1022. Climate Change Will Force Billions More Into Poverty, Warns UN

Draught in Africa

By Jacob Chamberlin, Common Dream, March 15, 2015

A lack of action against climate change will force up to three billion people into extreme poverty by 2050, according to the United Nations 2013 Human Development Report, released Thursday.

Unless actions are taken to avert climate change by a coordinated global community, the report argues, extreme weather, environmental disasters, deforestation, and air and water pollution could halt or reverse any progress made in recent years to lift people in the world's poorest communities out of poverty.

According to the report:

Environmental threats are among the most grave impediments to lifting human development … The longer action is delayed, the higher the cost will be.

Environmental inaction, especially regarding climate change, has the potential to halt or even reverse human development progress. The number of people in extreme poverty could increase by up to 3 billion by 2050 unless environmental disasters are averted by coordinated global action.

Far more attention needs to be paid to the impact human beings are having on the environment … Climate change is already exacerbating chronic environmental threats, and ecosystem losses are constraining livelihood opportunities, especially for poor people. A clean and safe environment should be seen as a right, not a privilege

The rise of the South and its potential for accelerating progress for future generations should be seen as beneficial for all countries and regions, as living standards improve and the world as a whole becomes ever more deeply interdependent.

Susan Cavanagh, media director at Greenpeace USA, responded to the report's findings by writing:

When it comes to political action on climate change, it’s the richest nations in the North that demand developing nations also act, which seems fair at first glance.

But it’s the rich nations of the North that reaped the benefits of industrialization leaving the rest of the world in an economic backwater. And it’s the polluting gases from that industrialization that’s driving the climate change now reigning down on the developing nations in the global South. [...]

It’s a cruel irony that now that those developing nations have raised their economic game to claw back some of the gains made by the North, the impact of climate change from industrialization should be visited upon them most. [...]

So the global South got a raw deal from industrialization and now it’s happening again from industrialization's monster child, climate change.

1021. The Winter of the Monarch

By Lincoln P. Brower and Homero Aridjis, The New York Times, March 15, 2013

In the Village of Contepec, in Michoacán, a few hours northwest of Mexico City, every winter day, rivers of orange and black butterflies would stream through the streets in search of water, swooping down from the Oyamel fir forest on Altamirano Hill. One of us, Homero, grew up with the monarch butterflies. The other, Lincoln, saw them for the first time in 1977, also in Michoacán, on a mountain called Sierra Chincua, where the branches of hundreds of fir trees were covered with butterflies that exploded into glorious flight when warmed by the sun.

Today the winter monarch colonies, which are found west of Mexico City, in an area of about 60 miles by 60 miles, are a pitiful remnant of their former splendor. The aggregate area covered by the colonies dwindled from an average of 22 acres between 1994 and 2003 to 12 acres between 2003 and 2012. This year’s area, which was reported on Wednesday, hit a record low of 2.9 acres.

Reasons for the decline are multiple, including: out-of-control ecotourism, extreme weather and diversion of water. Two threats loom above all others: the destruction of breeding habitat in the United States because of the widespread use of powerful herbicides and genetically engineered crops, and illegal logging in Mexico’s high-elevation Oyamel fir forests.

Deforestation has always been a dark shadow lurking in these beautiful mountains, and it has never been adequately dealt with by the Mexican government. In the 1980s, horrified television viewers watched footage of loggers armed with chain saws felling trees covered with butterflies and log-laden trucks crushing butterflies as they drove down the mountains. That led to the establishment, in 1986, of the Monarch Butterfly Special Biosphere Reserve, within which logging was outlawed. But still it continued.

In recent years, news releases from Mexico based on aerial imagery have claimed that illegal logging inside the reserve has been reduced to virtually zero. But these reports are incomplete and misleading, as they measure only visible deforestation in the core zone of the reserve, about a fourth of the protected 217-square-mile area. Forest loss in the surrounding areas is not reported, nor is the magnitude of local logging, in which individual trees are removed from the core area. This “selective cutting” is not visible in the aerial imagery, and yet it alters the forest microclimate and increases monarch butterflies’ risks of starving and freezing.

Ecotourism is presenting an additional threat to the butterflies as its popularity increases. As regular visitors to the monarch colonies, we have seen the conditions in these areas deteriorate, for butterflies and tourists. Along the heavily used trails that lead to the colonies in Piedra Herrada and Sierra Chincua, extensive areas of vegetation have been killed. Excessive dust, which now rises into the air with each step, is hazardous to the butterflies because it clogs their respiratory orifices. When we visited the Piedra Herrada site this February, along with former President Jimmy Carter, a welcome sign on the trail leading to the butterflies read, “No more than 20 people in the Sanctuary.” And yet we counted 24 tourist buses in the parking lot.

So what can be done? Ecotourism is an important part of the local economy, but we must make sure that its costs in habitat degradation and increased butterfly mortality don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg. The Mexican government has made strides in reducing much — but not all — illegal logging, and needs to do more. The United States, for its part, should re-examine the extent to which industrialized herbicide-based agriculture is destroying the flora in the Midwestern United States that monarchs depend on in the spring and summer. In addition to all of this, we simply need better data on the butterflies.

Measuring the size, location and survival rate of each colony that winters in Mexico is the responsibility of World Wildlife Fund Mexico and the staff of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. Sites are measured in December, and the total areas in each of the major locations are reported, usually in February or March. But, although W.W.F. Mexico has more specific data, the published reports are not detailed enough to allow scientists to review the status of individual colonies or to evaluate the butterflies’ survival in relation to forest condition. W.W.F. Mexico must release data on where the butterflies roost each year, whether each colony is increasing or decreasing in size, and what the mortality rates are at each site.

If some are doing better than others, we must learn why. If, as we fear, all are diminishing, then we should ask why the current management plans, both in Mexico and in the United States, are failing.

We are fortunate to have experienced the magnificent overwintering phenomenon over more than three decades. We hope that better stewardship will allow the monarch butterflies to continue to festoon the Oyamel forests of Mexico for generations to come.

Lincoln P. Brower is a professor of zoology at the University of Florida and a professor of biology at Sweet Briar College. Homero Aridjis, a former Mexican ambassador, is the author of the poetry collection “A Time of Angels.”

1020. Ron Finley: A guerrilla gardener in South Central LA

By TED, February 2013

Artist and designer Ron Finley couldn’t help but notice what was going on in his backyard. “South Central Los Angeles,” he quips, “home of the drive-thru and the drive-by.” And it's the drive-thru fast-food stands that contribute more to the area’s poor health and high mortality rate, with one in two kids contracting a curable disease like Type 2 diabetes.

Finley’s vision for a healthy, accessible “food forest” started with the curbside veggie garden he planted in the strip of dirt in front of his own house. When the city tried to shut it down, Finley’s fight gave voice to a larger movement that provides nourishment, empowerment, education -- and healthy, hopeful futures -- one urban garden at a time.

1019. Monarch Migration Plunges to Lowest Level in Decades

Summer migration pathways for the Monarch butterfly

By Michael Wines, The New York Times, March 13, 2013

The number of monarch butterflies that completed an annual migration to their winter home in a Mexican forest sank this year to its lowest level in at least two decades, due mostly to extreme weather and changed farming practices in North America, the Mexican government and a conservation alliance reported on Wednesday.

The area of forest occupied by the butterflies, once as high at 50 acres, dwindled to 2.94 acres in the annual census conducted in December, Mexico’s National Commission of Natural Protected Areas disclosed at a news conference in Zitácuaro, Mexico.

That was a 59 percent decline from the 7.14 acres of butterflies measured in December 2011.

Because the insects cannot be counted, the combined size of the butterfly colonies is used as a proxy in the census, which is conducted by the commission and a partnership between the World Wildlife Fund and the Mexican cellphone company Telcel.

“We are seeing now a trend which more or less started in the last seven to eight years,” Omar Vidal, the head of the wildlife group’s Mexico operations, said in an interview. Although insect populations can fluctuate greatly even in normal conditions, the steady downward drift in the butterfly’s numbers is worrisome, he said.

The latest decline was hastened by drought and record-breaking heat in North America when the monarchs arrived last spring to reproduce. Warmer than usual conditions led the insects to arrive early and to nest farther north than is typical, Chip Taylor, director of the conservation group Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas, said in an interview. The early arrival disrupted the monarchs’ breeding cycle, he said, and the hot weather dried insect eggs and lowered the nectar content of the milkweed on which they feed.

That in turn weakened the butterflies and lowered the number of eggs laid.

But an equally alarming source of the decline, both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Vidal said, is the explosive increase in American farmland planted in soybean and corn genetically modified to tolerate herbicides.

The American Midwest’s corn belt is a critical feeding ground for monarchs, which once found a ready source of milkweed growing between the rows of millions of acres of soybean and corn. But the ubiquitous use of herbicide-tolerant crops has enabled farmers to wipe out the milkweed, and with it much of the butterflies’ food supply.

“That habitat is virtually gone. We’ve lost well over 120 million acres, and probably closer to 150 million acres,” Mr. Taylor said.

A rapid expansion of farmland — more than 25 million new acres in the United States since 2007 — has eaten away grasslands and conservation reserves that supplied the monarchs with milkweed, he said.

The monarchs’ migration is seen as a natural marvel and, for Mexico, a huge tourist attraction. But naturalists regard the butterflies as a forward indicator of the health of the food chain. Fewer butterflies probably means there are fewer other insects that are food for birds, and fewer birds for larger predators.

Mr. Vidal and Mr. Taylor said December’s record-low census does not necessarily constitute a knockout blow against the butterfly. The Mexican government has halted what was once extensive logging in the monarchs’ winter home, and there remains the prospect that conservationists and state and local governments will replenish some of the milkweed lost to development and changed farming habits.

Mr. Vidal said that American and Canadian officials should move quickly. “Mexico is doing its part,” he said. “Mexico has invested resources, and it’s eliminated this massive illegal logging in the reserve. But on the other hand, I think the United States has to do much more.”

Mr. Taylor said a further decline could cross a tipping point at which the insects will be unusually vulnerable to outside events like a Mexican cold snap or more extreme heat that could put them in peril.

“Normally, there’s a surplus of butterflies and even if they take a big hit, they recover,” he said. But if their current 2.94-acre wintering ground drops below 2.5 acres, bouncing back could be difficult.

“This is one of the world’s great migrations,” he said. “It would be a shame to lose it.”

1018. From Readers: Why the Need for Sustainable Society

By Fred Ball, March 15, 2013

Fred Ball

As a new feature, I will post comments from the readers on matter of interest to Our Place in the World.  The following remarks are by Fred Ball who lives with his Costa Rican (Tico) family in Atenas, Costa Rica, for the past 14 years.  Fred Ball is a marine biologist, commercial pilot and former university lecturer. He currently conducts nature tours throughout Costa Rica. Ball and his wife, also a biologist, are currently part of a movement to stop Mansanto's project to plant GMO corn in Costa Rica.  He is also taking an online course on sustainability offered by Professor Jonathan Tomkin of the University of Illinois.  He submitted the following statement to a forum consisting of other students participating in that course. 

--KN

*     *     *

Greetings fellow students whom I hope will aspire to promote sustainability in times present and beyond. I am Frederick Ball, and I am aware of the pessimistic views expressed by scientists, environmentalists and others how humankind continues to compromise the precious assets of planet Earth such as the air we breath and the water we drink. Over the years I have witnessed on a global basis the widespread results of deforestation, contamination of the marine and fresh water environments, and reduced air quality. If you have not personally observed any of these events, which I find hard to believe, then you can certainly scan the abundance of available information that can be found in the media. Also, there are countless watchdog groups such as Ecological Internet and Rainforest Rescue that monitor projects that threaten the environment.  The National Aeronautics and Space Administration have a site (climate.nasa.gov) that provides certain vital signs of the planet relative to global climatic change. Despite the ongoing assault on Earth’s indispensable resources there is no doubt in my mind that Earth as a geological entity will survive, but not its ecosystems that support life! Perhaps lower life forms such as bacteria and cockroaches will continue to survive, but the majority of advanced organisms will most likely die-off. I say the majority because maybe Homo sapiens, in light of their technological wisdom, for a select few, will be able to extend their survival in artificial systems. Just imagine living the rest of your life in a closed capsule for life-support!

    Some people argue that it is already too late to reverse the trend of Earth’s deteriorating ecosystems. Whether true, or not, I believe all of humankind is obligated to seek out a life style that does not continue to compromise our vital natural resources. For me, that is what sustainability is all about!

1017. Big History Resources

By Kamran Nayeri, March 8, 2013

Our Place in the World was initiated on the premise that the solution to the combined social and natural crisis requires an ecological socialist transformation of Our Way of Life. Both the theoretical conceptualization of ecological socialism and the radical transformation of human culture requires a synthesis of several fields of knowledge. I include Big History as well as Darwinian evolutionary theory, Deep Ecology and Marxian theory among them. 

In the past few weeks, I have posted a number of contributions dealing with Big History.  In this post I like to draw your attention to the International Big History Association (IBHA) and urge readers to consider becoming a member.  Big History is a new field of study and the  IBHA is small. Yet, both can contribute greatly to any radical reconsideration of Our Way of Life and its transformation so that humanity can live in peace with itself and in harmony with the rest of nature.  I urge the reader to visit the IBHA website and explore it.   You will find very helpful information like current literature on Big History, ongoing discussion among its members, or upcoming conference.  By the way, don't forget to introduced Big History to the younger generation (see the Big History Project). 

Below I reprint the introductory note from the IBHA Home page.

*     *     *

Beginning about 13.7 billion years ago, the story of the past is a coherent record that includes a series of great thresholds. Beginning with the Big Bang, Big History is an evidence-based account of emergent complexity, with simpler components combining into new units with new properties and greater energy flows.

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe is thought to have been so hot and dense that matter could only exist in the form of a soup of quarks and gluons. As the universe expanded and cooled, matter could take on new forms, including the first protons and neutrons, followed much later by neutral atoms. Though the early universe was almost perfectly uniform, slight non-uniformities existed from the beginning, and over cosmic time gravity has enhanced those non-uniformities, pulling matter from less dense regions into more dense regions. This has produced the large-scale structure of the universe that we see today, including galaxies, galaxy clusters, and superclusters.

Within galaxies, gravity causes the collapse of gas clouds to form stars, which combine atomic nuclei to produce heavier elements through nuclear fusion. Before the first stars formed, the universe contained only hydrogen, helium, and small amounts of lithium (created in the first minutes after the Big Bang, when the universe as a whole was still hot enough to sustain fusion). But massive stars create carbon, oxygen, and all manner of heavier elements through fusion all the way up to iron. When these stars run out of fuel and explode as supernovae, the huge amounts of energy released often allow for the formation of even heavier elements like gold, uranium, and others. The heavy-element-enriched gas propelled outward by a supernova mixes with pre-existing gas and dust clouds, which may then collapse under gravitys influence to form second-generation stars. Because first-generation stars had created heavy elements, these were available for gravity to form rocky or terrestrial planets.

The formation of our own Sun and Earth took place about 4.6 billion years ago. The Solar System is located in one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms, known as the Orion Arm or Local Spur. We are between 25,000 and 28,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which consists of a few hundred billion stars. We are traveling around that center at a rate of about 220 kilometers per second, completing one revolution every 225- 250 million years. Over the past 4.6 billion years, the Earth has seen many chapters in its own history, with changes in atmosphere, the appearance and continual reformation of land masses through plate tectonics, and many other transformations.

Elements and molecules on the Earth formed various combinations in a process of chemical evolution. About 4 billion years ago, some of them formed membranes, gained access to additional chemicals and energy that became metabolism, and became able to reproduce with variation. What is called life then began its own highly uneven process of evolution, sometimes becoming more complex and diversified. Major transitions led to such features as cell nucleii, photosynthesis, intentional motion, multicellular specialization and cooperation, heads, backbones, four limbs, and many other features.

The rise of mammals following the extinction of dinosaurs some 65 million years ago led to the emergence of hominids. Eventually Homo sapiens emerged 200,000 years ago. Bipedal, largely hairless, large- brained, and with opposable thumbs, humans developed symbolic and imaginative language, inherited a social nature, and made ethics explicit.

Through our culture, humans shaped some of the natural forces from which we emerged. We added hunting to scavenging and gathering. Beginning about 70,000 years ago, we left our African home and migrated throughout the globe, crossing Beringia into the Americas some 20,000 years ago (though the precise date is still heavily debated). We formed bands, kinship groups, villages, chiefdoms, cities, nations, and empires. Our species crossed other major thresholds with the emergence of agricultural states, the burning of fossil fuels, and the recent entrance into an information-rich, digital era.

We have fought many wars among ourselves and brought about environmental degradation and resource depletion. These and other problems threaten the quality and even survival of our species. We face a current crisis and a possible loss of complexity. Over 99% of the species that have ever existed are now extinct. No complex species is likely to survive intact for more than a few million years; we will be lucky if we survive that long.

Does Big History provide a narrative that can help nurture the development of the empathy and cooperation that are part of our social nature? Can humans form a more perfect human community as we continue to create a more complex society than has existed before? Or will our current levels of social complexity face inexorable demise?

Whatever the answers to these questions, any species still surviving on Earth a few billion years from now would be well-advised to hop a spaceship to another solar system. Those still on Earth will face a much hotter sun. About 5 billion years from now, the Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel in its core and will grow into a red giant, evaporating the oceans and possibly engulfing the Earth. The Sun will eventually eject its outer layers, leaving behind its core, a white dwarf that will cool and fade over trillions of years. Meanwhile, other galaxies may keep racing away from our own Local Group of galaxies, perhaps leaving us with a sky devoid of the images of distant galaxies that have contributed so much to our understanding of the universe and the cosmic context of the Earth.

1016. Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years

By Justin Gillis, The New York Times, March 7, 2013

Scientists like Brian Bencivengo of the National Ice Core Laboratory examine ice cores to determine past air temperatures at the location from which the core was obtained. Photo: The New York Times

Global temperatures are warmer than at any time in at least 4,000 years, scientists reported Thursday, and over the coming decades are likely to surpass levels not seen on the planet since before the last ice age.

A research vessel collected data about past sea surface temperatures.

Previous research had extended back roughly 1,500 years, and suggested that the rapid temperature spike of the past century, believed to be a consequence of human activity, exceeded any warming episode during those years. The new work confirms that result while suggesting the modern warming is unique over a longer period.

Even if the temperature increase from human activity that is projected for later this century comes out on the low end of estimates, scientists said, the planet will be at least as warm as it was during the warmest periods of the modern geological era, known as the Holocene, and probably warmer than that.

That epoch began about 12,000 years ago, after changes in incoming sunshine caused vast ice sheets to melt across the Northern Hemisphere. Scientists believe the moderate climate of the Holocene set the stage for the rise of human civilization roughly 8,000 years ago and continues to sustain it by, for example, permitting a high level of food production.

In the new research, scheduled for publication on Friday in the journal Science, Shaun Marcott, an earth scientist at Oregon State University, and his colleagues compiled the most meticulous reconstruction yet of global temperatures over the past 11,300 years, virtually the entire Holocene. They used indicators like the distribution of microscopic, temperature-sensitive ocean creatures to determine past climate.

Like previous such efforts, the method gives only an approximation. Michael E. Mann, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University who is an expert in the relevant techniques but was not involved in the new research, said the authors had made conservative data choices in their analysis.

“It’s another important achievement and significant result as we continue to refine our knowledge and understanding of climate change,” Dr. Mann said.

Though the paper is the most complete reconstruction of global temperature, it is roughly consistent with previous work on a regional scale. It suggests that changes in the amount and distribution of incoming sunlight, caused by wobbles in the earth’s orbit, contributed to a sharp temperature rise in the early Holocene.

The climate then stabilized at relatively warm temperatures about 10,000 years ago, hitting a plateau that lasted for roughly 5,000 years, the paper shows. After that, shifts of incoming sunshine prompted a long, slow cooling trend.

The cooling was interrupted, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, by a fairly brief spike during the Middle Ages, known as the Medieval Warm Period. (It was then that the Vikings settled Greenland, dying out there when the climate cooled again.)

Scientists say that if natural factors were still governing the climate, the Northern Hemisphere would probably be destined to freeze over again in several thousand years. “We were on this downward slope, presumably going back toward another ice age,” Dr. Marcott said.

Instead, scientists believe the enormous increase in greenhouse gases caused by industrialization will almost certainly prevent that.

During the long climatic plateau of the early Holocene, global temperatures were roughly the same as those of today, at least within the uncertainty of the estimates, the new paper shows. This is consistent with a large body of past research focused on the Northern Hemisphere, which showed a distribution of ice and vegetation suggestive of a relatively warm climate.

The modern rise that has recreated the temperatures of 5,000 years ago is occurring at an exceedingly rapid clip on a geological time scale, appearing in graphs in the new paper as a sharp vertical spike. If the rise continues apace, early Holocene temperatures are likely to be surpassed within this century, Dr. Marcott said.

Dr. Mann pointed out that the early Holocene temperature increase was almost certainly slow, giving plants and creatures time to adjust. But he said the modern spike would probably threaten the survival of many species, in addition to putting severe stresses on human civilization.

“We and other living things can adapt to slower changes,” Dr. Mann said. “It’s the unprecedented speed with which we’re changing the climate that is so worrisome.”