Adapt Or Die: Can Evolution Outrun Climate Change?

CBS News



Across the planet, animal and plant species are on the run. A rapidly changing climate is shifting when and where plants blossom, and forcing creatures big and small to migrate and learn new tactics for survival.
It's a trend that's likely to accelerate as scientists expect to see more extreme weather events — intensifying storms and droughts, and greater temperature fluctuations on land and sea. To understand the impact, researchers are flocking to a unique, living lab: the Galapagos Islands.
The Galapagos, a remote, rocky archipelago 500 miles off the coast of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean, are home to animals that don't exist anywhere else in the world — animals so unique that they inspired Charles Darwin to formulate the theory of evolution after his famous voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle in the 1830s.
Species like giant tortoises, marine iguanas, flightless cormorants and finches with finely-tuned beaks evolved in isolation here over millions of years — since long before humans walked the Earth. But today, those that fail to adapt to their changing environment within the space of a few brief generations may face the prospect of extinction.

An iguana perches on the Galapagos' rocky coast. CBS News

CBSN Originals traveled to the Galapagos to see firsthand how the effects of both climate change and adaptation are playing out right now.

The coral detective
Marine biologist Jon Witman from Brown University comes to the Galapagos regularly to monitor the effects of climate change on the evolutionary process.
"It's been stated that the Galapagos is the natural laboratory for evolution. And we're saying that it's a natural laboratory for studying climate change and evolutionary responses to climate change," Witman told CBS News' Adam Yamaguchi.
He said evolutionary changes that once unfolded over hundreds of thousands of years are now happening before our eyes.
"It's a major new perspective in evolutionary biology and ecology, because it's forcing ecologists like me to think about adaptation and natural selection on the period of ten years or so," he said.
Witman's team is focused on understanding the impact underwater, diving to inspect the health of coral reefs and see how changes in water temperature may be shaping changes in marine species.
Part of what they're looking for is the impact of repeated El Niño systems, which he calls "the greatest modulator of climate on the planet." El Niño is a complex weather phenomenon that results in a warming of Pacific Ocean waters, which can devastate marine populations. Its counterpart, La Niña, cools the water and helps foster growth and recovery in the ecosystem.
These warming and cooling cycles test the resilience of species to withstand opposite extremes.
Coral will bleach and eventually die if the water becomes too warm or too cold. And since 90 percent of marine species — from algae all the way up the food chain — rely on the habitat of coral reefs, the consequences are far-reaching.

Creatures that could disappear with the Great Barrier Reef 1/16

Pygmy seahorse (Hippocampus Bargibanti)

This minute master of camouflage survives by adapting its body to closely resemble sea fans, the soft coral it calls home.It's just one of the many creatures that could disappear along with the Great Barrier Reef because of global warming. Credit: Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild via Getty Images

Witman is concerned about evidence that climate change may make the naturally-occurring El Niño and La Niña cycles more frequent and more extreme — pushing nature's resilience to a breaking point. Will animals be able to cope?
"That's the $64 million question that we want to answer," he said. "Yes and no. I think the no part is that the El Niño stress may recur so frequently that the species that are stressed don't have enough time to recover before the next El Niño comes.
"There's no doubt we are in an unprecedented period of global stress in terms of climate impacts. And basically  the natural world is being hit by what I call the big three. Certainly climate change is up there. Habitat destruction by humans is absolutely key. And we're also adding pollution to the ecosystem. It sounds pretty grim, and it is grim."

The penguin wrangler
There are fewer than 1,000 Galapagos penguins on the islands, and Gustavo Jimenez is on a mission to capture every last one of them. The researcher and his team work day and night to chase down and scoop up the birds so that they can be measured and studied, then released back into the wild.
"We're worried what happening in the planet. The planet is just — is one, just one house for everybody, for every species. So we know we need to protect them," Jimenez said.
He's tracking the health of the penguins and whether they're having babies. The data he gathers on this endangered species will be critical to understanding how the changing climate may affect their feeding and breeding patterns — and may help find clues to evolutionary changes the species is undergoing.
Their survival is not assured. The planet is currently experiencing one of the greatest extinction events since the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. While extinction is a natural phenomenon, with one to five species historically being lost each year, these days it's occurring at 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural rate. Dozens of species worldwide are being lost forever every single day.

The Galapagos Islands are home to many unique bird species. CBS News

It's a threat potentially facing the flightless cormorant, a bird Yamaguchi calls an "oddity of evolution." Somewhere around two million years ago, its evolutionary path diverged from other cormorants and it lost the ability to fly. The Galapagos cormorants didn't need to fly; they could find all the food they needed in the waters off the islands' jagged rocks, so they developed powerful legs and webbed feet to help them become strong swimmers instead.
Penguins share those rocks, nesting in pairs in the cave-like crevices. Jimenez said climate change is having a noticeable impact on them, forcing penguins to move their nests to higher ground. The researchers keep a record of each location.
The penguins' ability to adapt — which helped this species thrive near the equator while most penguins chill in Antarctica — offers their best hope for the future. But this time around, they may not have millions of years to figure it out.
"Maybe the time is smaller than before, and the problem is how they could adapt … in that short time," Jimenez said.

Darwin's finches today
Researcher Jaime Chaves is a self-described "bird geek" who's taken an interest in studying Darwin's finches — the very species that helped inspire Charles Darwin's landmark book, "The Origin of Species," in 1859.
Darwin documented how the beaks of these small birds varied from island to island to take advantage of available food sources. Those with sharp beaks feasted on insects while others with short, stout beaks plucked seeds from the ground. Natural selection meant those best suited to their environments thrived and multiplied, while others struggled and died out. Eventually they developed into 14 distinct species.
Chaves and his team string up very fine netting between the trees to capture finches for study.
"We're gonna analyze and collect the data on their morphology, that is, how different their beaks are," he explained. "The beak shape is one of those traits in birds that is so key because it will determine the fate of that group."
Chaves and his students track minute changes, year to year, in the shapes and sizes of the finches' beaks as the flocks adapt to the varieties of food available. Those with inadequate beaks don't survive. And because the finches breed two or three generations every year, "in so little time, you can see evolution in action," he said.
These rapid adaptations may give it an advantage for survival in a changing world. In 2017, researchers discovered that an entirely new species had been formed when a wayward bird mated with another finch species and produced offspring. Chaves expects to see more of that happening globally as various species migrate.
But it won't always work. "Many species will not be able to make it," he said, echoing the concerns Jimenez expressed for the penguins and Witman for the coral ecosystem. "For many species in which you have this limitation of time, you might be too late."
It may be the ultimate test of the survival of the fittest, and many species — even our own — could lose out.
"I think the issue right now that we have is that the changes are happening in such a short period of time. The same amount of change that you've seen happening in a couple of millions of years has happened in the last 40 years," Chaves said. "From our perspective of humans, we have understand that it's our responsibility that these changes are happening because [of] our own mishandling of the planet."
It's no longer enough for animals to evolve. They have to adapt now, adapt fast — or die.

Links

• Mass coral bleaching hits the Great Barrier Reef – again
• Saving Florida's coral reef through underwater gardening
• Penguins quickly disappearing from Antarctica due to climate change
• Report: Human-caused climate change exacerbates extreme weather
• New giant tortoise species found in Galapagos Islands
• Satellite images reveal major changes in water availability worldwide
• Tourism's impact on climate is getting worse, study says

The EU's Plan To Set A Goal Of Zero-Emissions By 2050 Could Be A Big Deal For Climate Action

Quartz - Akshat Rathi

Reuters/Maxim Shemetov

When the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2015, it was a milestone in taking action against climate change. It set a clear goal—to keep global average temperatures from rising above 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels—and got every country on board (including the US, which can’t leave the accord till 2020).
And, yet, despite the progress, in 2017, the United Nations said that most countries are far behind on emissions reductions. When the world set a new record high for greenhouse-gas emissions in the same year, it lent support to the belief that if more ambitious targets are not set soon, then we will cross the crucial 2°C and face climate catastrophe.
Now the EU, the third largest emitter in the world, is standing up to the challenge. Miguel Arias Cañete, the EU climate head, announced in a blog post that the bloc is aiming to cut emissions to zero by 2050. The goal already has the backing of the European Parliament, and the EU will be launching public consultations within the next few weeks.
If the EU succeeds in binding itself to the target, it could be a big deal for climate action. Though smaller countries both within the EU and outside have committed to a zero-emissions goal— the EU would be the largest emitter to commit to it. It would set a benchmark for other countries to shape their policies for such a goal. As Quartz reported previously:

The zero-emissions goal is acknowledged in Article 4 of the text of the Paris climate agreement, though it doesn’t set a date for when the world should reach that target (it does say that rich countries need to get there sooner than poor ones). Most scientists agree that the zero-emissions target date for the world as a whole should likely be early in the second half of the century.

Previously, the EU had committed to cutting emissions by up to 95% of 1990 levels by 2050. It may seem like the previous goal is quite close to zero emissions, but the task of cutting emissions gets much harder the closer you try to get to zero.
That’s because it would mean cutting all emissions in sectors that currently don’t have effective technological means to achieve it. Take aviation—we currently don’t have any viable zero-emissions planes for passenger travel. In other cases, if we do have technology to cut emissions, then it is quite expensive. Take the cement industry—it produces carbon dioxide because of the use of its raw materials (beyond fossil fuels), and the only way to reduce its emissions are through capturing the carbon dioxide and storing it underground. There are only a handful of small cement plants testing the technology and hoping they can find ways to make it cheaper for larger scale deployment.
To be sure, it’s important to clarify that the EU’s goal is to get to “net-zero” emissions. It means that, by 2050, there may still be some permissible greenhouse-gas emissions for industries or sectors that haven’t found a viable alternative. But those emissions will have to be offset through negative-emissions technology, which will require capturing carbon dioxide from the air. Unlike an electric airplane, negative-emissions technology is not fantasy. There are three companies that boast of its commercial use, but it does come at a high cost.

Links

• Emissions Gap Report
• After years of holding steady, carbon emissions are now moving in the wrong direction
• The way scientists define climate goals has given the world a false sense of hope
• The Race to Zero Emissions
• Article 4 Paris climate agreement (pdf)
• The world’s first “negative emissions” plant has begun operation—turning carbon dioxide into stone

Scholar: Dumping Fossil Fuels By 2050 Needed To Save Climate

Washington Post - Menelaos Hadjicostis Associated Press



NICOSIA, Cyprus — Getting rid of fossil fuels by mid-century and making the switch to large-scale renewable energy sources and nuclear power offers the best chance of meeting the climate change targets set out by the Paris accord, a prominent American economist said Friday.
Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs said the world’s ways of producing and using energy need to change “much faster, much more dramatically” than political leaders looking to tap hydrocarbon reserves understand.
“So, if we want to move to zero emissions we better get the idea to move away from fossil fuels faster than Shell oil company thinks we can,” Sachs told a conference in the Cypriot capital on the climate change challenges faced by Mediterranean countries and the Middle East.
Sachs said climate change bringing desertification, drought, crop failures and rising sea levels are putting the region’s agriculture “in dire threat.”
“It’s worked well for the last 8,000 years and we’re going to ruin it in this generation, and that’s crazy,” said Sachs, who also serves as an adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on sustainable development.
“This is the tinder of conflict, of mass migration, or all the things we don’t handle decently,” he added.
Sachs says the best approach is to set up interconnected power grids where emissions-free electricity from renewable energy sources in one region could be transmitted elsewhere.
For instance, an interconnected grid would enable North African and the Middle Eastern countries harnessing their ample solar power potential to transmit generated electricity to colder and less sunny northern Europe.
Sachs hailed China as the current world leader in the energy interconnection project and urged Europe to draw up similar plans.
Although opposing exploitation of east Mediterranean gas deposits, he urged countries moving ahead with such projects to take steps and steeply curb carbon emissions while preparing their economies for carbon-free electricity generation to fire up everything from cars, to ships and factories.
Sachs, who also heads Columbia University’s Earth Institute, said Mediterranean countries could work together to draw up proposals on mitigating the challenges they face and submit them to a high-level U.N. climate summit set for September, 2019.

Links

• Utah teens convince lawmakers to recognize climate change
• Scholar: Dumping fossil fuels by 2050 needed to save climate
• Lawsuit contends energy lease sales will affect environment
• County sues top oil companies for downplaying global warming
• Talks on climate rules inch on, despite lack of leadership
• France's Macron backs European unity amid US tensions
• Stronger fuel standards make sense, even when gas prices are low
• Climate change may scuttle Caribbean's post-hurricane plans for a renewable energy boom
• Wanted: Leaders to lead on climate change
• Shell takes its turn in the climate change spotlight
• UN body reaches agreement to cut global shipping emissions
• Court rules Exxon must provide documents in climate probe
• Eugene climate trial date set
• October trial date set for 'climate kids' lawsuit
• Half of Earth's satellites restrict use of climate data
• Fiji damaged by cyclone, PM sees 'frightening' weather ahead

'Going Backwards': A Third Of Protected Land At Risk As Australia Lags

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Almost a third of the world's protected lands face intense pressure from humans with even rich nations such as Australia failing to conserve key biodiversity, a new study by Australian scientists has found.
The research, published in Science on Friday, found that while declared protected zones had quadrupled in size in the past quarter century, much of that land enjoyed little protection from farming, logging or other human intervention.
“One third of that land is in a terrible state, doing nothing for biodiversity conservation," said James Watson, interim director of the University of Queensland's Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science and an author of the report.
"Nations across the world are exaggerating in an incredible way their contribution to solving the biodiversity crisis.”

Threats from expanding slash and burn agriculture are placing pressure on many national parks around the world, even the better managed ones such as Niassa Reserve in Mozambique. Photo: World Conservation Society/UQ

The study claims to be first to examine in high resolution - using satellite imagery and other data - the world's 202,000 protected areas that account for almost 15 per cent of land.
"We couldn't have done this study 10 years ago," Professor Watson said. "Nations need to realise they're going to be held more and more to account."

Search for funds
Among the examples are the Tsavo east and west national parks in Kenya.
The reserve was established in 1948 and now has a railway built through it, with plans to establish a six-lane highway to parallel it. Animals at risk include the eastern black rhinoceros and Tsavo lions, whose adult males often lack manes.
The Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve in Honduras had lost about 300 square kilometres to illegal agriculture and infrastructure. The area includes some of Central America's last surviving areas of undisturbed rainforest, and is home to king vultures, jaguar and mantled howler and spider monkeys.
Nations should address rising human pressures - including from climate change - not by defunding national parks but stepping up support for regions that were important for economic and social wellbeing, and the natural capital they contain, the paper said.
"Funding could also be increased through mechanisms that allow nations to trade or offset conservation funding and commitments, so wealthy nations can support conservation in poorer nations," it said.

'Massively degraded'
Australia's track record was notably poor, with mining permitted in national parks - such as Kakadu - and cattle allowed into conservation areas in places such as the Carnarvon Gorge in Western Australia and alpine reserves in Victoria.
"At least 15 per cent of Australia’s protected areas are massively degraded," Professor Watson said.
“Australia, unless a miracle occurs, will always be going backwards, because there’s no injection of cash to get the objectives we need.”
Recent federal budgets have included deep cuts to conservation spending with at least 60 officers involved in biodiversity cut in the 2017 budget, said James Trezise, healthy ecosystems policy co-ordinator for Australian Conservation Foundation.
"Some places that we think are safe and free from development are quite clearly at significant exposure," Mr Trezise said.

Australia's track record on biodiversity conservation is poor, even in some protected areas. Photo: Goongerah Environment Centre, Gippsland

Those cutbacks extend to marine areas too, with the Turnbull government responsible for the largest reversal of such protections in the world in changes announced in April, he said.
The Murray Valley National Park in NSW is also at risk of being de-gazetted, with the local Nationals MP Austin Evans campaigning to turn the area into a state forest open to logging.
Oisin Sweeney, science officer for the National Parks Association, said that as a wealthy nation, Australia "could be doing a hell of a lot better" in preserving its rich biodiversity.
"Massive" budget cuts to the National Reserve System had also weakened "the biggest single tool to acquire national park land", while states such as NSW had deliberately been reducing the numbers of experienced park rangers, Dr Sweeney said.
Mr Trezise said NSW, Victoria and Tasmania had also been accelerating efforts to open up national parks to development such as resorts and projects such as a cable car up Mt Wellington near Hobart.

Links

• Australia's biodiversity and climate change - A strategic assessment of the vulnerability of Australia's biodiversity to climate change
• Climate change impacts on biodiversity in Australia
• Implications of climate change for Australia's biodiversity - CSIRO
• Climate change impacts on biodiversity | NSW Environment & Heritage
• Ecosystems and biodiversity - Climate Adaptation - CSIRO Research
• Climate change impact on Australia may be irreversible, five-yearly report says
• Meet the Australian wildlife most threatened by climate change
• Government winds back marine protections to support fishing industry

What Is Climate Change? The Definition, Causes And Effects

Wired

Climate change is one of the biggest crises facing humanity. Let's all get a grip on exactly what it is

Getty Images / David McNew / Stringer

Climate change is the catch-all term for the shift in worldwide weather phenomena associated with an increase in global average temperatures. It's real and temperatures have been going up around the world for many decades.
Reliable temperature records began in 1850 and our world is now about one degree Celcius hotter than it was in the period between 1850 and 1900 – commonly referred to as the "pre-industrial" average.
The change is even more visible over a shorter time period – compared to average temperatures between 1961 and 1990, 2017 was 0.68 degrees warmer, while 2016 was 0.8 degrees warmer, thanks to an extra boost from the naturally-occurring El Niño weather system.
While this temperature increase is more specifically referred to as global warming, climate change is the term currently favoured by science communicators, as it explicitly includes not only Earth's increasing global average temperature, but also the climate effects caused by this increase.
Global efforts are now focussed on keeping temperatures from increasing more than two degrees above that pre-industrial average, and ideally no more than 1.5 degrees. That goal may still be possible if the international community pulls together.

What are the effects of climate change?

Worsening drought conditions are having a major impact on farmers in South Africa's Western Cape region. Morgana Wingard/Getty Images

The effects of anthropogenic – human-caused – climate change range from more frequent and severe droughts to snowstorms and extreme winter weather in temperate regions as a result of warming Arctic weather fronts.
It's not only humans that are affected. Warming ocean temperatures are increasing the frequency of coral reef bleaching; warmer, drier weather means that forests in some regions are no longer recovering from wildfires and wildlife habitats around the world are becoming less hospitable to animals.
Climate change is having economic and socio-political effects, too. Food security is already being impacted in a number of African countries and researchers are studying suggestive links between climate change and an increased likelihood of military conflict.
We're already seeing the first climate refugees as people are displaced by rising sea levels, melting Arctic permafrost and other extreme weather.

What are the causes of climate change?
We are. While a wide range of natural phenomena can radically affect the climate, publishing climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that global warming and resultant climate effects that we're witnessing are the result of human activity.
Life on Earth is dependent on an atmospheric "greenhouse" – a layer of gasses, primarily water vapour, in the lower atmosphere that trap heat from the sun as it's reflected back from the Earth, radiating it back and keeping our planet at a temperature capable of supporting life.
Human activity is currently generating an excess of long-lived greenhouse gasses that – unlike water vapour – don't dissipate in response to temperature increases, resulting in a continuing buildup of heat.
Key greenhouse gasses include carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Carbon dioxide is the best-known, with natural sources including decomposition and animal respiration. The main source of excess carbon dioxide emissions is the burning of fossil fuels, while deforestation has reduced the amount of plant life available to turn CO2 into oxygen.
Methane, a more potent but less abundant greenhouse gas, enters the atmosphere from farming – both from animals such as cattle and arable farming methods including traditional rice paddies – and from fossil fuel exploration and abandoned oil and gas wells.
Chlorofluorocarbons and hydrofluorocarbons – once widely used in industrial applications and home appliances such as refrigerators – were key greenhouse gasses released during the 20th century, but are now heavily regulated due to their severe impact on the atmosphere, which includes ozone depletion, as well as trapping heat in the lower atmosphere.
Our warming climate is also creating a feedback loop as greenhouse gasses trapped in Arctic permafrost are released.

Why is climate denial a thing?

August 29 2017: People wade along a flooded street as cars become stuck during heavy rain in Mumbai. Imtiyaz Shaikh /Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

For many years, oil companies were heavily invested in pushing the narrative that fossil fuels did not have an impact on climate change. To this end, they bought advertising and funded organisations to cast doubt on climate change, even while their own research conclusively showed that fossil fuels are a major contributing cause of climate change.
This is still playing out in ongoing lawsuits against oil companies, but even giants such as Chevron now publicly acknowledge the role that fossil fuel use has played in changing our climate. Now, their key defence is that it's the fault of fossil fuel consumers for using it, rather than of the companies that extracted, marketed and profited from oil.

Definition of Climate Change
Nasa defines climate change as: "a broad range of global phenomena created predominantly by burning fossil fuels, which add heat-trapping gases to Earth’s atmosphere. These phenomena include the increased temperature trends described by global warming, but also encompass changes such as sea level rise; ice mass loss in Greenland, Antarctica, the Arctic and mountain glaciers worldwide; shifts in flower/plant blooming; and extreme weather events."

Links

• What is climate change? | Australian Academy of Science
• What Is Climate Change? | NASA
• Climate change - Wikipedia
• What is climate change: facts for kids | National Geographic Kids
• What is climate change? - Met Office
• Anthropogenic Climate Change - Potsdam Institute (pdf)

Earth Just Had Its 400th Straight Warmer-Than-Average Month Thanks To Global Warming

USA TODAY - Doyle Rice


NOAA climate scientists say April 2018 marked the planet's 400th consecutive month with above-average temperatures. USA TODAY

It was December 1984, and President Reagan had just been elected to his second term, Dynasty was the top show on TV and Madonna's Like a Virgin topped the musical charts.
It was also the last time the Earth had a cooler-than-average month.
Last month marked the planet's 400th consecutive month with above-average temperatures, federal scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday.
The cause for the streak? Unquestionably, it’s climate change, caused by humanity's burning of fossil fuels.
"We live in and share a world that is unequivocally, appreciably and consequentially warmer than just a few decades ago, and our world continues to warm," said NOAA climate scientist Deke Arndt. "Speeding by a '400' sign only underscores that, but it does not prove anything new."
Climate scientists use the 20th-century average as a benchmark for global temperature measurements. That's because it's fixed in time, allowing for consistent "goal posts" when reviewing climate data. It's also a sufficiently long period to include several cycles of climate variability.
"The thing that really matters is that, by whatever metric, we've spent every month for several decades on the warm side of any reasonable baseline," Arndt said.
NOAA's analysis found last month was the 3rd-warmest April on record globally. The unusual heat was most noteworthy in Europe, which had its warmest April on record, and Australia, which had its second-warmest.

Photo: Rajat Gupta, EPA-EFE

Portions of Asia also experienced some extreme heat: In southern Pakistan, the town of Nawabshah soared to a scalding 122.4 degrees on April 30, which may have been the warmest April temperature on record for the globe, according to Meteo France.
Argentina also had its warmest April since national records began there in 1961.
North America was the one part of the world that didn't get in on the heat parade. Last month, the average U.S. temperature was 48.9 degrees, 2.2 degrees below average, "making it the 13th-coldest April on record and the coldest since 1997," NOAA said.
For the year-to-date, the Earth is seeing its 5th-warmest start to the year.
A separate analysis of global temperature data from NASA also found last month was the third-warmest April on record.
Another milestone was reached in April, also related to the number "400": Carbon dioxide — the gas scientists say is most responsible for global warming — reached its highest level in recorded history at 410 parts per million.
This amount is highest in at least the past 800,000 years, according to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

The Earth had its 3rd-warmest April on record, both NOAA and NASA said. Red areas are warmer-than-average. North America was the one part of the world that saw unusually cool temperatures in April. (Photo: NASA)

Links

• Earth's carbon dioxide levels continue to soar, at highest point in 800,000 years
• Spring shiver: Last month was USA's coldest April in more than 20 years
• April 2018 was Third Warmest April on Record
• The World’s Bleak Climate Situation, In 3 Charts
• Earth Will Start Becoming A Desert By 2050 If Global Warming Isn’t Stopped, Study Says
• Australia One Of The Countries Most Exposed To Climate Change, Bank Warns
• Stark Differences In Climate Impacts Between 1.5 And 2 Degrees Of Warming
• New Scenarios Show How The World Could Limit Warming To 1.5c In 2100
• Health Savings Outweigh Costs Of Limiting Global Warming: Study
• Humans Are Responsible For Nearly All Modern Global Warming
• New Climate Model Promises To Help Avoid Dangerous Global Warming
• 'Significant' Heatwave Roasts South-Eastern Australia As Global Records Melt
• Long-Term Warming Trend Continued In 2017: NASA, NOAA
• How Global Warming Fueled Five Extreme Weather Events

Population Control, The Environmental Fix No One Wants To Talk About

Les Echos (translation WORLDCRUNCH) - Gérard Maarek

Climate change is a real and alarming problem. But there's another — and intimately related — ticking time bomb threatening our planet: overpopulation. 

Rickshaws in Dhaka, Bangladesh Suvra Kanti Das/ZUMA

PARIS — More than 250 years ago — on Nov. 1, 1755 — a high-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami and fire ravaged the city of Lisbon, killing some 60,000 people. It also prompted a passionate, philosophical debate between two of Europe's leading thinkers of the time: Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
To Voltaire, the catastrophe represented the cruel hand of fate and the unfathomable decree of Providence — further evidence of just how miserable the human condition really is. Rousseau, on the other hand, saw urban expansion and population density as playing a key role in the death and destruction. It stemmed from an overall excess of civilization and separation from nature, he reasoned.
It's easy, nowadays, to dismiss the position taken by the author of Zadig. And yet, people are still reluctant to side with Rousseau and to endorse the radical criticisms of the Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Perhaps they should reconsider though. Have they not noticed the consistent increase in the frequency of natural disasters, their explosive costs — a record $306 billion dollars in 2017 — and the growing number of victims to mourn?
Contemporary thinkers are satisfied instead with the unambiguous explanation that human activity generates greenhouse gas, which causes global warming. With a few modifications, the thinking holds, we can arrange everything just so and solve the problem. But this all-too-casual chain of thought is questionable in more ways than one.

The human species has taken over the entire animal kingdom.

First, not all natural disasters can be attributed to the climate. Consider the Asian tsunami in 2004 that took 250,000 lives, or the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010.
Second, if these cataclysms are causing more and more damage, it's also because they reach denser population centers and ruin more expensive infrastructure and equipment.
Third, the extinction of numerous animal species is less linked to global warming and more to mankind's direct impact on our ecosystems (urbanization, overfishing, hunting, chemical pollution, etc.). The human species has taken over the entire animal kingdom.
Demographics is the "blind spot" of environmental politics. While the right side of the brain debates the maximum temperature threshold the world can handle, the left side of the brain contemplates the skyrocketing projection of population increase.
For example, between 1990 and 2014, global CO2 emissions increased by 58%, but only by 15% per capita. The increase in the population thus contributed nearly three-quarters of the growth. And yet, the Climate Change Conference in Paris (or COP21) completely ignored the issue.

Train station in Beijing  Photo: Pan Kanjun/Xinhua/ZUMA

The reasons behind this attitude are multiple and profoundly rooted in our collective unconscious. For one thing, a numerous population used to be a synonym of power. It meant a workforce for agriculture, a reservoir of manpower for the industry, and a way of expanding the ranks of the army. And some of that thinking still holds sway. Why would one country try to limit its rate of population growth if its neighbors practice the opposite?
Demography is all about externalities. For a while those externalities were positive: More people gathering in cities and working in factories led to greater production and even more jobs. But there are negatives as well.
The birth of a child affects the future of every other person on the planet. Once a baby is born, we feel compelled to stand in solidarity with that child no matter what happens. Then, when she becomes an adult, she'll contribute to the increasing anthropic pressure, not only in her neighborhood but the entire planet as well.

These questions may not be politically correct, but they need to be asked.

Today, we are without a doubt at the inflection point at which the negative externalities prevail. To combat this, there are two possible strategies: A ban that threatens penalties or promises incentives. China wasted no time enacting the first strategy with the one-child policy, which promoted economic growth. India also tried this is the 1970s with limited success. Today, 1.35 billion people live in India, triple what it was 50 years ago.
Elsewhere in the world, we just wait for quality-of-life improvements to dissuade couples from having multiple children. This strategy has worked quite well in the West, vastly lowering the fertility rate, and has also taken effect, more recently, in Asia and the Middle East. But the inertia of the demographic phenomenon is great.
Africa is lagging behind, contributing to nearly 60% of the expected global population increase by 2050 (+1.3 billion people). Family planning policies remain principally ineffective.
Is procreation an unequivocal human right? The Universal Declaration does not explicitly say so. It is limited instead to the vague statement of the right to marriage and the foundation of a family (Article 16). Should we leave it to individual states to decide their own familial policies? These questions may not be politically correct, but they need to be asked.
Developed countries — the biggest polluters — are ready to drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. A wedge formula shows that if each country were to stabilize its CO2 emissions per capita today, the global volume would still increase 16% by 2050 as a result of population increase. Conversely, to maintain the volume at the level it is at today, developing countries could maintain their emission levels if developed countries agreed to decrease their emissions by 40%.
This shows that the challenge is large and that we should welcome more control over population growth.
The solution must be tailored to accommodate developing countries, especially those in Africa (Article 7 of the Paris Accord). Will such an incentive system suffice? Will more coercive measures be necessary to avoid the explosion of the "demographic bomb" and its fallout in terms of wars and uncontrollable migratory movements?
What does seem clear is that if we fail to meet this challenge, future generations will realize, sooner rather than later, that the real "mother of all disasters" isn't climate change, per se, but overpopulation.

Links

• Food For Thought: Food Security, Population Growth & Over-Farming
• Climate Change Is Not A Key Cause Of Conflict, Finds New Study
• To Stop Climate Change, Educate Girls And Give Them Birth Control
• Growing Populations, Climate Change Leave Cities On A Fast Track To Water Deficits
• Bioethicist: The Climate Crisis Calls For Fewer Children
• What If Global Warming Emptied India?
• Climate Change | Sustainable Population Australia
• Human Population Growth and Climate Change
• Does Population Growth Impact Climate Change? - Scientific American