3338. Nafeez Ahmed on Synchronous Failure and Post-Pandemic Systems Change

By Asher Miller and Nafeez Ahmed, Resilience, March 30, 2020

As the pandemic grows, governments and communities are not only struggling to minimize loss of life and protect our fragile healthcare and economic systems, they are wrestling with questions about how we can recover when this storm eventually passes.

But how many people are thinking about the larger context of this crisis? How many recognize that this pandemic—or some other shock to our interconnected and brittle global systems—could trigger a massive “phase change,” and utterly remake the world as we know it?

I spoke with investigative journalist and systems thinker Nafeez Ahmed about these critical questions.

Nafeez and I discuss frameworks for understanding how the pandemic relates to the larger, systemic environmental, energy, economic, and political challenges we face—including Thomas Homer-Dixon’s concept of “Synchronous Failure,” Joseph Tainter’s “Collapse of Complex Societies,” C.S. Holling’s “Adaptive Life Cycle,” and Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine.” But far from being an abstract, academic exploration, Nafeez and I explore the real-world implications of these forces at play, and provide a call-to-action when we re-enter a world that has been transformed by COVID-19.

Please give it a watch or if you’d rather give it a listen on your favorite podcasting app, we’ve also released the interview on Crazy Town. Oh, and share with your friends and loved ones if you find it worth a listen.

We at Post Carbon Institute are closely monitoring the global COVID-19 pandemic and encouraging our staff, volunteers, and broader community to take great caution and practice social distancing. We’ll do our best to share insights and resources—ones grounded in PCI’s dedication to helping humanity address the broader sustainability crises of the 21st century and build a just and resilient future.

3325. Merkel Says Two-Thirds of Germans Could Become Infected

By The New York Times, March 11, 2020

Coronavirus outbreaks in Germany

Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Wednesday that the coronavirus was likely to infect about two-thirds of the German population.

“Given a virus for which there is no immunity and no immunization, we have to understand that many people will be infected. The consensus among experts is that 60 to 70 percent of the population will be infected,” she said.

In her first public appearance to address the epidemic, which has already infected more than 1,200 people in Germany, Ms. Merkel said that her government was following the advice of medical experts. She urged citizens to do the same.

“We are at the start of a development that we cannot yet see the end of,” Ms. Merkel told reporters. “But we as a country will do whatever is necessary to do, working within the European bloc.”

That readiness includes flexibility on spending, to help especially the small and midsize enterprises that are losing business, she said.

“This is an exceptional situation, and we will do whatever is needed,” Ms. Merkel said. “We won’t ask every day, ’What does this mean for our deficit?’”

The chancellor urged Germans to accept that it was important to stay home whenever possible and take precautions, to ensure that the health system would be able to withstand the high number of people who could fall seriously ill.  

Major events, including all large cultural performances in Berlin, Munich and elsewhere, such as many soccer games, have either been canceled or will take place without spectators. “How we respond matters,” Ms. Merkel said. “We are playing for time.”

Stocks on Wall Street tumbled on Wednesday, as topsy-turvy trading across global markets signaled continued investor concern about how governments would deal with the coronavirus fallout.

In Europe, major indexes in Frankfurt, London and Paris fell, giving up early gains that had come after the Bank of England said it would cut interest rates to help British businesses. Shares in Asia also fell.

Investors are vacillating between the threat that the coronavirus poses to the global economy and the hopes that governments will unveil a series of measures to help businesses.

President Trump has signaled that he will consider ways to stimulate the economy. Options include cutting payroll taxes and extending the American tax filing deadline past April 15. But so far, the White House has yet to announce any specific measures, and most experts say a payroll tax cut is not an effective way to combat the problems facing the economy.

The S&P 500 fell more than 2 percent in early trading on Wednesday. Stocks tumbled nearly 8 percent on Monday, and rose nearly 5 percent on Tuesday.

Other markets signaled persistent investor jitters. Futures for gold, a traditional haven, edged higher. The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond fell, another indicator of investor nervousness.

Oil prices fell after the Saudi Arabian state oil company said for the second time this week that it would expand production capacity. The announcement signaled no let up in Saudi Arabia’s clash with Russia over supplies, which sent crude prices crashing this week.

The speed of the coronavirus spread across Europe — with Italy accounting for about half of the nearly 20,000 cases on the Continent — has left countries scrambling to come up with a coordinated containment plan.

At the end of February, European nations other than Italy had reported just a few dozen cases. Now, France, Germany and Spain have well over 1,000 cases each.

Britain, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland each have at least 400 confirmed infections. Denmark and Belgium have both reported more than 250 cases, and Sweden has more than 350. Belgium reported its first death on Wednesday.

Even the island nation of Iceland has not escaped, with 81 infections in a population of about 364,000, one of the highest number of cases per capita worldwide.

Italy, with more than 10,000 cases and more than 600 deaths, has imposed strict travel limits across the entire country and banned public gatherings.

Matteo Renzi, a former prime minister, said Italy’s sacrifices would serve the entire continent.

“Today, the red zone is Italy,” he said, but if containment measures fail, “the red zone will be Europe.”

Some of the countries with the fewest cases are taking the most drastic actions.

Greece and Ukraine announced this week the closing of all schools, universities, and kindergartens. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government declared a “state of emergency” on Tuesday, granting his administration special powers to address the coronavirus outbreak, including closing universities and theaters.

Poland, which on Wednesday had 25 confirmed cases, will also shut down theaters, museums and art galleries for two weeks starting Friday.

Denmark has suspended naturalization ceremonies because a handshake is officially required for their completion.

In an unusual three-hour teleconference on Tuesday night, the European Council, which comprises the heads of government of the European Union states, decided to set up a $28 billion investment fund and to relax rules governing airlines.

But the leaders failed to overcome disagreements among bloc members about sharing medical equipment like face masks and respirators, given that health issues are the responsibility of national governments.

After the meeting, President Emmanuel Macron of France said: “What we are living is a true world crisis.”

In late January, the first confirmed American case of coronavirus had been reported in the Seattle area. Had the man infected anyone else? Was the virus already spreading?

Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, had a way to monitor the region. As part of a research project into the flu, she and a team of researchers had been collecting nasal swabs for months from residents experiencing symptoms throughout the Puget Sound region.

To repurpose the tests for the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But officials repeatedly rejected her idea, interviews and emails show,  as weeks crawled by and outbreaks emerged outside of China.

By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests without government approval. What came back confirmed the worst: a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history.

In fact, officials would later discover through testing, the virus had already contributed to the deaths of two people, and it would go on to kill 20 more in the Seattle region over the following days.

Federal and state officials said the flu study could not be repurposed because Dr. Chu’s lab did not have explicit permission from research subjects; the lab was also not certified for clinical work. While acknowledging the ethical questions, Dr. Chu and others argued there should be more flexibility in an emergency.

The failure to tap into the flu study was just one in a series of missed chances by the federal government to ensure more widespread testing during the early days of the outbreak, when greater containment still seemed possible. 

Even now, after weeks of mounting frustration toward federal agencies over flawed test kits and burdensome rules, states such as New York and California are struggling to test widely for the coronavirus. The continued delays have made it impossible for officials to get a true picture of the scale of the growing outbreak, which has  spread to 36 states and Washington D.C.

1702. Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says

By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, January 15, 2015

A dead whale in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 2011. As container ships multiply, more whales are being harmed, a study said. Photo: Marco De Swart/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

But there is still time to avert catastrophe, Dr. McCauley and his colleagues also found. Compared with the continents, the oceans are mostly intact, still wild enough to bounce back to ecological health.

“We’re lucky in many ways,” said Malin L. Pinsky, a marine biologist at Rutgers University and another author of the new report. “The impacts are accelerating, but they’re not so bad we can’t reverse them.”

Scientific assessments of the oceans’ health are dogged by uncertainty: It’s much harder for researchers to judge the well-being of a species living underwater, over thousands of miles, than to track the health of a species on land. And changes that scientists observe in particular ocean ecosystems may not reflect trends across the planet.

Dr. Pinsky, Dr. McCauley and their colleagues sought a clearer picture of the oceans’ health by pulling together data from an enormous range of sources, from discoveries in the fossil record to statistics on modern container shipping, fish catches and seabed mining. While many of the findings already existed, they had never been juxtaposed in such a way.

A number of experts said the result was a remarkable synthesis, along with a nuanced and encouraging prognosis.

“I see this as a call for action to close the gap between conservation on land and in the sea,” said Loren McClenachan of Colby College, who was not involved in the study.

There are clear signs already that humans are harming the oceans to a remarkable degree, the scientists found. Some ocean species are certainly overharvested, but even greater damage results from large-scale habitat loss, which is likely to accelerate as technology advances the human footprint, the scientists reported.

Coral reefs, for example, have declined by 40 percent worldwide, partly as a result of climate-change-driven warming.

Some fish are migrating to cooler waters already. Black sea bass, once most common off the coast of Virginia, have moved up to New Jersey. Less fortunate species may not be able to find new ranges. At the same time, carbon emissions are altering the chemistry of seawater, making it more acidic.

“If you cranked up the aquarium heater and dumped some acid in the water, your fish would not be very happy,” Dr. Pinsky said. “In effect, that’s what we’re doing to the oceans.”

Fragile ecosystems like mangroves are being replaced by fish farms, which are projected to provide most of the fish we consume within 20 years. Bottom trawlers scraping large nets across the sea floor have already affected 20 million square miles of ocean, turning parts of the continental shelf to rubble. Whales may no longer be widely hunted, the analysis noted, but they are now colliding more often as the number of container ships rises.

Mining operations, too, are poised to transform the ocean. Contracts for seabed mining now cover 460,000 square miles underwater, the researchers found, up from zero in 2000. Seabed mining has the potential to tear up unique ecosystems and introduce pollution into the deep sea.

The oceans are so vast that their ecosystems may seem impervious to change. But Dr. McClenachan warned that the fossil record shows that global disasters have wrecked the seas before. “Marine species are not immune to extinction on a large scale,” she said.

Until now, the seas largely have been spared the carnage visited on terrestrial species, the new analysis also found.

The fossil record indicates that a number of large animal species became extinct as humans arrived on continents and islands. For example, the moa, a giant bird that once lived on New Zealand, was wiped out by arriving Polynesians in the 1300s, probably within a century.

But it was only after 1800, with the Industrial Revolution, that extinctions on land really accelerated.

Humans began to alter the habitat that wildlife depended on, wiping out forests for timber, plowing under prairie for farmland, and laying down roads and railroads across continents.

Species began going extinct at a much faster pace. Over the past five centuries, researchers have recorded 514 animal extinctions on land. But the authors of the new study found that documented extinctions are far rarer in the ocean.

Before 1500, a few species of seabirds are known to have vanished. Since then, scientists have documented only 15 ocean extinctions, including animals such as the Caribbean monk seal and the Steller’s sea cow.

While these figures are likely underestimates, Dr. McCauley said that the difference was nonetheless revealing.

“Fundamentally, we’re a terrestrial predator,” he said. “It’s hard for an ape to drive something in the ocean extinct.”

Many marine species that have become extinct or are endangered depend on land — seabirds that nest on cliffs, for example, or sea turtles that lay eggs on beaches.

Still, there is time for humans to halt the damage, Dr. McCauley said, with effective programs limiting the exploitation of the oceans. The tiger may not be salvageable in the wild — but the tiger shark may well be, he said.

“There are a lot of tools we can use,” he said. “We better pick them up and use them seriously.”

Dr. McCauley and his colleagues argue that limiting the industrialization of the oceans to some regions could allow threatened species to recover in other ones. “I fervently believe that our best partner in saving the ocean is the ocean itself,” said Stephen R. Palumbi of Stanford University, an author of the new study.

The scientists also argued that these reserves had to be designed with climate change in mind, so that species escaping high temperatures or low pH would be able to find refuge.

“It’s creating a hopscotch pattern up and down the coasts to help these species adapt,” Dr. Pinsky said.

Ultimately, Dr. Palumbi warned, slowing extinctions in the oceans will mean cutting back on carbon emissions, not just adapting to them.

“If by the end of the century we’re not off the business-as-usual curve we are now, I honestly feel there’s not much hope for normal ecosystems in the ocean,” he said. “But in the meantime, we do have a chance to do what we can. We have a couple decades more than we thought we had, so let’s please not waste it.”