29/10/2019

How To Mourn A Glacier

New Yorker - *

In Iceland, a memorial ceremony suggests
new ways to think about climate change.
Video by Josh Okun
Along the western edge of Iceland’s central-highland plateau, in the far east of the Borgarfjörður district, the Kaldidalur, or “cold valley,” stretches twenty-five miles between two barren volcanic ridges: the Prestahnúkur system to the east and the Ok volcano to the west. These volcanoes form part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the longest mountain range in the world, which runs under the ocean from Antarctica to the Arctic and into the Siberian Sea. On the valley’s eastern slope, massive glaciers push dolerite boulders down the mountainsides with their shining blue snouts. The western slope rises slowly toward the summit of Ok, a low shield volcano shrouded in mist.
Although nearly every mountain, stream, and valley in Iceland has a name and a history, Ok isn’t particularly famous. No path brings tourists to its summit, and those who travel the one-lane gravel road through the valley floor typically take no note of Okjökull—meaning “Ok’s glacier”—which spanned sixteen square kilometres at its largest, at the end of the nineteenth century. By 1978, it had shrunk to three square kilometres. In 2014, Iceland’s leading glaciologist, Oddur Sigurðsson, hiked to Ok’s summit to discover only a small patch of slushy gray ice in the shadow of the volcano’s crater. Okjökull could no longer be classified as a glacier, Sigurðsson announced to the scientific community. It had become “dead ice.”
In August, I joined about a hundred scientists, activists, dignitaries, farmers, politicians, journalists, and children, as they gathered at the base of Ok to mourn the lost glacier. The day began cold and gray; a cover of low clouds threatened rain. “The climate crisis is already here,” Iceland’s Prime Minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, told the crowd. “It is not just this glacier that has disappeared. We see the heat waves in Europe. We see floods. We see droughts.” Film crews pointed their cameras, while the wind whipped Jakobsdóttir’s hair and the paper on which she had written her remarks. “The time has come not for words, not necessarily for declarations, but for action,” she said.
Her message was echoed by Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland and former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and by Kumi Nadoo, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, who assured us that the planet would be fine. But, if we sustain our current trajectory, he continued, humans would be gone. Nadoo passed the microphone to the writer and former Icelandic Presidential candidate Andri Snær Magnason, who gripped it with both gloved hands. “Some of the students who are here today are twenty years old,” he said, his voice shaking. “You may live to be a healthy ninety-year-old, and at that time you might have a favorite young person—a great-grandchild, maybe—who is the age you are now. When that person is a healthy ninety-year-old, the year will be 2160, and this event today will be in the order of direct memory from you to your grandchild in the future.”
Magnason, who wore black glasses, a black stocking cap, and waterproof pants, had written the text for a memorial plaque that was to be installed at the top of the volcano, at the site of the former glacier. Like his speech, the plaque was meant, he said, to connect us to “the intimate time of the future.” He asked us to turn toward the mountain. I followed the crowd away from the road and up Ok’s slope. Behind us, the volcanoes darkened with rain.
The area where Ok Glacier once was. The landscape is desolate, with rocks that are reminiscent of a large lakebed. Photograph by Josh Okun
Dominic Boyer, Cymene Howe, and Magnús Örn Sigurðsson brave the elements to hike to the summit of Ok mountain and drill holes for the plaque. Photograph by Josh Okun
When Sigurðsson first announced Okjökull’s death, it was reported with little fanfare. A brief program aired on public television, and one short, four-line story appeared in an English-language newspaper. Around that time, two American anthropologists, Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer—my colleagues at Rice University—began conducting fieldwork on the social impacts of the climate crisis in Iceland. The story about the death of Okjökull caught their attention, they told me, because Ok (pronounced “auk”) “was not O.K.” Photographs of the melting ice cap showed the caldera in the shape of an “O”; inside the crater, a black rock jutting from the ice, looked like a “C”. One Icelander they spoke to pointed out that “Oc” is the spelling of Ok in medieval Icelandic. The mountain, they said, seemed to be writing its own name.Howe and Boyer began making a documentary about the glacier. Working with a team of Icelanders, they filmed interviews with farmers and artists who lived near the volcano, and with scientists, politicians, folklorists, writers, professors, tourists, and religious leaders. When asked how they felt about the death of Okjökull, some people shrugged and said that they were sad. Others admitted that they were hearing its name for the first time. Sigurðsson, the glaciologist, insisted to Howe and Boyer that, even though Okjökull was the smallest named glacier in Iceland, its death was a major loss. “It should not feel like just brushing something off your coat,” he told them. Children learn the name of Okjökull in their earliest geography lessons; they see its name printed on nearly every Icelandic map. “A good friend has left us,” Sigurðsson said.
After the documentary premièred, in 2018, Howe and Boyer sought a sense of closure. They settled on the idea of installing the memorial plaque and asked Magnason to write the text. It was a difficult prompt, Magnason told me: only a handful of people might ever climb the mountain, and fewer still would happen to stumble across the plaque. The other challenge was how to evoke, in words, the linkage between glaciers and memory. “The oldest Icelandic texts are a thousand years old,” Magnason said—around the same age as the ice in the country’s oldest glaciers. “In all that time, the Earth has been quite stable, but the Earth will have changed more in the next two hundred years than in the last thousand years.” The plaque, cast in copper, would need to cohere for a reader two centuries from now, he explained, while also enshrining a specific moment of urgency.Magnason decided to address his imagined audience directly. “A letter to the future,” the plaque reads in both Icelandic and English. “Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.” As Howe, Boyer, and Magnason planned the ceremony, the first public photographs of the plaque were released and went viral. Soon, they began hearing from people all over Europe, Asia, and North America—scientists, journalists, even the Prime Minister of Iceland—who wanted to be part of the funeral for the dead glacier at the top of the world.f we say something has died, can we also say it once lived? A few days before the memorial ceremony for Okjökull, I met Sigurðsson for coffee on an uncommonly sunny morning in Reykjavík, hoping to learn more about why he had chosen to frame the loss of the glacier as a death. For a glaciologist, Sigurðsson has amassed an unusual degree of celebrity. His phone rang several times as we talked, and he admitted that he was not used to the attention. He was looking forward to a trip with his wife, the next week, to celebrate their anniversary.
Sigurðsson brightened when I asked him about glaciers. “They are enormously interesting as a natural phenomenon,” he said. Partly his passion was aesthetic—“They just shine,” he said—but he was also interested in why they surge suddenly and without explanation. When I asked him directly if glaciers were living, he hesitated. Things that grow and move, we tend to consider animate, he said, even if we resist the idea that every animate thing has a soul. A healthy glacier grows each winter more than it melts each summer; moves on the ground under its own weight; and is at least partially covered with a thick, fur-like layer of snow. Glaciers also move on their insides, especially in Iceland, where the glaciers are made of temperate ice, which exists right at the melting point. This sets them apart from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which are frozen and older by hundreds of thousands of years.
In Iceland, Sigurðsson said, the oldest ice was born more than a thousand years ago, before the Little Ice Age, on the north side of Vatnajökull, the largest glacier in the country. Vatnajökull is roughly the area of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, and stands almost as tall as the Empire State Building. Okjökull, by comparison, was small and young when it died; ice covered the mountaintop for only a few centuries. Sigurðsson knows this because he had counted the glacier’s rings, which were formed by dust each year—not unlike the rings on a tree. The rings contained a sort of memory—a record of pollen clouds, volcanic eruptions, world wars, and nuclear meltdowns. When a glacier melts, Sigurðsson explained, its memory disappears.
Having “memory” is just one of the many ways scientists refer to glaciers in terms that make them seem alive. They also “crawl” and have “toes”; when they break off at the ablation edge, they are said to have “calved.” They are born and die—the latter at increasing rates, especially during “the great thaw” of the past twenty years. When Sigurðsson conducted a glacier inventory in the early two-thousands, he found more than three hundred glaciers in Iceland; a repeat inventory, in 2017, revealed that fifty-six had disappeared. Many of them were small glaciers in the highlands, which had spent their lives almost entirely unseen. “Most of them didn’t even have names,” he told me. “But we have been working with local people to name every glacier so that they will not go unbaptized.” Now, he intends to complete their death certificates and bring a stack of them to meetings. The next to go, he thinks, will be Hofsjökull, to the east.
It is unusual for a glaciologist to fill out a death certificate, but something concrete, like a piece of paper or a plaque, helps to make clear that the loss is irreversible. The last ice age began in the Pleistocene and ended ten thousand years ago, when Iceland was covered in a massive ice sheet thousands of feet thick. The planet has warmed, cooled, and warmed again since then; ice has advanced and retreated, and this movement has carved the mountains and valleys that we claim as our own. But, in the past several years alone, we have witnessed not only an acceleration of the great thaw, but also the sudden bleaching of the coral reefs, the rapid spread of the Sahara desert, continuous sea-level rise, the warming of the oceans, and record-breaking hurricanes each season and every year. This is one of the most distressing things about being alive today: we are witnessing geologic time collapse on a human scale.
The crowd moments after the plaque placement ceremony. The monument is within a few hundred feet of the remaining glacial ice, and is the largest rock in the area. Photograph by Josh Okun
A rare ground rainbow in the Kaldidalur. Photograph by Josh Okun
Climbing Ok, we scrambled for hours over dolerite boulders, pitted lava rocks, patches of thick moss, and the small streams that trickled down the volcano to the lake below. We paused for lunch before the final leg of the hike, and Magnason instructed us to approach the caldera with reverence and humility. Elsewhere in Iceland, he explained, climbing to the summit of a mountain in silence and without looking back is said to grant the hiker three wishes. Wishes are sometimes too grand to be of use, Howe added, but it can be useful to imagine the future we hope to see.
As we walked the last few hundred feet, I realized that we lack metaphors for comprehending the future, much less the scale of the disaster that it has in store for us. Then the mountainside levelled, and the sight of the crater purged all thoughts from my head. The ice was gray, lifeless, uncanny. Guðmundur Ingi Guðbrandsson, Iceland’s Minister of the Environment, stood on the boulder that had been chosen as the site of the memorial. Children surrounded him with protest signs, demanding that their political leaders, their parents, and their teachers do more. “When I grew up as a little boy not very far away from here, my grandmother taught me the names of all the mountains we could see on the horizon, and the names of the four glaciers,” Guðbrandsson said. “When I visit my parents today on their farm, I can see only three.” The wind chill had dropped below freezing, and the crowd huddled together for warmth. Sigurðsson read a list of vital statistics from Okjökull’s death certificate. “The age of this glacier was about three hundred years,” he said. “Its death was caused by excessive summer heat. Nothing was done to save it.”
Howe and Boyer asked the children to come to the front of the crowd. “We need to understand our relationship to the world in ways we haven’t had to in the past,” Howe said. “We need to be able to imagine a new future.” There was a moment of silence as the children pushed the plaque into place. The day had cleared a little, and I could see across the Kaldidalur to the glaciers on the opposite peaks. Below them, in the valley’s deepest crevice, a meltwater lake was forming, already so blue and deep.
  • Lacy M. Johnson is the author, most recently, of “The Reckonings.”
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Thirst Turns To Anger As Australia's Mighty River Runs Dry

Reuters - Tracey Nearmy

MENINDEE, Australia (Reuters) - Reduced to a string of stagnant mustard-colored pools, fouled in places with pesticide runoff and stinking with the rotting carcasses of cattle and fish, the Darling River is running dry.

The parched earth of Australia’s longest waterway, if tributaries are included, is in the grip of the continent’s most severe drought in a century.
At Menindee, 830 km west of Sydney, despair has turned to anger as residents blame the government for exacerbating the drought by drawing down river water in 2017 for irrigation and other uses downstream.
Locals now avoid using tap water for drinking and washing babies and children, saying it has caused skin irritation, and prefer boxed and bottled water instead.
“That was our food source, the river, our water source. That was our livelihood,” said Aboriginal elder Patricia Doyle, in her backyard piled with flotsam discovered in the now-exposed riverbed.
“When you live on a river and you have to have water brought into your town to drink and survive on, what’s that saying? It’s saying that our system ... isn’t looked after properly.”
The past two years have been the driest in the catchment area of the Darling, which flows 2,844 km (1,767 miles) over the outback to the sea, and adjoining Murray river since records began in 1900.
Ngiyaampaa girl Punta Williams poses for photographs on the dry riverbed before performing at Yaama Ngunna Baaka Corroboree Festival on the banks of the Darling River in Wilcannia, New South Wales, Australia, October 1, 2019. Recently, Aboriginal communities held special festivals along the river "to heal the Barka". Ochre-painted dancers performed around fires at dusk, revering the river but also seeking to draw attention to its plight. REUTERS/Tracey Nearmy  
 Drought is weighing on economic growth, and the dire conditions have prompted Australia, a major wheat exporter, to import the grain for the first time in 12 years.
Last summer was the hottest on record, and in Menindee, where temperatures regularly top 38 Celsius (100 Fahrenheit), another scorching season is expected.
The government has set up a panel to evaluate water management and ordered its anti-trust watchdog to investigate trading in irrigation rights.

‘The River Should Be Flowing’
Doyle’s clan is called the Barkindji, or people of the river, and in Aboriginal language, the Darling is called the Barka.
The river is at the heart of stories about the origins of the clan and its cultural life, particularly evident in Menindee where a third of 550 residents are indigenous, compared with a national average of less than 3%.
Lined with river red gums, the Darling also waters some of Australia’s richest grazing land, and until the construction of railways in the early 20th century, was the main route used to take wool and other goods to market.
All aspects of society are now suffering. “The river country itself, it doesn’t provide as much as what it used to,” says Kyle Philip, a Barkindji hunter and goat musterer.
Parents have forbidden children from swimming in the murky water that remains. Fish caught in holes still deep enough to hold water are inedible.
“We could taste the mud in the meat of the perch,” said Philip. “We couldn’t really eat them.”
The trunk of a gum tree glows as the sun sets over what is left of the Darling River in Menindee, Australia, September 29, 2019. Lined with river red gums, the Darling also waters some of Australia's richest grazing land. Reduced to a string of stagnant mustard-coloured pools, fouled in places with pesticide runoff and stinking with the rotting carcasses of cattle and fish, the Darling River is running dry. REUTERS/'Tracey Nearmy
Recently, Aboriginal communities held special festivals along the river “to heal the Barka”. Ochre-painted dancers performed around fires at dusk, revering the river but also seeking to draw attention to its plight.
“We’re going to start dancing and singing the land,” organizer Bruce Shillingsworth said. “Singing the rivers, singing our environment back again to make it healthy.”
And in the Anglican church at Menindee, there are prayers. “The river should be flowing,” said Reverend Helen Ferguson.
“When that river flows, the people are just abuzz and the whole town just comes to life. But that hasn’t happened for some time now and my prayer is that people don’t get worn down through that.”

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The Real Reason Some Scientists Downplay The Risks Of Climate Change

The Guardian - Dale Jamieson | Michael Oppenheimer | Naomi Oreskes

Climate deniers often accuse scientists of exaggerating the threats associated with the climate crisis, but if anything they’re often too conservative
Sea ice on the ocean surrounding Antarctica. Photograph: Ted Scambos/AP
Dale Jamieson, Michael Oppenheimer and Naomi Oreskes are authors of Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy.
Although the results of climate research have been consistent for decades, climate scientists have struggled to convey the gravity of the situation to laypeople outside their field.
If anything, the wider public only recently seems to have awakened to the threat of the climate crisis. Why?
In our new book, Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy, we attempted to illuminate how scientists make the judgments they do.
In particular, we wanted to know how scientists respond to the pressures, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, that arise when they know that their conclusions will be disseminated beyond the research community – in short, how scientists are affected when they know the world is watching.
We explored these questions with respect to assessments of acid rain, ozone depletion and sea level rise predictions from the west Antarctic ice sheet.
While climate skeptics and deniers often accuse scientists of exaggerating the threats associated with the climate crisis, the available evidence suggests the opposite.
By and large, scientists have either been right in their assessments, or have been unduly conservative. We noticed a clear pattern of underestimation of certain key climate indicators, and therefore underestimation of the threat of climate disruption.
When new observations of the climate system have provided more or better data, or permitted us to re-evaluate earlier conclusions, the findings for ice extent, sea level rise and ocean temperature have generally been worse than previously thought.
One of the factors that appears to contribute to this trend of underestimation is the perceived need for consensus, or what we call “univocality”: the felt need to speak in a single voice.
Many scientists worry that if they publicly air their disagreement, government officials will conflate their differences of opinion with ignorance and use this as justification for inaction.
Others worry that even if policy-makers want to act, they will find it difficult to do so if scientists fail to send an unambiguous message.
Therefore, scientists actively seek to find their common ground, and to focus on those areas of agreement. In some cases, where there are irreconciliable differences of opinion, scientists may say nothing, giving the erroneous impression that nothing is known.
How does the pressure for univocality lead to underestimation? Consider a case in which most scientists think that the correct answer to a question is in the range one to 10, but some believe that it could be as high as 100. In this case, everyone will agree that it is at least one to 10, but not everyone will agree that it could be as high as 100.
Therefore, the area of agreement is one to 10, and this will be reported as the consensus view. Wherever there is a range of possible outcomes that includes a long, high-end tail of probability, the area of overlap will lie at or near the low end.
We are not suggesting that every example of under-estimation is caused by the factors we observed in our work, nor that the demand for consensus always leads to underestimation. But we found that this pattern occurred in all of the cases that we studied.
We also found that the institutional aspects of assessment, including who the authors are and how they are chosen, how the substance is divided into chapters, and guidance emphasizing consensus, also generally tilt in favor of scientific conservatism.
Knowing this, what do we do?
To scientists, we suggest that you should not view consensus as a goal. Consensus is an emergent property, something that may come forth as the result of scientific work, discussion and debate. When that occurs, it is important to articulate the consensus as clearly and specifically as possible. But where there are substantive differences of opinion, they should be acknowledged and the reasons for them explained.
Scientific communities should also be open to experimenting with alternative models for making and expressing group judgments, and to learning more about how policy makers actually interpret the findings that result.
Such approaches may contribute to assessments being more useful tools as we face the reality of adapting to the climate crisis and the disruptions that will occur.
For political leaders and business people, we think it is important for you to know that it is extremely unlikely that scientists are exaggerating the threat of the climate crisis. It is far more likely that things are worse than scientists have said.
We have already seen that the impacts of increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are unfolding more rapidly than scientists predicted. There is a high likelihood that they will continue to do so, and that the IPCC estimates – that emissions must be rapidly reduced, if not entirely eliminated, by 2050 – may well be optimistic.
The fact that this conclusion is hard to swallow does not make it untrue.
And for ordinary citizens, it is important to recognize that scientists have done their job. It is now up to us to force our leaders to act upon what we know, before it is too late.

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28/10/2019

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Greta Thunberg Versus The Climate Contrarians

Pearls and Irritations - Andrew Glikson

It is not an accident that fascist philosophies and movements willfully ignore human-induced global warming leading to the Sixth mass extinction of species, the largest since 56 million years ago. The nature of denialists is manifest in their venting of hate on the 16 years-old Gerta Thunberg, the voice of a generation destined to face the global warming calamity perpetrated by sections of humanity.
Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images
Andrew Glikson
Dr Andrew Glikson is an Earth and Paleo-climate Scientist, Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, Research School of Earth Science, the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Planetary Science Institute, and a member of the ANU Climate Change Institute.
There is nothing moral about the fundamentalists telling children they may be burning in hell if they sin on Earth, while ignoring the evidence of the inferno facing future generations as the atmosphere is heated by greenhouse gas emissions, plunging the planet into a hothouse Earth.
In their panic the denialists attribute the girl’s views, which are consistent with climate science, to her asperger syndrome or smear her as mentally ill, ignoring many with this syndrome are highly intelligent people. By extension they dismiss the basic laws of physics, climate science and the consensus on global warming, which the 16 years-old reiterates.
While the destruction of the habitability of Earth is in progress, rather than comprehend the extreme consequences of global warming the contrarians appear to be alarmed by the voice of a teenage girl, just in case this may deprive the industry of death from their enormous profits. Further, these people instinctively correlate attempts at defending life on Earth with “left” socialist ideas.
The history of H. sapiens is dominated by a conflict between life-enhancing forces and the life-destroying conduct, carnage and wars, the cycle symbolized in the Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva cycle in Hindu mythology. Climate change has not been invented by “conservatives” but once its fatal consequences have become manifest it fits well with the “survival of the fittest” ideology, denying science, nature and life.
Such conflicts originate in the natural world, however once a species has acquired a range of lethal techniques—chemical detonation, atom splitting, radiation, biological warfare—the survival of the fittest paradigm becomes a recipe for global suicide, compounded by the lunacy of seeking shelter on other planets.
Global governance and legal systems are not designed to cope with this ultimate danger. Elaborate legal systems exist to collect taxes or enforce traffic rules, but no courts exist to prevent the powers that be from changing the composition for the atmosphere, thereby leading to one of the greatest mass extinction of species the Earth has suffered.

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‘We Really Need To Wake Up Quickly’: Al Gore Warns Of A Looming Food Crisis Caused By Climate Change

Washington Post - Amanda Little*

Former vice president Al Gore backstage at the Time 100 Health Summit in New York in October. (Craig Barritt/Getty Images For Time 100 Health)
CARTHAGE, Tenn. — “I’ve done so many presentations I just never get nervous anymore, but I was nervous before this one — so much new material,” Al Gore said last week as he launched into the latest iteration of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the slide show that won him an Oscar, a Nobel Prize and a Grammy.
Gore had invited 300 guests — chefs, farmers, food executives and activists — to “The Climate Underground,” a two-day conference last week at his family farm here that explored the intersection of food, climate change and sustainable agriculture.
Some 40 panelists, most of them farmers and scientists, took the stage to discuss topics from healthy soil to carbon sequestration, but the main event was Gore’s slide show, delivered with his characteristic mix of bravado and humility, detailing the impacts of climate change on food systems worldwide.
“This is in Georgia; a heat wave cooked these apples before they could be harvested,” he said, issuing forth rapid-fire examples alongside bone-chilling images and video. “This is the Australia wine region that’s going to be untenable. . . . Rice yields in 80 percent of Japan have declined due to the rising temperatures. . . . In nearby Murfreesboro, Tenn., we’ll see a quarter decline in soybean yields within the next 30 years.”
Gore spent the better part of 90 minutes detailing the pressures of drought, heat, flooding, superstorms, “rain bombs,” invasive insects, fungi and bacterial blight on food producers. “We may be approaching a threshold beyond which the agriculture that we’ve always known cannot support human civilization as we know it,” he declared in a low growl. “That’s something we need to avoid.”
Alice Waters, who Gore said catalyzed his interest in food and who had volunteered to cook the vegetarian lunches served to attendees (using local, seasonal and organic ingredients, natch), said the presentation was bittersweet: “I am deeply depressed. But on the other hand, the solution seems so, so unbelievably transformational. . . . We can restore the health of the planet while also restoring the health of people and communities.”
Naomi Starkman, editor-in-chief of ­Civil Eats, which covers news on sustainable agriculture, was similarly fraught: “Gore spoke with such devastating and fierce clarity, connecting the dots between the ways agriculture is implicated in and impacted by the climate crisis. But it also felt like a hopeful moment wherein agriculture, and farmers in particular, are taking a front-and-central place in solving one of the most urgent issues of our time.”
Mark Bittman, the former New York Times food columnist, was more circumspect: “There are ways in which the conversation here isn’t quite realistic. Regenerative agriculture is not about increased yield, it’s about producing more of the right food in the right ways. ... But kudos to Al Gore for taking it on. There’s no more important conversation to have.”
I sat down with the former vice president to dive deeper into the details. Edited excerpts of our conversation follow:

Q: The main way most humans will experience climate change is through its impact on food: Is this a fair statement?
A: Ever since 2015, it’s been clear that the impact on the food system was underestimated in previous years. And there is a natural resistance that many of us have had to getting too concerned about the food system. Food insecurity had been declining steadily for the last couple of decades, just as extreme poverty had been declining. But in the last couple of years, that too has changed, and the principal reason is the climate crisis.
Africa, by mid-century, will have more people than either China or India. And by end of century, more people than China and India combined. And you combine that with the impact of the climate crisis on subsistence agriculture in Africa, the importance of subsistence agriculture in Africa, the poor quality of the soils, the persistent problems of land tenure, and the economic and social structures that discourage good stewardship of the land, then, wow. We really need to wake up quickly to the serious crisis that could develop there.

Q: What are the most crucial policy measures that need to be taken to encourage regenerative farming in the U.S. and climate-smart agriculture broadly?
A: We need leadership to completely refocus USDA to completely change the system of farm subsidies to stop the massive subsidies for crops that are not eaten by people, that go to bio­fuels, that go to animal feed. We should eventually work our way toward a system for compensating farmers for the buildup of soil carbon. That’s not possible yet, partly because we are still developing a measurement of soil carbon buildup that is necessary for the confidence of policymakers and voters that this is not some boondoggle. But eventually, that’s where we need to be.

Q: On one hand you have Bill Gates saying, “The time has come to reinvent food,” and on the other you have Alice Waters and others saying, “Let’s de-invent food, let’s go back to preindustrial agriculture,” essentially. What do you think the role of tech should be?
Alice Waters, at The Washington Post in 2017, has advocated for a return to traditional farming. (Kristoffer Tripplaar/For The Washington Post)
A: We want a single, magic answer that’s going to solve a big, complicated problem, and I think that in agriculture and food and climate, these systemic approaches are usually more likely to be successful. But technology and science has an important role to play. Measuring soil carbon is one. That team at the Salk Institute has a really interesting proposal to modify roots to sequester more suberin, a form of carbon that stays in the soil for a long time. If their hypothesis is correct, the root structures of food plants can be made much more robust in a way that simultaneously sequesters more organic carbon and increases yields. So that’s technology that is worth exploring and evaluating.
In general, the solutions in agriculture are more to be found in going back to some traditional approaches that worked but were discarded because of the pressure for short-term profit maximization. And that includes crop rotation. It includes cover crops to put key chemicals and nutrients back in the soil after it’s been used for a particular cash crop. It includes rotational grazing, which is not without controversy but has been proven to work, at least on farms of this scale.
Q: What role must consumers play in the shift toward sustainable food systems and climate resilience?
A: There’s a danger in focusing on consumer behavior. There’s a danger of giving the impression that the solutions to the climate crisis have to be shouldered by women and men who care enough about it to change their personal choices. They do. But as important as it is to change a lightbulb, it is way more important to change policies. And in order to change policies, we have to have new policymakers. So the most important role that individuals can play is in taking their concern and passion for a better world into the voting booth and turning out in large numbers to overcome the dominance of our political system by big money.

Q: Some permaculture and regenerative farmers that I met with have said that it’s more expensive to farm this way. They can’t afford their own products. How do we address that?
A: I don’t want to deny the premise of your question, but some regenerative farmers have saved a lot of money on their input costs. Now, how do we develop markets for healthier, organic, regenerative-agriculture food? That’s one of the reasons we’re incorporating efforts to get school systems and hospitals and nursing homes and long-term care facilities to provide markets for healthier food.

Q: Still, there are real concerns from ­middle- and low-income consumers that this is an elitist movement.
Solar panels on a home in Maryland in 2016. (Benjamin C Tankersley/For The Washington Post)
A: It hasn’t been very many years since solar panels were considered an elitist movement. And you heard exactly the same critique. “For those who can afford them, that’s fine. But don’t tell me that’s going to be a significant development, because only the wealthy elite are doing it.” Well, that’s not true anymore, because that was the beginning of a movement that drove scale and accelerated the cost reduction curve. And now you’ve got people putting rooftop solar on and community solar, and it is really taking off dramatically. But it started as an elitist movement. The same thing is beginning to be true of electric vehicles. If we can democratize and widely distribute the soil carbon assessment technologies, I don’t think it’s that hard to imagine technology driving the cost down to the point where this can spread more rapidly.
 
Q: The agriculture industry is so interesting because it is a major driver of the climate problem, but it is also more vulnerable than any other industry to the pressures of climate change.
A: Many pioneers of regenerative agriculture are finding that their farms are more resilient to drought and flood and extreme weather than with the older established farming techniques. Building the health of the soil does not mean just more organic carbon. It also means building the ability of the soil to absorb the higher rainfall events and to withstand drought events more effectively.

Q: One scientist said to me the most delicious fruits are dying because the specialist crops, the ones that we love the most, are hardest to adapt to new circumstances. Of all the crops that are most vulnerable, which would be the hardest for you to live without?
A: Chocolate. Cacao. Absolutely.

*Amanda Little is author of “The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World” (Harmony, 2019).

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Young Canadians Sue Government For Failing To Act On Climate Change

Reuters - Moira Warburton

A group of young Canadians filed documents on Friday to sue the federal government for injuries allegedly suffered due to Ottawa’s role in contributing to climate change.
A picture of climate change environmental teen activist Greta Thunberg is featured on a supporter's sign with text reading "Make America Greta Again" during a climate strike march in Montreal, Quebec, Canada September 27, 2019. REUTERS/Allison Lampert/File Photo
 The 15 youths aged 10 to 19 from across the country have each suffered “specific, individualized injuries due to climate change,” Our Children’s Trust, a U.S.-based non-profit group, said in a press release.
The group is providing technical support to the plaintiffs, as it has done in similar cases in other countries in which children have sued their governments because of climate change - including the Netherlands, the United States and India.
The Canadian plaintiffs are suing under section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which protects individual autonomy and personal rights, as well as section 15, which guarantees equality rights. The Charter is part of the Canadian Constitution.
The statement of claim filed in a federal court in Vancouver on Friday by the plaintiffs alleges that “despite knowing for decades” that carbon emissions “cause climate change and disproportionately harm children,” the government continued to allow emissions to increase at a level “incompatible with a stable climate capable of sustaining human life and liberties.”
It specifically cites the government’s purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline, which carries oil from Alberta to British Columbia’s coast, as an action that contributed to climate change.
“As a youth my rights are being disproportionately violated because I cannot vote,” Ira Reinhart-Smith, 15, from Caledonia, Nova Scotia, told Reuters. “I am now and in the future going to be faced with extreme consequences because of climate change. This lawsuit is the best way for me to move forward in my action against climate change.”
Reinhart-Smith has participated in climate activism in the past, including with Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for the Future movement, but he felt protesting corporations and lobbying politicians was not effective enough.
“It was still depending on them to do the actions,” he said. If the lawsuit is successful, the government will have to act “by order of the court, rather than listen to some youth that are telling them it’s the best way to go.”
Reinhart-Smith and the other plaintiffs are represented by Arvay Finlay LLP and Tollefson Law Corporation, and have partnered with the Pacific Centre for Environmental Law and Litigation and the David Suzuki Foundation.
In the United States, 21 activists aged 11 to 22 sued the federal government in 2015 for violating their rights to due process under the U.S. Constitution by failing to adequately address carbon pollution such as emissions from burning of fossil fuels.
Both the Obama and Trump administrations have failed in their efforts to have the lawsuit thrown out, and it is currently under consideration in a federal appeals court in Oregon.

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27/10/2019

Earth's Rocks Can Absorb A Shocking Amount Of Carbon: Here’s How

National Geographic - Stephen Leahy

 The depths of the planet offer a rock-hard potential solution to climate change.
The Tungurahua volcano erupting at twilight. One of the ways the earth returns its inner carbon to the surface is through volcanic eruptions. Photograph by Mike Theiss, Nat Geo Image Collection
I’ve been toting around 27 pounds of carbon all of my adult life. You’ve been hauling carbon too: Approximately 18 percent of your body is made of carbon atoms. All of those atoms were once in the food we ate and, before that, in the air, oceans, rocks, and other forms of life. Carbon, an element born of exploding stars, is essential for all forms of life and so it may be surprising that more than 90 percent of planet’s carbon is underground.
Even more remarkable is the discovery that life, in the form of microbes and bacteria, thrives miles beneath our feet in such abundance that its total carbon mass is up to 400 times greater than all 7.7 billion of the humans on the surface. That one of Earth’s largest ecosystems lies deep inside the planet is just one of the many discoveries from the decade-long Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) project that brought together 1,200 researchers from 55 nations to explore the internal workings of our planet.
The DCO wraps up in Washington, D.C. on October 24 to 26 with hundreds of scientists from around the world meeting to share and celebrate results.
“We now understand that the Earth’s biosphere and its geosphere are one integrated and complex system, and carbon is the key,” says DCO Executive Director Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science. “This is a fundamentally new way of thinking about our planet,” Hazen says in an interview.
Over the last decade the DCO launched 268 projects and produced 1,400 peer-reviewed studies. Here are few highlights from the dozens if not hundreds of astonishing new discoveries about the deep Earth, including its role in kickstarting life.

Carbon In, Carbon Out
Carbon from plants and animals goes deep into the earth through the process of subduction—when oceanic plates sink below continental plates—over hundreds of millions of years. This once-living carbon has been discovered inside diamonds that formed 410 to 660 kilometers below the surface. Given enough time, that carbon, in the form of diamonds, rocks, or as carbon dioxide emissions emitted from volcanoes, returns to the surface, where the sun shines on it once more.
In other words, just like us, our planet is constantly ingesting and exhaling carbon, often in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2). This once-stable carbon cycle has been disrupted by our acceleration of the return of carbon to the surface by digging up and burning massive amounts of hydrocarbons: oil, gas, and coal. At the same time cutting down forests, building cities and roads, and otherwise transforming the surface has impaired the planet’s ability to ingest carbon.
This disruption of the carbon cycle is what we are calling the climate crisis, says Hazen.
One of 31 new carbon-bearing minerals discovered during the DCO's Carbon Mineral Challenge, triazolite was found in Chile. It thought to have derived in part from cormorant guano. Photograph courtesy Joy Desor, Mineralanalytik Analytical Services
“Climate change poses an existential threat to humanity, not in the far future but in the next generation or two,” he says.
In the next 20 to 40 years CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have to be eliminated and large amounts of CO2 already in the atmosphere need to be removed to prevent very dangerous levels of global warming.
However, new knowledge about the deep carbon cycle revealed by the DCO gives Hazen hope. There are natural carbon sequestration methods that are “incredibly powerful,” he says.

Watching rock grow
One of these sequestration methods involves a large slab of rock pushed up from Earth's upper mantle long ago in what’s now the country of Oman. Known as the Samail Ophiolite, weathering and microbial life inside the rock take carbon dioxide out of the air and turns it into carbonate minerals.
The process is so effective that “you can actually watch carbon dioxide being sucked out of the atmosphere and being deposited as rocks before your very eyes,” says Hazan.
Experiments pumping carbon-rich fluids into the ophiolite rock formation show that carbonate minerals form very rapidly. That could potentially remove billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, though it would be a huge project and very different for Oman, which is dependent on its oil revenues, he says.
Ophiolites are also found in North America, Africa, and elsewhere. Another natural form of carbon sequestration involves rocks from basalt formations like those found in Hawaii that can absorb CO2 from the air when crushed. In Iceland, another DCO natural sequestration project, CarbFix, involves injecting carbon-bearing fluids into basalt and observing their conversion to solids.
These new discoveries about the ability of the Earth to absorb carbon “give me tremendous optimism,” Hazen says.


I Didn't Know That: Diamonds

Insight into alien life
The DCO has also boosted optimism about the possibilities of life on other planets. Pure diamonds are made of nothing but carbon, but most contain small impurities. They may make poor jewelry, but they’re priceless in research. These impurities, called inclusions, have revealed "abiotic" methane as an energy source for life deep side Earth.
When water meets the ubiquitous mineral olivine under intense pressure, the rock transforms into another mineral, serpentine, while producing abiotic methane. If microbes can live using chemical energy from rocks under a range of extreme heat and pressures so deep, that may hold true on other planetary bodies.
The discovery also fuels the proposition that life first originated and evolved in the deep earth, not in oceans as widely believed.
“The Deep Carbon Observatory has produced important evidence” for this hypothesis, says Jesse Ausubel of The Rockefeller University and science advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Diamonds also provided DCO researchers with evidence that the deep earth has more water—mostly locked up within the crystals of minerals as ions rather than liquid water—than all of the world's oceans. As with carbon, subduction of the great continental and oceanic plates are thought to have brought water into the depths of the planet.

Earth's alarms
DCO projects monitoring gases coming from volcanoes resulted in the first-ever detection of a change in the ratio of CO2 to sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions prior to the eruption of a Costa Rica volcano, offering a potential early warning system.
“It was just a theory that the gas ratio might change before an eruption, but the DCO allowed us to go and find out,” said Sami Mikhail of the University of St Andrews. “This could be like a doorbell, telling us when someone is at the door.”
Several volcanoes near populated areas, including Tungurahua, Ecuador, Etna, Italy, and Soufriere Hills, Montserrat are now being monitored. Those and other volcano monitoring stations have also provided definitive evidence that CO2 emissions from volcanoes are a tiny fraction compared to those from burning fossil fuels. Some climate deniers have long blamed volcanoes for the rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

Future of the DCO
While the DCO mandate has ended, the global community of deep carbon scientists will continue to pursue existing and new investigations with the support of grants from NASA, the National Science Foundation, the German Research Foundation, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and other institutions.
The Institut du Physique de Globe du Paris will serve as a new headquarters.


The Deep Carbon Observatory is a global community of multi-disciplinary scientists unlocking the inner secrets of Earth through investigations into life, energy, and the fundamentally unique chemistry of carbon. In this video we dive deep into Earth, where most of Earth's carbon resides, and explore the core questions DCO scientists are asking. How much carbon is in Earth? Where did it come from and what does it "look" like? How does it move from deep Earth into our atmosphere and back again? And even, what are the origins of life on Earth?

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