we have assumed planetary constancy but the luxury of that assumption is gone. We need to have this topic constantly on the airways–it’s that serious. On the one hand, it’s like a modern iteration of Galileo telling us that the earth is not the center of the universe (as first suggested by Copernicus), but with one big difference–nothing changed when we learned the new rules of planetary rotations, although Galileo went into house arrest for blasphemy against the church and stayed there until his death.  But except for him and the impact his house arrest had on his young colleagues, the rest of contemporary society could just sit back and claim indifference or belief, without any action required.  The threat of Global Warming is at the opposite end of this analogy spectrum because if we don’t convert this new knowledge of climate change into action, to reduce our carbon emissions, we may be putting all species on the planet at increased risk for survival, including the one we have named  Homo sapiens. Indeed, for some species, such as the polar bear, the possibility of extinction through our greenhouse gas emissions has already been foretold and could be unavoidable; then too, coral reefs  are disappearing as the oceans become more acidic by absorbing more carbon dioxide. We can’t be neutral because the oceans no longer are and they are already talking back to us about we have done to them. Imagine the oceans without any coral reefs: where will all the fish go? We can’t wait to see if the science is wrong or whether some unknown force will emerge to wipe our carbon mess away.  Faux News will have to go–we need nothing but objectivity and action with an arrow pointing in the right direction. Those oars that are not pulling us all in the same direction need to be silenced or nullified. The world cries out for the return simple things like verifiable truth, not the muted information we get from our corporate news media. I agree with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now when she says that “mainstream media” is a misnomer, because they don’t really reflect the views of mainstream America at all. But that’s another story.

While I am a scientist (neuroscientist), I do not feel any special advantage over non-scientists when it comes to learning something about our climate and its history. The topic covers virtually all aspects of our scientific knowledge base, from physics to biology through paleontology,  evolution, geology, chemistry and astrophysics, while at least touching on everything in between. Hanging on the forces that created our climate is the tree of life itself. And increasingly there is the question of human ethics if we don’t act soon in the interest of protecting those that follow. I began reading and writing on this topic as I went along, expressing myself periodically in this forum, at the same time that I was assimilating some of the basics of our climate history and the essential mechanisms of climate change.  At one level, it’s all too simple: the carbon dioxide we have been dumping into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels from the beginning of the industrial revolution reflects heat energy from the earth that would normally go out into space (the shorter wavelengths of light coming from the sun do not interact with carbon dioxide–it’s the longer wavelengths that represent reflected heat (infrared) emission coming from the Earth that interacts with carbon dioxide molecules); part of the energy reflected by carbon dioxide heads back towards the earth and makes our planet warmer, just like what happens in a greenhouse and that’s why they call carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas. However, that’s the easy part–the hard part is understanding how the planet will react to this increased global warmth and those studies are still evolving and being refreshed and updated. But the basics are known–the planet is out of energy balance and it is beginning to speak back to us in predictable ways, few of which are desirable.

As I attempted to learn more about our climate, I took many diversions along the way, reading for example about foraminifera (forams) protists and their role in giving us information about our climate history and the importance of knowing the ratio of oxygen isotopes (O18 and O16) to measure ice and sea levels and ocean temperatures in the past. There is a giant literature on these topics and they all coalesce to give increasing confidence in the reliability of our knowledge about paleoclimatology–the science of knowing our past climate history. One thing seems clear to me: insights from paleoclimatology are essential for understanding our future, even though we have embarked on a climate experiment that is unlike anything that ever took place in the history of our planet. Two divergent methods give us information about the future of our climate. One is through modeling, using large-scale models to predict our climate future. These models are getting better, but they are still deficient in several important respects. The other method is through paleoclimatology, the idea that our climate has gone through many different changes in the past and the analytical techniques, largely applied to core drillings of ice sheets and the ocean floor, have provided us with an increasingly confident if incomplete understanding of our past environment and the factors that influenced our transitions through large climate excursions. It’s very fascinating stuff!

Fig. 2 Dust Storm Over Australia (September 2009)

What Are the Essential Questions? Early on, there was one over-riding question that I felt was an essential element to the core issues of global climate change and how I was going to address it. Everyone knows that the earth’s climate has seen fairly dramatic excursions of global temperatures over the documented history in which humans have provided some record of their presence and the question is what forces were responsible for those temperature excursions? How big were they and how did they happen? Are the same forces at work today?  Modern humans appeared about 200,00 years ago and human activity was observed about 130,000 years ago in Africa, where human evolution began. This time line of the fossil record took place during an interglacial period known as the Eemian, in which the average global temperature was only 1 degree Celsius warmer than what we have today. The warm Eemian period gave way to the last ice age, which developed over a period of thousands of years. However, the final descent into the last ice age happened about 70,000 years ago, was very rapid and coincided with the near extinction of humans. Genetic variance studies suggest that that as few as 1000 breeding pairs of humans survived the precipitous onset of the ice age and went on to procreate our contemporary human population. One theory for this rapid excursion into the ice age was the explosion of the Toba supervolcano which blocked the sun, significantly cooled the earth and challenged human survival by creating a long “nuclear winter.” So we know that our climate has changed quite dramatically, such that at one time it challenged the future of human existence, and perhaps it can change more dramatically than we think. But how do we know that the forces responsible for the last ice age won’t come along and create another one, rendering the issue of Global Warming as an irrelevant topic best left to climatologists and paleoclimatologists? One could ask is there really a need to learn something about climate change? Won’t the earth fix itself as some early climate doubters claimed?

The climate experiment we have embarked on has never been executed before. This is a new experiment. Whereas the Earth’s climate has typically evolved over millennia, we have, during the last two centuries, taken a giant syringe and injected our atmosphere with 130 ppm of additional carbon dioxide (along with some serious levels of methane and other atmospheric contaminants) and now we are waiting for the rest of the experiment to unfold. We finally recognize from early reports about this experiment, that we would like to stop it, remove the carbon dioxide we added and get back to the business of being humans again, but this time without the recent weather patterns that include giant floods, excessive droughts and global threats to our water supply. So that’s the message: how do we stop the experiment we started now that it’s going so badly? Stop the experiment–I want to get off. According to scientist James Hansen, if we eliminated all coal-burning sources of energy, and did so within decades, we would come very close to ending our carbon nightmare. But, right now, the world is building more coal-burning energy sources, so we are still moving in the wrong direction.Then too there is the problem of what we would use to replace this source of energy. Renewable energy sources? Unfortunately, we are a long way from having that as a reliable energy source, so we are left with a miracle biofuel or perhaps nuclear energy. Nuclear energy as we have known it is out of the question, because of our inability to handle the nuclear waste and the accident that took place earlier this year in Fukushima Japan. But fast breeder reactors, that have very little nuclear waste and can use up the nuclear waste we have stock piled, could emerge as an alternative. The plan to build one of those reactors was started under the Nixon administration, but killed under Clinton.

The Human Drive for Knowledge and the Best Way to Get it: The great beauty of the university classroom is that professors stand in front of you and condense vast knowledge into a small crystal that dissolves in your brain and creates an image of clarity, where before there was only confusion and uncertainty. Of course, as we all know, you can’t absorb all this by sitting  passively even if you are on the front row. Everyone who gains through this process has to study, read and ponder things, and all of us know that learning requires dedication to the task. Repetition breeds familiarity with the subject and stimulates the need to know more. We learn far more effectively from a knowledgeable person standing in front of us, engaging our brains on the topic of our mutual interest, when compared to any other forum of learning. Now that this form of learning is under threat, we realize that it has been both under appreciated and not well understood, though it requires human dialogue and interaction to work effectively. After forty years of being a university professor, I profess that this mechanism we have established to transmit knowledge by learned scholars standing in front of us, tickling our brains with integrated facts and a lifetime of research experience, is the highest standard of educational sophistication that we have attained in human history and any efforts to destroy this high form of learning will in turn destroy our culture. We should be expanding that experience not contracting it, as we are doing by such things as “distance learning” and “for profit” educational institutions. It is such a profound mode of learning that every human should have the opportunity to experience it and the intellectual stimulation it evokes; otherwise they are robbed of insight from the best form of education humans have ever developed. If expanding this form of didactic/Socratic learning became a more universal form of education, we might have hope of accommodating the 9 billion people on this planet, the expected population by the middle of this century. But even by then, there will still be more cells in a single human brain than humans on the planet and the lust for knowledge will pulsate within each of them.  It is up to us in the new culture to make sure that the innate thirst humans have for knowledge is met by teachers with expertise and enthusiasm for the work. As parents, all of us had to be teachers to our children and now the demand placed on us is to be a parent to the planet: it has been abused.

A First Among Us–the Tea Party Brain: Tea Party climate denial is hard to understand, for it is in this sector of humanity that the thirst for knowledge has died out, extinguished beyond any hope of repair. We might wonder whether this is a new stage in the human evolutionary experience. Someone must do an fMRI study on these Tea Party members to learn how it is possible for a member of our species to suppress frontal lobe function, when in fact that is what the human brain was designed to engage in–the need to figure things out. Normally, it carries out this function unavoidably–it’s human nature.  Until confronted by this group, I did not know that we as humans came with an off switch for this form of brain activity–I thought the use of frontal lobes for longitudinal thinking was obligatory, unavoidable and indigenous to our species. What surprises me even more, but seems consistent with the facts, is that once you turn that switch off and leave it in the off position for a while, it can’t be turned back to on–there’s no more light in that particular brain cavity. Apparently, for the Tea Party Republicans, energy for frontal lobe brain activity was permanently diverted to other centers that remain active, including brainstem functions. It follows that Tea Party members probably have excellent respiration. If so, they should be our first canary in the coal mine. Perhaps that will be their major contribution in the future. Climate denialists working to promote climate disaster, while steadfastly acquiring emphysema.

Creative Confusion: In the early phase of what I call “creative confusion” over my ignorance about climate mechanisms, I sat in on a class,  Mathematical Modeling of Climate Change directed by Professor Richard McGehee of the Mathematics Department at the University of Minnesota. A linked site provides references to some of the important publications in the field of climate science. If you go there you can get a copy of Jim Hansen’s 2008 paper  Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim. It will be a useful reference for his book which I describe below. The modeling course by McGehee was an excellent learning experience, aided by PowerPoint slides from major scientific studies, it was pivotal in getting me to realize how little I knew about Global Climate Change, even though it was not my first introduction to climatology, as I had read a number of scientific papers as well as some of the published reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There is of course a massive literature on the topic of climate change and crystallizing it into a more manageable form is not really possible, so we have to settle for some of the major principles and focus at first on books that have tried to summarize and coalesce the science; then there is the question about how far you want to go, particularly if you still have a day job. I am still on that journey, but I write here to recommend a few books that I have read along the way that others might find useful.

Fig. 3 Mount Rongbuk glaciers in the Himalayas; top is 1968, botton is 2007 (from James Hansen)

Book One: Five different books have given me new insights on global climate change that you might find useful in understanding the problem, its origins, what we can do about it and what is being done today.  I have already reported on one, “The Discovery of Global Warming” by Spencer Weart, Harvard University Press, 2008. This is a short, highly readable book on the history of Global Warming and the mechanisms of climate change. Weart has a website where you can essentially download most of the book and other features, such as a timeline of Global Warming history. If you want to assist the cause, allowing your idle computer to work solving global climate models, you can do that as well by going here. Weart also offers advice on how to talk to a climate skeptic which I am not following in this posting.  His site is worth more than one visit. I always get something new each time I tune-in.

More work is being carried out on adaptation than you might realize and future possibilities might work out, but only if we soon begin to mitigate the carbon dioxide levels that we have been adding to our atmosphere since the industrial revolution began. One should no longer be thought of as an alarmist to suggest that the fate of civilization as we know it is at stake, with the serious possibility that our inaction could dramatically truncate the human population to a point where survival can occur but only under very primitive living conditions if at all. Perhaps the most important point that one can make, is that all those who have studied climate change for any significant period in their lives come away from that experience, believing as I do, that our planetary future is in peril and emergency, knowledgeable action is required.  “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet“ by Mark Lynas was published in 2008 by The National Geographic Society in collaboration with HarperCollins. I don’t see this book available on Kindle. To research this book,  Lynas went the to the Oxford library for months and took notes on tens of thousands of articles, reading original, peer-reviewed publications on global climate studies as he classified each paper, based on the degrees with which the study projected the global temperature increase during this century. He also relied on the IPCC report, which in 2007, based its predictions on probabilistic outcomes, and the use of phrases like “Virtually certain = greater than 99% probability” all the way to “Exceptionally unlikely as less 1% probability” and of course, many levels in between. The book is organized by chapters based on projections of the average global temperature increase during the 21st century. It is thus more futuristic and predictive than teasing apart the mechanisms of climate change, though some of that is touched upon. Separate chapters are devoted to (1) One Degree, (2) Two Degrees, (3) Three Degrees…all the way up to (6) Six Degrees. Each chapter describes the kind of climate changes expected if the mean global temperature should reach the degree predictions specified by the chapter title. Every chapter has references in the back “note” section to validate the author’s projections. Keep in mind that these are degrees Centigrade, so remember that 1 degree centigrade=1.8 degrees Fahrenheit; thus the outside projection of six degrees, where all hell breaks loose, would be 10.8 degrees F, a whopping change and one that is hard to imagine, but definitely achievable if we don’t act quickly. At those temperatures, human adjustment is not just a matter of turning up the air conditioner, its a matter that food won’t grow, deserts will get larger, sea levels will rise by more than 270 feet and the polar ice caps and Greenland ice will all be gone. We can’t let that happen, but we have to act now to make sure such a dire projection is avoided.

The One Degree Picture: The minimal One Degree picture for the Southwest United States is not pretty, as drought conditions are projected to increase. Humans have already experienced severe drought conditions in that region, both in the pre-industral era, as well as those taking place today. Lynas describes the Pueblo Indian society that lived in Chaco Canyon, located in New Mexico, where the inhabitants erected the largest stone building on the North American Continent before the European invasion–four stories high with 600 rooms. When a significant drought came to the region in AD 1130 the culture collapsed; many died, while  survivors  eked out a living within the steep cliffs nearby. There is evidence for a violent ending for many in Chaco canyon, attended by cannibalism. In the One Degree future for the Southwest, projections include 40% less rainfall, sustained over decades. The primary reason for drought conditions in these areas is that warmer air can hold more moisture, so that it can further dry the earth surface and make the region more vulnerable to fires and failed crop production. Other problems include water shortages interspersed with flooding and enhanced and more dangerous hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, coupled with more widespread, powerful storms that will make many regions of the country far less habitable and living conditions more uncertain. The places on the planet where humans can live comfortably will shrink.

Mount Kilimanjaro: Scientists are now rushing to Africa’s highest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro, to obtain ice core samples that provide information about Africa’s geologic past, obtained by dissecting through the ice cores for layers of dust, oxygen isotopes and gas bubbles frozen in isolation within discrete layers. Studies estimate that 80% of the glacier on the top of Kilimanjaro melted during the 20th century and by roughly 2015, four years from now, it will all be gone. The only ice from the mountain that will still be in existence will be in the form of ice cores in the freezers of scientists’ laboratories. Glaciers are melting throughout the globe and cultures that depend on glacier melting for their water supply will face an increasing challenge for water as the glacier runoffs are reduced to a trickle (see figure above on Mt Rongbuck in the Himalayas)

Fig. 4 Surface Greenland Ice Flowing into a Moulin

More Than One Degree: From the one degree scenario things, as you might predict, get much worse and Lynas covers issues like polar bear extinction, which I have touched on previously and failed agriculture in China. At three degrees, an alarming result has been reported in a 2000 paper published in Nature–in which a massive positive carbon feedback forcing was modeled, involving release of huge amounts of carbon from land sources, adding 250 ppm of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2100 and adding an additional 1.5 degrees to the global temperature; this model resulted in the creation of a huge desert in the Amazon rain forest! Imagine that–from jungle to desert! According to this model global temperature could reach 4.0 to 5.5 degrees C by 2100 reaching close to the outer limits projected by the IPCC’s worst-case scenario. Lynas’ book does not have many positive outcomes, though there may be some regions that continue to have a climate where humans can survive and maintain the culture we have grown up in, minus of course the luxury of polluting our atmosphere with carbon fuels. The point of all this is that surviving humans need to have access to good technologies for generating heat and cooling while not adding to the carbon load and hopefully reducing it in time to prevent the full blown, worst case scenarios generated by climate science. It is up to us.

Six Degrees: When you reach the outer limits of projected global temperature change, that of six degrees, you can find a period when the earth was that warm to compare with what we might face under the same temperature conditions,  but you need to go all the way back to the Cretaceous period, some 65 to 144 million years ago. At that time the continents were still united into a single land mass (Pangaea), though the Atlantic Ocean was beginning to form–about as big as the Mediterranean–and sea levels were 200 or more meters higher than they are today; only 80% of the current land mass was above water and the average temperature was ten to fifteen degrees hotter than today. Africa, South America and southern portions of North America and Europe were dry and inhospitable, though the northern latitudes were warm and humid and, importantly,  no ice caps were evident at either pole. In the last chapter of his book, Lynas emphasizes that right now, perhaps for a period of only a few years, we have a choice about the world in which we want our children and grandchildren to live. The one degree scenario probably can’t be avoided, or if we did avoid it, we would have to get back to 350 ppm of carbon dioxide (right now we are at 387) and do so very quickly. Even then we would be faced with decades of an altered climate and if we returned to 350 ppm, at the very least there would be fewer non-human species.  The two degree scenario is fast approaching, with carbon dioxide at 400 ppm, a level projected for 2015. Beyond that, all bets are off because we could enter into the carbon-cycle feedback that might generate a potentially disastrous and irreversible climate change–a true tipping point to our climate future. On the whole this is an excellent book which properly frames our future insofar as we can make sound judgments derived from the science and models that are currently available. Lynas closes the introduction to his book by remarking, “Of this I have no doubt: Climate change is the canvas on which the history of the 21st century will be painted. Forewarned is forearmed.”

A Second Book: The second book I recommend is “Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth“ by Mark Hertzgaard. This was published a few months ago (2011) and is available on Kindle. Hertzgaard has written extensively on climate change in articles published in The New Yorker, The Nation and Vanity Fair. He has covered global climate issues for years and has traveled throughout the world interviewing scientists, experts, city planners, hydrologists and farmers to learn more about the hardships we can expect from global climate change. He is doubtful that the Monsanto monoculture farming technique, that is widespread in America and China can succeed, and suggests that farmers must increasingly rely on using biodiversity/organic farming techniques. Otherwise there is a risk, like that of the potato famine in Ireland, of having crops wiped out because they are all the same, heat intolerant, drought susceptible, or disease prone. Many farmers are speaking out against the Monsanto strategy of genetically altered crops that are resistant to Roundup, so that the herbicide can be used more effectively against weeds.   One of the positive achievements taking place is that farmers in the Sahel region of Africa, including Kenya, Sudan and Uganda increasingly use a method referred to as “farmer-managed natural regeneration” (FMNR) in which they are recapturing and creating fertile, farmable soil by planting trees to help them push back the desert. The mulch generated by the leaves of trees retains more moisture and improves the nurturing quality of the soil, leading to improved productivity of the land. Time will tell whether the pressure of climate change can be overcome with FMNR. It is one of the many fascinating issues currently evolving as one component to the world’s food supply. Manage the unavoidable and avoid the unimaginable is the guiding paradigm of those trying to adapt, but all the while keeping up the pressure for mitigation to reduce greenhouse gases. Without the latter, avoiding the unimaginable is not possible. Right now we are witnessing a human catastrophe in Africa where the most intense drought conditions in decades are forcing mass movements of people attended by widespread starvation. This too is a consequence of Global Warming which works by exaggerating conditions, including desertification,  that have taken place before.

This is a fascinating book and quite different from “Six Degrees.” This book presents an early summary of some of the changes that are shaping our climate, but Hertzgaard quickly moves on to discuss how his daughter Chiara, now five, must adapt successfully and survive the climate changes that are in her future. His thesis is that the intensity of Global Warming has arrived nearly a century before projections and that even if our global society is smart enough to get busy and reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere, we will still have to contend with an excessively warm planet for at least fifty years, because of the long half-life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Much of his book covers the success and attempts that others have and are making to adjust to the expected climate change and his book is focused on what his daughter must do to live through what is hopefully a temporary glitch, before our atmosphere returns to the conditions under which we and all other species have evolved and currently survive. The personal touch of looking towards the future, trying to protect a young daughter who is just beginning life and had nothing to do with creating climate change, gives the book a tone of emergency and sensitivity that  would otherwise be lacking. Discussing the impact of our climate future through the eyes of someone trying to protect their child, gives emphasis to the idea that Hertzgaard does not shy away from–those who oppose immediate action on our greenhouse emissions are guilty of crimes, serious crimes against the future of humanity.

Global Warming vs Global Climate Change: like many others, Hertzgaard distinguishes between Global Warming and Global Climate Change. The former is the actual increase in the mean global temperature as a result of greenhouse gases and the latter refers to the planet’s reaction to the increased temperature, or in other words, just about everything else. He also separates the concept of “adaptation,” meaning the things we must do to live through the next fifty years and “mitigation,” the international efforts that must be expanded to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, so that the period of adaptation will be confined to fifty years and not much longer. This terminology and distinction is also part of the most recent IPCC report (2007). Many scientists are leery of  adaptation because they fear it will relax the serious efforts we must take to mitigate the problem by reducing our carbon dioxide emissions. Adaptation by itself will not prevent the problem, in fact, it will get far worse if it leaves us with a false sense of security, feeling that we have done enough and we don’t have to deal further with the problem. Then it will truly get worse and may spin out of control.

Fig. 5 Greenland Ice Breakup

One issue which Hertzgaard addresses is the failure of the fourth IPCC to undertake serious recommendations about sea level rise. When he interviewed one of the reports’ authors, he found out that the fourth IPCC report committee  knew that the models they had been relying on for insights into sea level changes were wrong, so they minimized those aspects of the report and emphasized the need to await better modeling results, which would take into account the new realities of polar ice cap melting and the melting of Greenland’s vast ice stores (Figs 4 & 5). Climate models are furiously being revised to more accurately project sea level rise based on the new realities of massive melting conditions in the three regions of the globe that hold most of the ice and could impose an entirely different future for us if they melt more quickly that we presently assume. In other words, the IPCC fourth report of 2007 is flawed and its projections for sea level changes (which were less than the previous report) cannot be taken seriously. That issue is where James Hansen’s work comes in more forcefully (see below).

This is an informative book that speaks passionately about how it is too late to avoid climate change, so we have to learn to live through decades of these anticipated alterations in our climate, but we can still avoid the full throttle of these effects, unless we reach a tipping point beyond which we cannot escape and, should that turn out to be true, we will watch helplessly as things we do then will have no meaning for our climate future.  Nevertheless, the tone and outlook of Hertzgaard’s message is upbeat: we can adapt, but we have to increase the public pressure for mitigating carbon dioxide down to levels commensurate with a full life, like the one we used to be able to promise to our children and grandchildren. Right now, that promise is up for grabs.

A Third Book: Global climate scientist James Hansen has written a very readable book, “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity”, published in 2009 by Bloomsbury. It’s available on Kindle and was reviewed in the LA Times If you read no other book, this is the one I would recommend because it blends the science of climatology together with Hansen’s personal history in bringing the attention of this threat into the public arena: it combines science with a personal narrative and some of it shamefully recreates how the Bush administration suppressed scientific information that Hansen tried to promote as a climate scientist.  I have commented many times on how the Republican Party and GW Bush have suppressed science to favor their own political interpretation over those generated through the laboratory. I have also provided a little slide show illustrating how we veered off course. Although it is written by an expert, it is done in such a way that you feel well informed and not intimidated by an overwhelming level of science and technogarble. No one in the world is in a better position to write on this topic and use this kind of title than James Hansen. He was the first to testify before Congress in 1988 and warn of the coming weather hardships if we don’t address the issue of greenhouse gases. He has written numerous articles on this topic and has been a leader, both scientifically and sociologically for a good part of his career. Bill McKibben, coordinator of 350.org, has referred to Hansen at “the planet’s great hero.” As the most outspoken advocate of immediate action to avert planetary disaster from climate change, you can imagine that Hansen is one of the prime targets of the climate change denial community. But, to our great benefit, Hansen is fearless in asserting what the science tells him needs to be done.

No scientist feels comfortable predicting and projecting the future, especially if it is something as complex as our global climate and a subject which is likely to attract international attention. We admonish meteorologists who don’t accurately predict the weather a few days in advance, so imagine what many reserve for a climatologist who can’t explain today’s weather hardly at all, but then has no doubt about the future weather trends. So what’s missing? Whereas many climatologists rely on computer models for projecting the future, Hansen instead is committed to paleoclimatology which he feels is on firmer ground, though he does not shy away from climate modeling and his worked has involved both approaches to the problem. However, he is cautious about modeling because models, while getting better, still leave out many important details. One of the model deficiencies that has come to light recently is that of the failure of such models to deal effectively with melting the polar ice caps and Greenland ice. Until recently the models treated these giant structures as ice cubes melting in a glass of water, but it is clear that the these ice sheets are disappearing much faster than this kind of model projects. The moulin figure on the right shows surface melt water that carved a hole into the ice and allows melt water to fall to the bottom, accelerating the ice melting process, including ice sheets that normally resist the flow of a glacier. The elimination of deeply buried ice sheets leads to an accelerated movement and melting of glaciers. As far as models of major ice pack melting goes, it’s back to the drawing board for this aspect of modeling, and while they are still trying to get those models up and running properly, Hansen maintains that the science of paleoclimatology is sufficiently well understood that we can look backwards in order for us to project our future. Although we have been there before, the promise is that the trip we have embarked upon is unlike any trip we have been on before.

Fig. 6 Forest Fires Are Increasing in Frequency and Magnitude

In 1750, the carbon dioxide levels in the air were 280 ppm or .028%; in 2009 the carbon dioxide was 387 ppm or .039%; by 2015 we are expected to hit the magic 400 mark. Imagine that a small change in our atmospheric carbon dioxide could potentially threaten the future of the planet. But that small % change in carbon dioxide, coupled with some of the other greenhouse emissions (such as methane), means that a new net forcing from this factor alone accounts for 1.5 to 2.0 watts of additional energy/for every square meter of the planet, with an error of perhaps a watt. That amounts to turning on a couple of Christmas tree lights for each square meter of the earth’s surface, which seems like a trivial force; in the short run, it cannot interrupt a storm or change a storm path and yet that seemingly minuscule change in net energy is sufficient over a long period of time to effect our climate future. Such an effect pushes the earth’s climate further out of balance. Right now, we are being saved further warming of the planet from greenhouse gases by another factor, also a product of our industrial age, but one whose impact we don’t know a lot about–aerosols. These are man made dust particles, including soot, sulfur dioxide, chlorofluorcarbons and many other particulates. Their effect, when put into the atmosphere is to reflect sunlight and in a way protect us from further warming. They do this in a manner similar to what happens when a volcano erupts and spreads ash into the atmosphere. This will tend to cool the air by reflecting sunlight and can do so for a few years depending on the tonnage of ash delivered by the explosion. But, unless replenished (as we are doing with our fossil fuel usage), the ash will be removed from the atmosphere and lead to restoration from the climate trends that were ongoing at the time. So the efforts that are being generated to reduce particulates as part of our overall atmosphere cleanup, may give rise to a new shift in the global warming cycle and that has led some scientists to suggest that we add reflective particles to the atmosphere to achieve cooling by reflection. Many scientists, including this one, do not see this as a sensible way out of our carbon dilemma.

Hansen’s strategy to deal with our carbon footprint is to analyze the carbon levels that are being added to the atmosphere and then ask where they go? His analysis tells us that global emissions of carbon dioxide increased from less than 2 gigatons (GtC) a year in 1950 to more than 8GtC per year in the last few years. Oddly enough, there are two measurable features to the carbon emission pattern, one of which is the global amount of carbon dioxide emission and the other is the carbon dioxide that is in the atmosphere–two known quantities. Divide the annual increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the fossil fuel emissions and you get another parameter known as the airborne fraction or the fraction of the emission that is in the atmosphere. Oddly enough, that quantity has remained constant from 1950 to 2010, meaning that a constant fraction of what we are adding to the environment is going into a carbon sink. Carbon sinks include the ocean, forests and soils. Without these sinks our carbon loading of the atmosphere would be much greater that it is today. It has been estimated that the ocean takes up about 3 GtC per year; thus a fossil fuel load of 8.5 GtC per year, which leads to an average 4.5 GtC per year in the atmosphere,  add the ocean sink of 3 GtC per year and we get a net carbon sink for vegetation and soil of about 1 GtC per year. It is encouraging that this land sink for carbon dioxide exists despite the massive deforestation our planet has undergone during the last several hundred years. In the United States, 99% of the old growth forest has been cut down, reducing considerably the contribution from forests which would ordinarily form another large carbon sink. If we continue to use fossil fuels, the land sink for carbon dioxide could become saturated, leading to a much larger atmospheric carbon loading. It is important that we help reforest the planet, for better carbon balance.

Hansen’s book is an educational experience embedded in a fascinating narrative of his scientific life, with stories of his grandchildren added to invoke a proper sense of urgency to our current climate crisis. Hansen travels as a kind of international celebrity and the gold standard for frank discussion of our global threat. He has written letters to leaders of the world, imploring them to take climate issues seriously and begin by eliminating the use of coal. He insists that we must give up on the use of coal immediately–no more mountain tops removed–coal is the worst form of  polluting energy we have. Not only does it heavily pollute the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, but coal mining creates huge levels of polluted water and adds toxins such as mercury to our global air supply and the oceans.  Hansen’s idea is that if we could eliminate the use of coal, we would solve the carbon dioxide problem and begin to head back to 350 ppm carbon dioxide by the latter half of this century. He believes that a carbon tax needs to be applied at the source of each form of fossil fuel, with the money generated given back to the public as a dividend.  In that way the “fee-and-dividend strategy,” as models suggest, could reduce carbon emissions by 28 percent compared to what we have today. Hansen is forcefully opposed to cap-and-trade, which he believes is unworkable and nothing more than a political scam. Tragically, cap-and-trade is the basis of the law that is likely to be passed by Congress, though don’t hold your breath when that might happen.

In case you remain skeptical about Hansen’s sense of urgency concerning our planetary future and the need to act quickly, one of his later chapters (10) is titled “The Venus Syndrome,” in which he lays out how Venus, whose surface temperature is currently  +450 degrees C was once a planet, that like Mars and Earth, probably had oceans. At the time Venus was formed, the sun was 30 percent dimmer, so Venus was probably cool enough to have oceans. Mars on the other hand had its water frozen with a surface temperature of -50 degrees C, as its orbit is further out. But as the sun got brighter, the surface of Venus got hotter and the oceans became water vapor while carbon dioxide, from carbon sources of the planet, became the dominant gas, currently constituting about 97 percent of the atmosphere. Hansen argues that the earth could replicate the sequence of events that made Venus uninhabitable by going through a runaway greenhouse gas emission levels that reach 10 to 20 watts per square meter. This level could be achieved with a relatively small increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, though the exact levels required are unknown. But, such levels are in the ballpark of what we might get to by burning every last stitch of our fossil fuel supply and may be unavoidable if we don’t stop emitting greenhouse gases before we reach a tipping point where this planetary scenario is unavoidable. Right now we are “enjoying” a minimal period of solar radiation, based on the historical record from satellite data that was first obtained in the 1970s. Should the sun pull out of its current minimum in radiation, it could serve to further accelerate our date with a climate disaster.

Hansen’s final chapter describes the kinds of storms that our children and grandchildren are likely to experience, as he emphasizes that we are already going through these kinds of changes in our weather patterns; he uses concrete examples of past storms to illustrate the connection. Not every storm we see will have an obvious Global Warming signature. But collisions between warm, moist air and cool dry air will increasingly reflect the new energy stored in our atmosphere and released through condensation. His point is that the increase in the violence of the storms we have encountered so far pales in comparison to what we can expect in the near future. The additional energy in the atmosphere will drive larger storms, with more moisture, higher winds, more violent hail storms and give rise to larger and more deadly tornadoes. A mere 10 percent increase in wind speed increases the destructive potential of the storm by one-third. These supercell storms will increase in frequency and magnitude. The devastating tornadoes,  such as those that horrified us this year in Oklahoma, Alabama and Joplin Missouri will only increase in magnitude and destructive force. Thundersnow storms such as the giant cyclonic blizzard  Superstorm that struck the East Coast in mid-March 1993 had 100 mile per hour winds and stretched from Central America to Nova Scotia, Canada. Once the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers begin serious melting, north-south temperature gradients will further increase and likely change the ocean currents with yet more devastating storms like the Superstorm of 1993.  Now add the rise in sea levels anticipated and you have the additional capacity of windstorm floods reaching into new regions, not storm-flooded before. In America, we are not even remotely prepared to face these kinds of forces or admit to their origin.This is a special tragedy, since this country has supported much of the science that went into discovering these man-made threats to our future.

This book is Hansen’s clarion call for action. He advises those alarmed by these environmental threats to join Bill McKibben’s 350.org and participate in the events that are needed to change the way we live and revert the planet to one we can live on in the absence of a man-made threat that will make life on earth virtually impossible if we do nothing about atmospheric carbon dioxide. Despite the alarmist nature of Hansen’s message, he remains an optimist about our future and continues to give lectures and advise governments on what lies ahead if we don’t act now. He also has grandchildren that he hopes to help protect from a future that none of us want, but few of us are prepared to help prevent.

RFM

So, to set the record a little straighter on Reagan, my current candidate for the worst president in history, I can add the following to the litany of deficiencies about his presidency, things not covered in the PBS documentary. During Reagan’s first term, AIDS came of age and Reagan steadfastly refused to acknowledge the disease or have his government act on it, as they should have done because of the government’s responsibility for protecting the interests of public health. The Surgeon General of the United States was expressly forbidden to discuss AIDS.  It was not until late in his second term, when he learned that his friend Rock Hudson had died of AIDS, did he finally bring the word into his dialog. In the meantime, tens of thousands of Americans and perhaps millions of Africans could have had their lives saved with more timely information and better supportive care and education. Reagan also began the process of destroying the integrity of the Surgeon General’s office, so that he/she could not independently advocate things like the dangers of smoking or AIDS or anything else that was a political no-no for the Republicans. This trend, started under Reagan, would gain momentum under GW Bush who delayed the report on the health problems of second-hand smoke. For Reagan’s handling of the AIDS problem alone, we cannot dismiss the damage that was done to the health of this country, the lack of understanding about AIDS and the role that our government, driven by an ideological interpretation of disease, allowed Ronald Reagan  to suppress vital  information about AIDS because he thought that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuality. They went so far as to suppress information on AIDS in Africa because that form of AIDS was not homosexual in origin, but rather heterosexually transmitted and such an admission would get the Reagan administration off message on AIDS: so the delusional tactic remained in place. You can read about Reagan’s AIDS policy history here.

RFM

A recent  NYT article describes a possible major breakthrough in the disovering the etiology of CCD.  The Times article was based on an extensive study described in the on-line science journal Plos One (public access is available). The combined force of academic researchers and a group of army researchers studying proteomics, extensively analyzed  and compared stable, unstable and collapsed bee colonies. They used a very powerful method of mass-spectrometry based proteomics. With this approach, instead of looking for genomic evidence, they were able to analyze thousands of different proteins and infer back to identify the organisms that generated them. The field of proteomics has exploded in the last decade and is becoming an increasingly powerful way of looking at gene control through analysis of the proteins they generate. Although many pathogens have already been detected in bees and many were also discovered in the Plos One study, two different organisms seemed to consistently track one another and correlate best with CCD, including a large DNA virus, not described in bees previously, and referred to as the invertebrate iridescent virus (IIV; Iridoviridae); however samples also consistently contained a microsporidia Nosema apis (fungus); the co-localization of these two pathogens was more consistent with CCD than either one alone. Once a hive was infected, forager flights began to decline, as dead honey bee samples showed increasingly high peptide counts from the two pathogens. Using pathogen injections into single bees (see figure), they were able to show that bee toxicity was far more evident when both pathogens were injected as opposed to either one alone.

Injection of single bees

The take home message from this study is twofold: first MSP is a powerful tool for studying the pathogenic origins of bee infections and secondly, perhaps a dual infection with a previously unknown (in bees) large DNA virus (Iridoviridae) and a  fungal agent (Nosema apis) accounts for beehive collapse in America. The authors are quick to point out that  CCD in other countries may be attributed to different pathogens and that their analysis may only account for the problem in North America. It is still not clear whether the dual infection is the cause of CCD or whether it is a sign of imminent colony collapse, but the injection studies certainly point to these two pathogens as the cause rather than an indicator. The obvious question is that if the double pathogen theory is correct, how can CCD be treated and can beehives be restored to centers of industry and productivity? Many workers in the field seem to believe that treating the fungus may be the best approach, but as the graph shows, fungus control alone may not solve the entire problem. Iinjections with either pathogen reduced bee lifespan over controls. Perhaps on the way to recovering normal beehive function, we may have a period in which beehive lifespan is reduced, while still serving a pollinating function. The other possibility that is difficult to eliminate is that healthy bees can effectively fight off these infections, while bees that are environmentally intoxicated through other means cannot. Thus, one can ask whether CCD in North American bee colonies reflects the globalization of pathogen exposure or have these pathogens always been in the environment and now have opportune moments for bee infection, because their hosts decline in health through other mechanisms? Only time and a lot more research can answer these questions. The good thing about the Plos One report is that a new bee pathogen has been discovered and it may hold important clues to the future of pollination and the security of our own food supply.

Let’s see now, how would the free market  respond to the pollination problem we are facing in America? No, they would not invest in the development of electronic pollinators because the development time is too long (remember that the lifespan of a CEO is about five years, so investment must yield something substantial within that time frame).  Only the shaky and uncertain thrust of venture capitalism would respond with long-term investments and the hope of a payoff down the road. That sector of our financial repertoire  is about the only healthy element  that remains, but it is too small to be a broadly effective source of financing.  In the meantime, thank God we have a government who will support these studies, though I find it worrisome that a U.S. Army MSD apparatus was necessary, rather than having one available to the scientists on their own, together with the expertise required to run the machine and interpret the data. This is what happens when grants get cut to the bone and research is limited because of limited funding. I counted eighteen authors on the Plos One article and thirteen different institutional locations. A problem of the depth and magnitude of CCD can only be approached through highly collaborative scientific efforts.  CCD is truly one of the more profoundly disturbing components of our modern culture and, in my view,  should be ranked with global climate change as a looming threat for which we need to mobilize a strong research effort, preferably one that doesn’t require the American military. On the other hand this story represents a good union of vital resources and technologies that proved essential to unravel this part of what remains as a serious whodunit problem.

RFM

In case you haven’t heard, bottled water is not regulated and, in many cases, it is merely tap water or worse (one example pointed out in the documentary was one in which a small company drilled a hole for water next to a Superfund site for hazardous waste removal). Bottled water in this country is already a $10 billion business and worldwide the sales are more than $ 100 billion. The United Nations has estimated that for $30 billion, the entire population of the world could be provided with sufficient water for their daily  human needs. In the credit section of the documentary, they urge viewers join in signing a petition and contribute to a movement within the U.N. to provide safe, fresh water for all human inhabitants of the world, as an innate right of global  citizenship (that should extend to animals as well, but that’s getting a little ahead of the game). Doesn’t that sound simple and right?

The full wording of UN Article 31 is  “Everyone has the right to clean and accessible water, adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access or quality of water due to individual economic circumstance.” You can sign the petition by going here. This pursuit of privatized water is a growing multinational corporate menace created by the sinister for-profit drive by the amoral free market economy, the force that is increasingly impoverishing the globe, with no major obstacles yet standing in its way. The economic crash we are still enjoying, given to us by corporate greed, is being used to accelerate the move towards complete privatization of our water supply. Our public water supply is under a threat that extends to all corners of the globe.

I previously commented on how Bolivia managed to drive out Bechtel, a corporate giant, who had privatized the local water supply of Cochabamba (as one condition for receiving a World Bank loan), but had to leave one step ahead of the hangman when their enterprise went sour because of rapid increases in local water charges. Then too, I raised the issue a while ago about why bottled water is an unnecessary ripoff and serves to remove pressure to keep our drinking water supply safe and continuously evaluated.
This documentary on water is an easy, but disturbing introduction to the vast scope of our water supply future.  The impact of trapping water by damning rivers goes far deeper than we might think. By creating huge numbers of ever larger damns, we massively reduce the normal flow of nutrients that eventually find their way to the ocean and help sustain both river and ocean sea life.  Creating damns not only reduces the capacity of our oceans to support life, but the nutrients that are trapped by the damn sink and rot and contribute methane gas to our environment, one of the greenhouse gases that we have to worry about. The High Aswan damn built on the Nile in the 1960s, has reduced the flow of nutrients to farmers, such that some of the electricity generated by the damn has gone into the production of fertilizer to replace what was lost when the damn became operational. But the replacement fertilizer is very rich in phosphates, which in turn generate large algae blooms. While the high Aswan damn provides a large fraction of electricity to the region, many who have studied the impact of the damn over its 40 plus year history,  have concluded that its net effect for the population has been negative.

Global climate change, combined with poor distribution and conservation of our water supply (more golf courses in Arizona?) are creating a crisis of water distribution, that, like global climate change, many of us will increasingly experience as one component of our future life on this shrinking planet during the advancing decades of this century. It seems that nature picked this century to test our wisdom in managing natural resources and, in response to this dilemma, we selected GW Bush as the first leader of this potentially dangerous new century. Good choice America! You probably thought I would not be able to squeeze in a reference to GWB in this short article, but there you have it! You may recall that GWB has purchased a huge piece of property in Paraguay, near one of the largest aquifers (the Guarani aquifer) in South America. What do you think a free marketeer like GWB is planning for his property development? It has the added feature that it is protected by a nearby secret U.S. military base.

RFM

BP has denied there are any health hazards to which cleanup workers get exposed and claims to have taken measurements of the air quality to prove it. But, but those measurements have yet to appear in public. Mr Guidry, knowledgeable about air quality issues, brought respirators to the commercial fisherman who were employed by BP for the cleanup, but they were all informed that BP would fire anyone caught using a respirator. Guidry claims that this experience goes all the way back to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, when respirators were not allowed to be used so that the company limited its liability; the use of respirators is an indication that the oil company believes there is an environmental problem with air quality and, as such, exposes them to the liability for respiratory ailments, a situation that could lead to long-term legal problems for the company. BP has stated that nothing is wrong with the air quality in the cleanup areas. If so, what made the workers ill a few weeks ago? Guidry claims it was exposure to toxins in the air. As it turns out, EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the Federal agency responsible for monitoring air quality has no jurisdiction for air quality over the water, but would have jurisdiction once the air moves onto land. It appears that the Coast Guard and MMS have jurisdiction over air quality issues in the water and so far these organizations have not made any decisions about air quality or cleanup worker safety. Measurements of air quality seem to be limited to those provided by BP. Mr Guidry reported that when he did work in cleaning up oil refineries, all workers had protective clothing and boots, as well as respirators as part of the normal routine worker protection. He has claimed that the lack of such protection exists solely so that BP limits its liability.

It would seem that The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a regulatory branch of our Federal Government, should have jurisdiction over environmental standards facing Gulf workers, since one could extrapolate work on the Gulf oil spill as as constituting a “workplace.” And, OSHA has standards for worker protection, which includes the need for respirators when adequate air quality conditions are not met. Under OSHA rules, respirators are supposed to be provided by the company. But, so far the respirators that have been showing up, though banned for use by BP, have all been provided by individuals, or in one case by the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council).

Beginning today, the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, is sponsoring a two-day workshop in New Orleans, LA, to discuss environmental health issues that face workers and residents in the region, related to the oil spill and the cleanup operation. You can watch a webcast of the meeting and even submit questions by going here. To view this properly, you will need Microsoft’s Silverlight which you can get here. The government of the United States needs to step in and take control of the environmental issues that are now apparent in many locations of this oil spill. Everyone in the region smells “oil.” Those workers closest to the source where the oil comes to the surface of the ocean must experience the most serious air quality problems. Why isn’t BP releasing measurements from these regions? Already we see in BP a company with a long history of safety violations, with little interest in responding to them, followed by subsequent disasters, followed in turn by minor fines which they treat as the cost of doing business. And, all of this takes place in a country that doesn’t matter to them, because corporate headquarters are in Great Britain. So far, our government has basically rewarded BP for their unresponsive attitude towards our safety regulations, and, their behavior in the Gulf oil spill is simply an example of continuity with their long-established corporate traditions, going as far back as when the company was Anglo-Persian, then Anglo-Iranian, at which time every drop of oil that fed the entire British economy, including fuel for ships, cars and lawnmowers, came from Iran, while the people in Iran got little in return and were treated as impoverished workers. BP would like to treat the people of America as they did the people of Iran and will continue to do so unless the people of America finally grasp the deficiencies in this arrangement.

There is straight line continuity in the BP we see operating in the Gulf today and the BP that felt it had exclusive rights to all Iranian oil, without adequate compensation to the Iranian people some seventy years ago. BP as a company should only survive so that its resources can be used to fund the study and cleanup of the Gulf oil spill, followed by company profits that will be funneled into the development of alternative energy sources. In other words, forcing the company to live up to their ads which talk about bp meaning “beyond petroleum.” What is yet to be established is whether BP will stand for “beyond prosecution.” We have plenty of safety standards that we could impose tomorrow should we choose to do so. Wouldn’t this be a great opportunity for Obama and his administration to finally take the wheel of this out of control vehicle we call BP?

RFM

Climatologists used to think that changes in the weather would only take place over hundreds if not thousands of years, because the atmosphere was perceived to be a large, gigantic carbon sink. But that has all changed and the contemporary view favors the potential for dramatic changes in climate that can take place  over decades or even in less time.  The delicate balance that we have taken for granted throughout the centuries of human history, has been significantly altered by our behavior, which has cumulatively started to change our environment, beginning with the industrial revolution. But those early, seemingly innocuous beginnings, are projected to reach peak levels of greenhouse gases during this century and eventually these new levels are projected to have a far more dramatic impact on our weather, even compared to the trends we have witnessed over the last few decades. Climatologists are confident that dramatic changes will begin to accelerate as the planet continues to warm and carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.   The Earth behaves like a blackbody source of radiation, in that it absorbs light energy from the Sun, whose wavelengths are generally short (in the visible wavelength spectrum and below (including ultraviolet light)) and then gives off energy at longer wavelengths, mostly in the infrared region, which is invisible to our eyes. In contrast however the Earth without an atmosphere loses sufficient heat through infrared radiation that, if that were the only thermal factor operating, it would leave our planet at temperatures well below freezing. It is the atmosphere that keeps absorbing and reflecting infrared radiation that is responsible for keeping our planet warm and, atmospheric carbon dioxide, though a small constituent of our atmosphere, has always played a major role in regulating our global climate.  Thus, the mean planetary temperature is created through the process of losing some heat through the atmosphere, while retaining some through heat capture and reflection; this dual process has served as the delicate balance by which we have faded into and out of warming and cooling cycles, including several ice-ages in our long geological history. While the causes of these past temperature fluctuations are still a matter of investigation and debate, scientists are in strong agreement that the carbon dioxide problem we face will dramatically change our weather, especially if we do nothing to control our carbon emissions.

The only way we can project our climate future is through computer models and base those models as rigorously as we can on data that we acquire through geological and other scientific disciplines. Today’s computer models are fairly sophisticated and have been gaining in precision and predictability as computer capabilities and measurement constraints have been slowly added to the modeling strategy. There is no other way. We are building these “General Circulation Models” and improving on them to make better predictions about our planetary future.  Initially, models and early studies tried to focus on why the Earth went through the dramatic temperature fluctuations that included several ice-age periods. Was this a normal cycling of the atmosphere and if so, why and how did our  weather change so drastically? But as the measurements and models got more sophisticated, climatologists, in collaboration with many other branches of science, including the biological and oceanic sciences, began to focus on a new problem, one that was increasingly created by man. This problem turned out to be not just an issue of greenhouse gases warming the Earth and the oceans, but also rising sea water levels that, in the near future, could threaten coastal cities and generate other, more dangerous possibilities created by alterations in the ocean currents that provide significant warm weather to Europe for example. In the latter case, models have demonstrated that that the Atlantic current that warms Europe, in which warm water travels north on the surface, as cold Arctic water travels in the opposite direction at deeper levels, could disappear in a relative heartbeat if the salinity of Arctic water goes down, as it might if significant melting in the region occurred. In an age of global warming, it seems counter-intuitive that Europe could get much colder, especially in the winter. But, not everyone is opposed to global climate change. Many Russians for example feel they would welcome a few degrees added to their winter. Then too excessive carbon dioxide can help support additional plant growth, but even this effect can turn negative if accompanied by excessive plant decay.

It was in 1938  that Stewart Callendar, standing in front of the Royal Meteorological Society in London,  first suggested that the planet was gradually warming and that the principal culprit was humans burning fossil fuels and adding tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Few other scientists accepted Callendar’s idea at the time, simply because it seemed irrational that the atmosphere was so delicate and limited that it couldn’t absorb the results of burning fossil fuels without a blip on the radar screen. Was planet Earth really that small? Earlier work by British scientist John Tyndall had determined that the main gases in the atmosphere, including nitrogen and oxygen, are transparent to infrared radiation, but “coal gas” was opaque to infrared rays, caused mostly by its high carbon dioxide content. In this way, atmospheric carbon dioxide became known as a “greenhouse gas.”

No teaching tool is quite like history for learning about the sea changes that shape politics and attitudes and the evolution of ideas, both scientific and otherwise. An excellent book that traces the history of global climate change is Spencer R. Weart’s “The Discovery of Global Warming“ Harvard Press, 2008. Weart has also created a site where a hypertext presentation and a summary of global climate change history and facts can be sorted out as a kind of short cut for reading the book.

From my perspective, the salient features of this story begin with the realization that scientists studying the global climate in the late 1970s had started to converge on the idea that Callendar was right: we faced a serious problem in the future with man-made greenhouse gases, the most important of which was carbon dioxide. But scientists alone cannot force changes in public policy and without some divine interference, scientists generally have a hard time getting attention to their concerns, unless there is a major catastrophe that requires their input for understanding (we can see the public beginning to turn to scientists for explanations as an aid in understanding the impact of the on-going BP Gulf oil spill).

In 1979, the influential National Academy of Sciences issued a report that gave increased visibility to the global warming concept by suggesting that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would bring an increase in global temperature of 1.5-4.5 degrees Centigrade (2.7-8.1 degrees Fahrenheit), an alarming increase that could raise serious concerns about the safety of our planetary future. Unfortunately, in the U.S., just as scientific studies of the global climate were gaining momentum, the election of Ronald Reagan brought about a backlash and helped generate the Republican skepticism on global warming that is still with us (or them) today. About the time that Reagan was elected President, Greenland ice core studies revealed that drastic temperature changes had taken place in our history within the span of a century, suggesting that our climate is not an ultrastable, unmodifiable system at all, but may have a tendency to favor rapid shifts in average global temperature, depending on multiple kinds of feedback systems, not all of which were then identified (and still aren’t). Other alarming studies showed that carbon dioxide was not the only greenhouse gas we had to worry about, as methane and other trace gases might also make a significant contribution, and had to be included in the models to avoid their predictive failure. Antarctic ice cores also revealed that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels went up and down together through past ice ages, which led scientists to conclude that our global atmosphere is highly dynamic and very modifiable–sort of like some  synapses in our brains.

1988 was an important year in the history of global climate study. It was an unusually hot year for the United States.  I remember that summer very well, as it was the year we moved from St. Louis to Minneapolis during heat spells that were uncharacteristic for the region and caused many well-established, older trees to die out. That was also the year in which U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was assembled, which, for the first time, formed a union between scientists and government representatives, whose function was to integrate scientific knowledge and help formulate public policy development to reduce greenhouse gases. The IPCC is the committee that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. The first report of the IPCC was made in 1990, in which the committee concluded that the planet had been warming in the recent past and future warming seemed likely. By 1995, the second report issued by the IPCC warned that serious warming would be likely in the coming century. Given that it was organized under the auspices of the United Nations, it is axiomatic that the Republican Party would be opposed to any information coming out of that committee. Fortunately, Al Gore formed an important relationship with the committee and helped to amplify their concerns with his popular documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The hottest year on record, that of  1998, was associated with a “Super El Nino” which caused weather disasters and unrelenting heat. By the end of the 20th century, sophisticated computer models had been able to simulate global ice age climate changes and gain substantial credibility for their future climate projections. The third IPCC report in 2001 indicated that future global warming would bring the hottest period of the planet since the last ice age and may be attended with “severe surprises.” By then, the entire scientific community had agreed that greenhouse gases would likely be a serious problem and that the global reach of human societies needed to get busy to correct the excessive use of fossil fuels. A serious response was required of the major industrialized countries, but the U.S. has balked from entering into serious agreements, such as the Kyoto protocol.  This was followed by numerous observations on collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland that might cause sea levels to rise faster with far less predictably than previously thought. In many ways, it was beginning to look like we were facing a climate emergency.

The fourth IPCC report was issued in 2007 and argued that the cost of reducing emissions from fossil fuels would be offset by the benefits and savings of doing nothing to curb the further accumulation of greenhouse gases. In that year the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 382 ppm and the mean global temperature for a five year average was 14.5 degrees Centigrade (58 degrees Fahrenheit), the warmest in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Some have argued that we are in a relative cooling period since 1998 because of reduced sunspot activity, but it’s unclear whether such activity  unambiguously affects our climate: if it does, then we are in for a sudden increase in global heating when sunspot activity resumes.

Global Climate Parameters vs IPCC projections

The main problem with the IPCC reports is that they take the arguments and data from scientists and water them down, for more palatable public consumption, hoping the issue appears less alarmist by making the issue less stressful, which in turn makes the issue seem less significant. Some scientists who serve on the IPCC have published papers challenging the overly conservative nature of the IPCC reports; the political arm of the IPCC gets the last word on the tone of the warnings and the details of the projections. One such objection to the IPCC reports was published by Rahmstorf et al, in Science, 2007 (volume 316, p 709–available to the public without a subscription to Science). The graph on the left was taken from the Rahmstorf et al paper (published on line); in the top section, the monthly carbon dioxide data measured from Mauna Loa Hawaii (blue) is compared to the IPCC projection (dashed line; note that the yearly levels of carbon dioxide fluctuate because of the annual change in vegetation and hence carbon dioxide absorption, largely in the northern hemisphere). The middle portion shows annual global mean land and ocean surface temperatures combined from two different sources (red and blue) together with their trends. The bottom panel shows the most discrepancy in the sea-level measurements based on tide gauges (annual, red) and from satellite altimeter (blue) data. When compared to the dashed line and gray range representing IPCC projections, it is primarily the sea-levels that show the greatest discrepancies between measurements and projections. That in short is the main worry.

At the present time, most of the expansion of the oceans has been attributed to thermal expansion, since the ocean is warmer, with an added dash of mountain glacier melting. To date, melting ice from the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice masses have added little to sea-level changes, but that picture could change dramatically in the coming decades. It is the sea-level discrepancy between measurements and the more conservative IPCC projections that stimulated Rahmstorf et al to publish a brief note in Science that brought more attention and focus on the politics of global climate projections within a body that is supposedly dedicated to a more complete and objective analysis.

We are now at a point in our understanding of the threat to global climate change, imposed by burning fossil fuels, that more science is not required. Yes, we will continue to refine our models, but by being forewarned, we should be forearmed and, as a global society, we should be sufficiently knowledgeable to act with a little long-term planning, as if we are facing a global emergency. We must recognize that our small blue planet, its oceans AND ITS CLIMATE are linked inseparably at the hip and that all three are being degraded by human activities. Ocean levels will rise and threaten coastal cities. The decrease in ocean salinity and pH could wipe out coral reefs, change the food chain in ways we cannot possibly comprehend and alter ocean currents which can dramatically change our weather.  Water resources will become more scarce in some regions and more abundant in others. If one removes natural vegetation, it will have an impact on the regional weather. Remove the trees in a region and you will have less rain; remove the plants and expose the soil and you invite desertification in some areas through more moisture evaporation imposed by the elevated temperatures. Additional moisture in the air will bring more floods and storms, but not in all regions. Some regions of the world may simply become unlivable, especially those where the climate is already dry and hot.  The Southwest region of the United States faces additional constraints on water and annual rainfall and regions of Africa are likely to become increasingly dry and more inhospitable. The global society in which we live, now numbering about 6 billion people are far more than the planet can tolerate if each society aspires to be like the us, as we continue to go about our business with an unlimited appetite for fossil fuels and forest depletion.   If anything, the rate of ice melting from the polar ice caps has been underestimated and modelers are madly revising their computer simulations to account for more dramatic events, such as entire ice shelves dropping into the ocean. It is probably asking too much for a model to accurately tell us where and when giant fluctuations in ocean levels are likely to originate.

I think that Obama’s nation-wide address this past week was about right, despite its downplay in the press. We need to interpret the catastrophic Gulf oil spill to 1) recognize that giant oil companies are completely indifferent to the environment and are acting solely through a profit motive (no surprise here and let’s give Obama credit for establishing the $20 billion BP compensation fund and the elimination of the annual BP dividend to stockholders–this was using the bully pulpit with great aplomb and a sensible outcome) and 2) if we had started on a more conservative use of fossil fuels, with an objective of reducing levels of carbon dioxide emissions just ten years ago, when GW Bush came into office, at a time when the need felt more acute, we would not need the oil that is gushing out of a giant hole a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf.  So, if we start immediately on the same quest, the next ocean oil gusher, whether in the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic seas, will never occur, because that oil will not be required. Surely, with the Gulf oil spill, we are witnessing a source of oil that might be better left under the ocean floor. We should work towards the end of leaving some oil in the ground.

As Obama has pleaded with us to change our orientation about the use of fossil fuels, its an open question whether we will view this catastrophic Gulf oil spill to finally act and reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. There are several things we could do to give ourselves a dramatic boost in reducing our fossil fuel habit. Energy conservation and the development of fossil fuel alternatives is currently at a very primitive stage of development and needs dramatic new funding to alter its present course. One thing we must do is learn how to tax oil usage, eliminate subsidies to oil companies and come up with accurate accounts of what the true cost of oil is today, when you consider that a good part of our military is devoted to protecting our sources of oil, and in the process our military uses huge quantities of oil to run our ships and planes.  So, Mr. Obama, help us arrive at a figure for the cost of gasoline at the pump, computed by adding up the cost of subsidies, correction for the cheap bargain-basement oil leases, add the cost of military protection of the sea lanes and our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the then give us the future cost of gasoline, imposed by the expense of relocating major coastal cities to higher ground as a result of sea changes that are at present unknowable, but certainly on the way. Add to that the cost of this single Gulf oil spill and then try to calculate the financial impact it has had on the entire Gulf economy and the availability of Gulf seafood for the entire nation.  I don’t myself have this number at the moment, but it should not be difficult to estimate with ballpark numbers and would have been a powerful additive to Obama’s national speech on energy, especially if approached honestly and with full and complete disclosure.  We should all be concerned about this number and have a national discussion on what it means and how it should be used to motivate changes in our future.

The barn door has closed on avoiding global climate warming–it’s here today. But, there is still time to alter the slope or the rate of these changes and that should be a matter of concern for all of humanity, rich and poor,  but most critically, it should deeply concern the citizens of the United States of America, as we are the biggest offender and historically the most insensitive nation in facing what should be a moral imperative. If we do not act with intelligence and dedication to this task, we can be certain that the rest of the world will go along with our own indifference on the subject. Never before has a single issue of global significance rested so squarely on the shoulders of the worst offender in the history of humanity. We are not only in a position to act, but we need to change our habits and consumption of fossil fuel so that we discourage the rest of the world from trying to emulate our fossil fuel gluttony. The globe cannot afford to have China grow up to look just as modern and fuel-consuming as the United States, but that is just where we are headed. Beijing adds 1000 cars a day to an already heavily congested street and highway layout. In 2030, not so far away, China will need and use the equivalent of Europe’s entire energy consumption. They will achieve this by investing $3.7trillion in energy over the next twenty-five years. The Global energy supply has never looked as small as it does today. Should the condition of global “peak” oil confront us, as it has in several countries, including the United States, then expansion of the kind that China is planning will be virtually impossible.

RFM

Today the Justice Department has initiated a criminal investigation against BP, but one has to wonder whether this isn’t more of a defensive operation than an offensive plan  of action. Is this legal investigation really based on something that can be criminally prosecuted, or is this, as BP contends, an industrial “accident?” Meanwhile, the gushing of oil into the Gulf could go on all summer. BP’s  intention was to cap the current well and move the drilling rig so that new sites could be drilled, some of which were intended to begin far deeper than the current problematic drilling site. I just watched the Jim Lehrer News Hour on PBS and noticed that a reporter went to a shoreline region in Prince William Sound, where the Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred. While the surface looked as if it was clean, the reporter dug down into the rocky shoreline and came up with oil-drenched rocks that smelled like “roofing tar.” Once it comes, it never goes away unless perhaps you think more in terms of geological time.

RFM

The New York Times also has a multimedia site that is worth checking out; among other sources of information,  it has a history of major oil spills beginning with the oil well leak in 1969 off the coast of Santa Barbara. In that instance, prisoners were used as a major source of labor for the cleanup which employed tons of straw. But, how desperate are we for oil such that some wells in the gulf have been granted permits to drill beginning at more than 9,000 feet below the surface? Is this oil-drilling chutzpa or are we pursuing true needs? Oil companies fear that if they don’t feed the never ending growth of the expanding  global thirst for oil, consumers will turn to alternative fuels and sources of energy, dropping the price of oil and making these more risky oil adventures less cost-effective. But is that really true? How desperate are we for oil and how scarce are the sources, if we are now drilling at such deep sites, without having a more foolproof method for handling accidents.  This is an issue, in which the biggest oil-consuming country on the planet, namely us, can have a huge impact on our economy, the environment and the need for ever increasing oil supplies by adopting more sensible restraints on oil usage: the new federal standards for improved fuel economy will help, but other measures are needed to meet the demands in front of us for global climate change. The Copenhagen agreement seems too little too late, even though it’s better than nothing.
So far bp has been reluctant to have scientists make more definitive calculations of the magnitude of the oil spill, because this measurement will have a direct impact on the financial liability of the company.  A government report on the spill magnitude, compiled by several different agencies,  is due out this week. In the meantime bp is sticking to 5,000 barrels a day, but other estimates, based on seeing the films of the oil leak, go as high as 70,000 barrels/day. Bp refers to these higher estimates as alarmist!

RFM

The impact of these giant underwater oil slicks is impossible to gauge, but measurements taken so far have demonstrated that these undersea oil slicks are reducing the oxygen content of the surrounding water, raising serious questions about the impact that these conditions might have on marine life at every level. At the moment, no one seems to understand why these oil slicks are suspended at mid-depths, rather than coalescing at the surface, where the specific gravity of oil would normally dictate its position. Speculation is that these undersea oil slicks represent oil droplets that have been created by the chemical detergents that have been sprayed near the leak, breaking the oil up into droplets rather than a single congealed mass. The loss of oxygen near the slicks may reflect the actions of oil-consuming bacteria that are also part of the cleanup operation. How much more destructive is it to the ecosystem when a confused, hypoxic sea creature swims for safety only to find itself in a new layer of a multilayer toxic spill? Replenishing oxygen into the deeper parts of the ocean takes time, as surface water needs to replace oxygen deprived water in deeper layers. This is part of the delicate nature and stability of a complex ecosystem such as an ocean and all the life it contains. Undoubtedly bp executives know little about marine biology, though it should be a requirement for them before they can apply for a permit to exploit what lies beneath. Ignorance thrives within our global economy, as does exploitation of our natural resources.

According to Tyson Slocum, the Director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, who was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now , bp has one of the worst safety records of any oil company operating in America. In addition to the eleven lives that were lost in the recent Gulf explosion, bp pleaded guilty in 2005 to a criminal felony violation of the Clean Air Act, related to their negligence in a refinery explosion in Texas that killed fifteen workers and injured more than 170 others. The fine for this violation was over $ 150 million and bp was placed on probation where they were expected to address hundreds of workplace safety violations. When the Obama administration reviewed their compliance, they determined that bp had not adequately dealt with the problem and fined the company an additional $87 million. But these fines are peanuts compared to bp profits and clearly designed to satisfy the environmentalists, rather than impact in a serious way on the company’s safety performance.

A few years ago, as a result of the pipeline oil spill at Prudhoe Bay Alaska,  the Department of Justice found that bp willfully under-invested in routine maintenance that allowed the pipes to corrode, resulting in 200,000 gallons of crude oil released directly into the tundra. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined the company $300 million for single-handedly manipulating the entire U.S. propane market. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission fined bp $21 million for its role in price gouging California electricity consumers during the California electricity crisis (which ultimately led to Schwarzenegger’s election as governor). Bp has committed other acts of note, including violations of the Clean Air Act at its Indiana refinery and workplace violations at its Toledo, Ohio refinery. So even when put on probation for violation of safety/environmental protection rules, bp does not feel the need to conform and instead, driven by its huge profits of $ 6 billion per quarter, can afford to slough off these fines and probationary costs as just another expense of doing business. Until the Gulf oil spill, which may take the issue far beyond safety issues into the domain of environmental toxicology and devastation, bp has absorbed the fines, neglected the probationary conditions and carried on with business as usual. We must think about permanent, costly  sanctions against companies like bp that seem to have a complete disregard for safety and the environment.  Obviously the logic which produces this behavior on the part of bp will continue to reinforce their pattern of neglect until bp executives face fines or even criminal neglect charges, perhaps including the possibility of dissolution of their company (bp Louisiana?) or prison sentences if negligence can be traced to executive decisions that cost workers’ lives. The recent Sixty Minutes piece seemed to provide evidence for corporate neglect, but whether company executives were guilty of mismanagement that cost lives remains to be established.

The initially low oil spill levels, estimated at 5,000 barrels per day, are almost surely underestimated, but bp officials have refused to allow technicians access to the site, where they could use special equipment to more accurately assess the magnitude of this spill. Certainly, the large underwater oil plumes seem to confirm that the original estimate is much lower that the actual oil leaking from this site.

In 1989, British Petroleum tried to redo is logo and image and changed it to BP and in 2000 BP Amoco changed its name to bp, meaning “beyond petroleum.” Their adds suggest they are investing heavily in advancing the cause of green technologies, but their behavior suggests otherwise. According to writer Sharon Beder “BP’s existing and proposed activities in Alaska have worried indigenous people and environmental groups. Between January 1997 and March 1998, BP Amoco was responsible for 104 oil spills in America’s Arctic,” according to US research. In 1999 BP admitted illegally dumping hazardous waste at its “environmentally friendly” oil field in Alaska and was fined $500,000 for failing to report it. It paid $6.5 million more in civil penalties to settle claims associated with the waste’s disposal.” Beder claims that the new bp logo is more about the use of green paint or “green washing” than changed behavior on the part of an oil company. The new logo may have been generated to help minimize their soiled reputation in Columbia, where they were accused of using armed guards for suppressing citizen protests.

Bp is a also major polluter in terms of the energy it uses to conduct its operations. Again from Beder’s article, “By 1999 BP’s emissions were greater than those of Central America, Canada or Britain, according to Corporate Watch. And bp’s recent acquisitions mean the company is now thought to be responsible for about 3 percent of worldwide greenhouse emissions! Hows that for the greening of the environment.

The Union of Concerned Scientists stated, “The volume of the bp Gulf of Mexico spill is still unknown, but the Coast Guard originally estimated it at 1.6 million gallons, or 0.04 million barrels. To put that number in perspective, raising fuel economy standards for passenger cars and light trucks to 42 miles per gallon (mpg; about what the Prius gets)  by 2020 would save 40 times more oil per day, according to UCS. With gas at $4 a gallon, those standards would save drivers more than $60 billion in 2020, after factoring in the extra cost drivers would pay for clean car technology when they buy new vehicles. At $3 a gallon, they would save $40 billion.”

Will this be the oil catastrophe that  finally provides the sobriety test for gas-guzzling America? Is this the nadir of our romance with fossil fuels? Probably not, but something like this had to happen and in all likelihood will happen again and again, as we continue to expand rather than shrink the world’s demand for oil and increase our permissive behavior for getting it out of the ground, no matter how deep it may be located and no matter how sensitive the surrounding environment is: we are hooked. The public seems unaware that all ocean dwelling oil rigs leak oil to some degree and major oil leaks have occurred in recent years, but are never reported in our own news media. Except for the discovery of the subsurface oil plumes, there has been virtually no science applied to this oil spill and we probably will never know the true extent of the environmental damage. After all, there are many species in the Gulf that have never been discovered, so the loss of those you don’t know about feels like no loss at all.

We must also remember that the oil companies are among the leading corporations that fund anti-global climate change “studies,” those that don’t typically get reported in peer-reviewed articles, but make it into the mainstream media reports.  They also fund one of the largest lobbying groups whose function is to put pressure on Congress to limit company liability and reduce regulatory control, despite the fact that they already have nearly unfettered access to their  “drill baby drill” philosophy, as evidenced by Obama’s recent expansion of off-shore oil leases. You can bet that those oil leases off sensitive costal areas will never come to auction. The oil companies are used to getting their way, especially in America where we view oil drilling as more of an adventure, like the space program, rather than an effort that seriously challenges the integrity of our environment. Recent off-shore oil leases, which always give unparalleled profit margins to oil companies, in exchange for relatively small leasing fees, promise more oil spills in the future, unless we begin to phase out off-shore drilling, as we ramp up energy conservation and alternative energy sources to reduce risks to an already imbalanced sea world. Bp and the other oil companies will try to minimize the impact of this spill and probably try hard to reduce the amount of scientific information we gain (it costs money to send out research vessels).  Bp will further try to limit its liability by having Gulf residents who might be affected by the spill, sign off future liability claims, in exchange for a small cash payment. This is what happened with the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound in 1989. These signatures from individuals were later used in court to deny any further damages,  despite proof of long-term job loss and permanent unemployment. Can we afford to have companies like bp running off-shore oil rigs? Can we even afford to have these companies exist, as they bring forward in time, the exploitative behavior they invented right after WW I by helping to divide up the Middle East and control its oil?  How many more spills of this magnitude will it take before we finally admit to our lack of sobriety over oil? If you add up all the oil spillage that comes, on a near daily basis from each off-shore oil rig, does the sum total amount come to something like we are seeing now in the present Gulf spill? Those involved in the cleanup are also at risk, as fumes from oil pose respiratory distress hazards. All workers involved in this cleanup should be wearing appropriate breathing masks to limit their exposure and protect their eyes. Is bp providing this equipment for cleanup workers? What have you seen? I haven’t seen a single mask used by cleanup workers, though my sample is small. It is clear that bp has generated a giant public disaster for themselves with this oil spill. But will the public respond by saying, “it’s not the PR stupid,” it’s the environment.

RFM