Terpsichore Sunday

Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance ~ Jean-Marc Nattier, 1739

I rented the Danish movie "A Royal Affair" (En kongelig affære) to watch online, which I quite liked because it's a terrific example of the genre of romantic, historical costume docudrama, with the inevitable antique dance at a fancy-dress ball which follows, ahem, in the footsteps of noble predecessors like this classic scene:



Another favorite of mine is Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, the magic of which I've never escaped.  Okay...it was 1968, and I was fifteen years old.  This isn't the original music, but it's all I could find with the visual and it's still pretty darn good.  If the embed vanishes (and due to copyright quirks it well might) you can watch it on youtube.

But I digress.  A Royal Affair was also interesting because it chronicles the slavish conservatism of the Danish court, the arcane rigidity and cruel hypocrisy of which was enough to drive the monarch King Christian VII mad (or maybe he was autistic).  The film draws on an erotic novel based the perspective of the rebellious English Queen, and her affair with the King's most trusted confident, his personal physician from Germany, the radical and ruggedly handsome Dr. Struensee.  He had smuggled in forbidden books, and was much enamored of the writings of the irrepressibly romantic optimist, Jean Jacques Rousseau.  Set during the turbulent social and political upheavals of the Enlightenment period, The doctor and the Queen conspire to encourage the King to insist upon edicts more in line with the rest of contemporary Europe.  They successfully make rapid changes beneficial to the peasants - until the reactionary Danish noblemen discover and reveal the illicit affair.

Needless to say, falling into disgrace does not end at all well for the lovers, and after the coup the country reverts, the new rulers imposing serfdom, torture, and censorship once again, while rescinding such humane institutions as a publicly funded home for orphans.  Eventually though we learn in the epilogue that the Queen's royal children - one by the King and one by the Doctor - grow up and, inspired by the fate of their parents, enact more liberal laws bringing Denmark into the the glorious future envisioned by Rousseau, who famously wrote:

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.  ~ Discourse on Inequality, 1754

As we all know however, despite that progress, since then it's all gone to shit Hobbesian-style.  To the extent we can even claim a comparative hiatus in civility and freedom, at least for the wealthy nations of the world (I seem to remember a few wars and CIA interventions since then) freedom, equality and liberty have been merely a brief historical aberration at best, if not at worst, a fabrication that continues unabated even though much of it has, at least in the US, most recently been obscured by the greatest invention at brainwashing ever, the television.

Nevertheless, in the spirit of redemptive love and one of it's most glorious expressions, the dance, here is an amateur (meaning, low-quality clips - but excellent sound) but delightful video compilation of Fred & Ginger with Frank Sinatra's most excellent Come Dance With Me...if EMI won't allow it, another click will be necessary to view it on youtube.  Happy dancing!

Sheer Brilliance from Paul Chefurka

The following essay is by Paul Chefurka.  The original is posted at his website.  It is a beacon of light for three reasons (that come to mind before coffee).  First, it deftly sidesteps all the political squabbling over whether climate change is happening or not and goes straight to the heart of the intractable human conundrum.  Second, his main thesis - that our dilemma is both inevitable and insoluble - is robustly supported by irrefutable evidence (unless you subscribe to mirages, but then I can't help you).  And third, he offers the only way for an individual to live humbly and happily with the consequences without going mad from denial, guilt and fury.  Thank you Paul for allowing the free dissemination of your work, which has doubtless emerged from many years of deep contemplation and painful searching.  To Paul's graphs, I've added some illustrations from Globaia that demonstrate the extent to which humanity has come to dominate the earth - for detailed explanations and interactive images, please see the website.

Carrying Capacity, Overshoot

and Sustainability

Ever since the writing of Thomas Malthus in the early 1800s, and especially since Paul Ehrlich’s publication of “The Population Bomb”  in 1968, there has been a lot of learned skull-scratching over what the sustainable human population of Planet Earth might “really” be over the long haul.

This question is intrinsically tied to the issue of ecological overshoot so ably described by William R. Catton Jr. in his 1980 book “Overshoot:The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change”.  How much have we already pushed our population and consumption levels above the long-term carrying capacity of the planet?

In this article I outline my current thoughts on carrying capacity and overshoot, and present five estimates for the size of a sustainable human population.

Carrying Capacity

“Carrying capacity” is a well-known ecological term that has an obvious and fairly intuitive meaning: “The maximum population size of a species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment." 

Unfortunately that definition becomes more nebulous and controversial the closer you look at it, especially when we are talking about the planetary carrying capacity for human beings. Ecologists will claim that our numbers have already well surpassed the planet’s carrying capacity, while others (notably economists and politicians...) claim we are nowhere near it yet!

This confusion may arise because we tend to confuse two very different understandings of the phrase “carrying capacity”.  For this discussion I will call these the “subjective” view and the “objective” views of carrying capacity.

The subjective view is carrying capacity as seen by a member of the species in question. Rather than coming from a rational, analytical assessment of the overall situation, it is an experiential judgement.  As such it tends to be limited to the population of one's own species, as well as having a short time horizon – the current situation counts a lot more than some future possibility.  The main thing that matters in this view is how many of one’s own species will be able to survive to reproduce. As long as that number continues to rise, we assume all is well – that we have not yet reached the carrying capacity of our environment.

From this subjective point of view humanity has not even reached, let alone surpassed the Earth’s overall carrying capacity – after all, our population is still growing.  It's tempting to ascribe this view mainly to neoclassical economists and politicians, but truthfully most of us tend to see things this way.  In fact, all species, including humans, have this orientation, whether it is conscious or not.

Species tend to keep growing until outside factors such as disease, predators, food or other resource scarcity – or climate change – intervene.  These factors define the “objective” carrying capacity of the environment.  This objective view of carrying capacity is the view of an observer who adopts a position outside the species in question.It’s the typical viewpoint of an ecologist looking at the reindeer on St. Matthew Island, or at the impact of humanity on other species and its own resource base.

This is the view that is usually assumed by ecologists when they use the naked phrase “carrying capacity”, and it is an assessment that can only be arrived at through analysis and deductive reasoning.  It’s the view I hold, and its implications for our future are anything but comforting.

When a species bumps up against the limits posed by the environment’s objective carrying capacity,its population begins to decline. Humanity is now at the uncomfortable point when objective observers have detected our overshoot condition, but the population as a whole has not recognized it yet. As we push harder against the limits of the planet’s objective carrying capacity, things are beginning to go wrong.  More and more ordinary people are recognizing the problem as its symptoms become more obvious to casual onlookers.The problem is, of course, that we've already been above the planet’s carrying capacity for quite a while.

One typical rejoinder to this line of argument is that humans have “expanded our carrying capacity” through technological innovation.  “Look at the Green Revolution!  Malthus was just plain wrong.  There are no limits to human ingenuity!”  When we say things like this, we are of course speaking from a subjective viewpoint. From this experiential, human-centric point of view, we have indeed made it possible for our environment to support ever more of us. This is the only view that matters at the biological, evolutionary level, so it is hardly surprising that most of our fellow species-members are content with it.

The problem with that view is that every objective indicator of overshoot is flashing red.  From the climate change and ocean acidification that flows from our smokestacks and tailpipes, through the deforestation and desertification that accompany our expansion of human agriculture and living space, to the extinctions of non-human species happening in the natural world, the planet is urgently signalling an overload condition.

Humans have an underlying urge towards growth, an immense intellectual capacity for innovation, and a biological inability to step outside our chauvinistic, anthropocentric perspective.  This combination has made it inevitable that we would land ourselves and the rest of the biosphere in the current insoluble global ecological predicament.

Overshoot

When a population surpasses its carrying capacity it enters a condition known as overshoot.  Because the carrying capacity is defined as the maximum population that an environment can maintain indefinitely, overshoot must by definition be temporary.  Populations always decline to (or below) the carrying capacity.  How long they stay in overshoot depends on how many stored resources there are to support their inflated numbers.  Resources may be food, but they may also be any resource that helps maintain their numbers.  For humans one of the primary resources is energy, whether it is tapped as flows (sunlight, wind, biomass) or stocks (coal, oil, gas, uranium etc.).  A species usually enters overshoot when it taps a particularly rich but exhaustible stock of a resource.  Like fossil fuels, for instance...

Population growth in the animal kingdom tends to follow a logistic curve.  This is an S-shaped curve that starts off low when the species is first introduced to an ecosystem, at some later point rises very fast as the population becomes established, and then finally levels off as the population saturates its niche.

Humans have been pushing the envelope of our logistic curve for much of our history. Our population rose very slowly over the last couple of hundred thousand years, as we gradually developed the skills we needed in order to deal with our varied and changeable environment,particularly language, writing and arithmetic. As we developed and disseminated those skills our ability to modify our environment grew, and so did our growth rate.

If we had not discovered the stored energy resource of fossil fuels, our logistic growth curve would probably have flattend out some time ago, and we would be well on our way to achieving a balance with the energy flows in the world around us, much like all other species do.  Our numbers would have settled down to oscillate around a much lower level than today, similar to what they probably did with hunter-gatherer populations tens of thousands of years ago.

Unfortunately, our discovery of the energy potential of coal created what mathematicians and systems theorists call a “bifurcation point” or what is better known in some cases as a tipping point. This is a point at which a system diverges from one path onto another because of some influence on events.  The unfortunate fact of the matter is that bifurcation points are generally irreversible.  Once past such a point, the system can’t go back to a point before it.

Given the impact that fossil fuels had on the development of world civilization, their discovery was clearly such a fork in the road.  Rather than flattening out politely as other species' growth curves tend to do, ours kept on rising.  And rising, and rising. 

What is a sustainable population level?

Now we come to the heart of the matter.  Okay, we all accept that the human race is in overshoot.  But how deep into overshoot are we?  What is the carrying capacity of our planet?  The answers to these questions,after all, define a sustainable population.

Not surprisingly, the answers are quite hard to tease out.  Various numbers have been put forward, each with its set of stated and unstated assumptions –not the least of which is the assumed standard of living (or consumption profile) of the average person.  For those familiar with Ehrlich and Holdren’s I=PAT equation, if “I” represents the environmental impact of a sustainable population, then for any population value “P” there is a corresponding value for “AT”, the level of Activity and Technology that can be sustained for that population level.  In other words, the higher our standard of living climbs, the lower our population level must fall in order to be sustainable. This is discussed further in an earlier article on Thermodynamic Footprints.

To get some feel for the enormous range of uncertainty in sustainability estimates we’ll look at five assessments, each of which leads to a very different outcome.  We’ll start with the most optimistic one, and work our way down the scale.

The Ecological Footprint Assessment

The concept of the Ecological Footprint was developed in 1992 by William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth's ecosystems. It is a standardized measure of demand for natural capital that may be contrasted with the planet's ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area necessary to supply the resources a human population consumes, and to assimilate associated waste. As it is usually published, the value is an estimate of how many planet Earths it would take to support humanity with everyone following their current lifestyle.

It has a number of fairly glaring flaws that cause it to be hyper-optimistic. The "ecological footprint" is basically for renewable resources only. It includes a theoretical but underestimated factor for non-renewable resources.  It does not take into account the unfolding effects of climate change, ocean acidification or biodiversity loss (i.e. species extinctions).  It is intuitively clear that no number of “extra planets” would compensate for such degradation.

Still, the estimate as of the end of 2012 is that our overall ecological footprint is about “1.7 planets”.  In other words, there is at least 1.7 times too much human activity for the long-term health of this single, lonely planet.  To put it yet another way, we are 70% into overshoot.

It would probably be fair to say that by this accounting method the sustainable population would be (7 / 1.7) or about four billion people at our current average level of affluence.  As you will see, other assessments make this estimate seem like a happy fantasy.

The Fossil Fuel Assessment

The main accelerant of human activity over the last 150 to 200 years has been fossil fuel.  Before 1800 there was very little fossil fuel in general use, with most energy being derived from wood, wind, water, animal and human power. The following graph demonstrates the precipitous rise in fossil fuel use since then, and especially since 1950.

Graphic by Gail Tverberg

This information was the basis for my earlier Thermodynamic Footprint analysis.  That article investigated the influence of technological energy (87% of which comes from fossil fuels) on human planetary impact, in terms of how much it multiplies the effect of each “naked ape”. The following graph illustrates the multiplier at different points in history:

Fossil fuels have powered the increase in all aspects of civilization, including population growth.  The “Green Revolution” in agriculture that was kicked off by Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug in the late 1940s was largely a fossil fuel phenomenon, relying on mechanization,powered irrigation and synthetic fertilizers derived from fossil fuels. This enormous increase in food production supported a swift rise in population numbers, in a classic ecological feedback loop: more food (supply) => more people (demand) => more food => more people etc…

Over the core decades of the Green Revolution from 1950 to 1980 the world population almost doubled, from fewe rthan 2.5 billion to over 4.5 billion.  The average population growth over those three decades was 2% per year.  Compare that to 0.5% from 1800 to 1900; 1.00% from 1900 to 1950; and 1.5% from 1980 until now:

This analysis makes it tempting to conclude that a sustainable population might look similar to the situation in 1800, before the Green Revolution, and before the global adoption of fossil fuels: about 1 billion peopleliving on about 5% of today’s global average energy consumption.

It’s tempting (largely because it seems vaguely achievable), but unfortunately that number may still be too high.  Even in 1800 the signs of human overshoot were clear, if not well recognized:  there was already widespread deforestation through Europe and the Middle East; and desertification had set into the previously lush agricultural zones of North Africa and the Middle East.

Not to mention that if we did start over with “just” one billion people, an annual growth rate of a mere 0.5% would put the population back over seven billion in just 400 years.  Unless the growth rate can be kept down very close to zero, such a situation is decidedly unsustainable.

The Population Density Assessment

There is another way to approach the question.  If we assume that the human species was sustainable at some point in the past, what point might we choose and what conditions contributed to our apparent sustainability at that time?

I use a very strict definition of sustainability.  It reads something like this: "Sustainability is the ability of a species to survive in perpetuity without damaging the planetary ecosystem in the process."  This principle applies only to a species' own actions, rather than uncontrollable external forces like Milankovitch cycles, asteroid impacts, plate tectonics, etc.

In order to find a population that I was fairly confident met my definition of sustainability, I had to look well back in history - in fact back into Paleolithic times.  The sustainability conditions I chose were: a very low population density and very low energy use, with both maintained over multiple thousands of years. I also assumed the populace would each use about as much energy as a typical hunter-gatherer: about twice the daily amount of energy a person obtains from the food they eat.

There are about 150 million square kilometers, or 60 million square miles of land on Planet Earth.  However, two thirds of that area is covered by snow, mountains or deserts, or has little or no topsoil.  This leaves about 50 million square kilometers (20 million square miles) that is habitable by humans without high levels of technology.

A typical population density for a non-energy-assisted society of hunter-forager-gardeners is between 1 person per square mile and 1 person per square kilometer. Because humans living this way had settled the entire planet by the time agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago, this number pegs a reasonable upper boundary for a sustainable world population in the range of 20 to 50 million people.

I settled on the average of these two numbers, 35 million people.  That was because it matches known hunter-forager population densities, and because those densities were maintained with virtually zero population growth (less than 0.01% per year)during the 67,000 years from the time of the Toba super-volcano eruption in 75,000 BC until 8,000 BC (Agriculture Day on Planet Earth).

If we were to spread our current population of 7 billion evenly over 50 million square kilometers, we would have an average density of 150 per square kilometer.  Based just on that number, and without even considering our modern energy-driven activities, our current population is at least 250 times too big to be sustainable. To put it another way, we are now 25,000%into overshoot based on our raw population numbers alone.

As I said above, we also need to take the population’s standard of living into account. Our use of technological energy gives each of us the average planetary impact of about 20 hunter-foragers.  What would the sustainable population be if each person kept their current lifestyle, which is given as an average current Thermodynamic Footprint (TF) of 20?

We can find the sustainable world population number for any level of human activity by using the I = PAT equation mentioned above.

• We decided above that the maximum hunter-forager population we could accept as sustainable would be 35 million people, each with a Thermodynamic Footprint of 1.
• First, we set I (the allowable total impact for our sustainable population) to 35, representing those 35 million hunter-foragers.
• Next, we set AT to be the TF representing the desired average lifestyle for our population.  In this case that number is 20.
• We can now solve the equation for P.  Using simple algebra, we know that I = P x AT is equivalent to P = I / AT.  Using that form of the equation we substitute in our values, and we find that P = 35 / 20.  In this case P = 1.75.

This number tells us that if we want to keep the average level of per-capita consumption we enjoy in in today’s world, we would enter an overshoot situation above a global population of about 1.75 million people. By this measure our current population of 7 billion is about 4,000 times too big and active for long-term sustainability. In other words, by this measure we are we are now 400,000% into overshoot.

Using the same technique we can calculate that achieving a sustainable population with an American lifestyle (TF = 78) would permit a world population of only 650,000 people – clearly not enough to sustain a modern global civilization.

For the sake of comparison, it is estimated that the historical world population just after the dawn of agriculture in 8,000 BC was about five million, and in Year 1 was about 200 million.  We crossed the upper threshold of planetary sustainability in about 2000 BC, and have been in deepening overshoot for the last 4,000 years.

The Ecological Assessments

As a species, human beings share much in common with other large mammals.  We breathe, eat, move around to find food and mates, socialize, reproduce and die like all other mammalian species.  Our intellec tand culture, those qualities that make us uniquely human, are recent additions to our essential primate nature, at least in evolutionary terms.

Consequently it makes sense to compare our species’ performance to that of other, similar species – species that we know for sure are sustainable.  I was fortunate to find the work of American marine biologist Dr. Charles W. Fowler, who has a deep interest in sustainability and the ecological conundrum posed by human beings.  The following two assessments are drawn from Dr. Fowler’s work.

First assessment

In 2003, Dr. Fowler and Larry Hobbs co-wrote a paper titled, “Is humanity sustainable?”  that was published by the Royal Society.  In it, they compared a variety of ecological measures across 31 species including humans. The measures included biomass consumption, energy consumption, CO2 production, geographical range size, and population size.

It should come as no great surprise that in most ofthe comparisons humans had far greater impact than other species, even to a 99%confidence level.  The only measure inwhich we matched other species was in the consumption of biomass (i.e. food).

When it came to population size, Fowler and Hobbs foundthat there are over two orders of magnitude more humans than one would expectbased on a comparison to other species – 190 times more, in fact.  Similarly, our CO2 emissions outdid otherspecies by a factor of 215.

Based on this research, Dr. Fowler concluded that there are about 200 times too many humans on the planet.  This brings up an estimate for a sustainable population of 35 million people.

This is the same as the upper bound established above by examining hunter-gatherer population densities.  The similarity of the results is not too surprising, since the hunter-gatherers of 50,000 years ago were about as close to “naked apes” as humans have been in recent history.

Second assessment

In 2008, five years after the publication cited above, Dr. Fowler wrote another paper entitled “Maximizing biodiversity, information and sustainability."  In this paper he examined the sustainability question from the point of view of maximizing biodiversity.  In other words, what is the largest human population that would not reduce planetary biodiversity?

This is, of course, a very stringent test, and one that we probably failed early in our history by extirpating mega-fauna in the wake of our migrations across a number of continents.

In this paper, Dr. Fowler compared 96 different species, and again analyzed them in terms of population, CO2 emissions and consumption patterns.

This time, when the strict test of biodiversity retention was applied, the results were truly shocking, even to me.  According to this measure, humans have overpopulated the Earth by almost 700 times.  In order to preserve maximum biodiversity on Earth, the human population may be no more than 10 million people – each with the consumption of a Paleolithic hunter-forager.

Urk!

Conclusions

As you can see, the estimates for a sustainable human population vary widely – by a factor of 400 from the highest to the lowest.

The Ecological Footprint doesn't really seem intended as a measure of sustainability.  Its main value is to give people with no exposure to ecology some sense that we are indeed over-exploiting our planet.  (It also has the psychological advantage of feeling achievable with just a little work.)  As a measure of sustainability,it is not helpful.

As I said above, the number suggested by the Thermodynamic Footprint or Fossil Fuel analysis isn't very helpful either – even a population of one billion people without fossil fuels had already gone into overshoot.

That leaves us with three estimates: two at 35 million, and one of 10 million.

I think the lowest estimate (Fowler 2008, maximizing biodiversity), though interesting, is out of the running in this case, because human intelligence and problem-solving ability makes our destructive impact on biodiversity a foregone conclusion. We drove other species to extinction 40,000 years ago, when our total population was estimated to be under 1 million.

That leaves the central number of 35 million people, confirmed by two analyses using different data and assumptions.  My conclusion is that this is probably the largest human population that could realistically be considered sustainable.

So, what can we do with this information?  It’s obvious that we will not (and probably cannot) voluntarily reduce our population by 99.5%.  Even an involuntary reduction of this magnitude would involve enormous suffering and a very uncertain outcome.  In fact, it’s close enough to zero that if Mother Nature blinked, we’d be gone.

In fact, the analysis suggests that Homo sapiens is an inherently unsustainable species.  This outcome seems virtually guaranteed by our neocortex, by the very intelligence that has enabled our rise to unprecedented dominance over our planet’s biosphere.  Is intelligence an evolutionary blind alley?  From the singular perspective of our own species, it quite probably is. If we are to find some greater meaning or deeper future for intelligence in the universe, we may be forced to look beyond ourselves and adopt a cosmic, rather than a human, perspective.

Discussion

How do we get out of this jam?

How might we get from where we are today to a sustainable world population of 35 million or so?  We should probably discard the notion of "managing" such a population decline.  If we can’t get our population to simply stop growing, an outright reduction of over 99% is simply not in the cards.  People seem virtually incapable of taking these kinds of decisions in large social groups.  We can decide to stop reproducing, but only as individuals or (perhaps) small groups. Without the essential broad social support, such personal choices will make precious little difference to the final outcome.  Politicians will by and large not even propose an idea like "managed population decline"  - not if they want to gain or remain in power, at any rate.  China's brave experiment with one-child families notwithstanding, any global population decline will be purely involuntary.

Crash?

A world population decline would (will) be triggered and fed by our civilization's encounter with limits.  These limits may show up in any area: accelerating climate change, weather extremes,shrinking food supplies, fresh water depletion, shrinking energy supplies,pandemic diseases, breakdowns in the social fabric due to excessive complexity,supply chain breakdowns, electrical grid failures, a breakdown of the international financial system, international hostilities - the list of candidates is endless, and their interactions are far too complex to predict.

In 2007, shortly after I grasped the concept and implications of Peak Oil, I wrote my first web article on population decline: Population: The Elephant in the Room.  In it I sketched out the picture of a monolithic population collapse: a straight-line decline from today's seven billion people to just one billion by the end of this century.

As time has passed I've become less confident in this particular dystopian vision.  It now seems to me that human beings may be just a bit tougher than that.  We would fight like demons to stop the slide, though we would potentially do a lot more damage to the environment in the process.  We would try with all our might to cling to civilization and rebuild our former glory.  Different physical, environmental and social situations around the world would result in a great diversity in regional outcomes.  To put it plainly, a simple "slide to oblivion" is not in the cards for any species that could recover from the giant Toba volcanic eruption in just 75,000 years.

Or Tumble?

Still, there are those physical limits I mentioned above.  They are looming ever closer, and it seems a foregone conclusion that we will begin to encounter them for real within the next decade or two. In order to draw a slightly more realistic picture of what might happen at that point, I created the following thought experiment on involuntary population decline. It's based on the idea that our population will not simply crash, but will oscillate (tumble) down a series of stair-steps: first dropping as we puncture the limits to growth; then falling below them; then partially recovering; only to fall again; partially recover; fall; recover...

I started the scenario with a world population of 8 billion people in 2030. I assumed each full cycle of decline and partial recovery would take six generations, or 200 years.  It would take three generations (100 years) to complete each decline and then three more in recovery, for a total cycle time of 200 years. I assumed each decline would take out 60% of the existing population over its hundred years, while each subsequent rise would add back only half of the lost population.

In ten full cycles - 2,000 years - we would be back to a sustainable population of about 40-50 million. The biggest drop would be in the first 100 years, from 2030 to 2130 when we would lose a net 53 million people per year. Even that is only a loss of 0.9% pa, compared to our net growth today of 1.1%, that's easily within the realm of the conceivable,and not necessarily catastrophic - at least to begin with.

As a scenario it seems a lot more likely than a single monolithic crash from here to under a billion people.  Here's what it looks like:

It's important to remember that this scenario is not a prediction. It's an attempt to portray a potential path down the population hill that seems a bit more probable than a simple, "Crash! Everybody dies."

It's also important to remember that the decline will probably not happen anything like this, either. With climate change getting ready to push humanity down the stairs, and the strong possibility that the overall global temperature will rise by 5 or 6 degrees Celsius even before the end of that first decline cycle, our prospects do not look even this "good" from where I stand.

Rest assured, I'm not trying to present 35 million people as some kind of "population target". It's just part of my attempt to frame what we're doing to the planet, in terms of what some of us see as the planetary ecosphere’s level of tolerance for our abuse.

The other potential implicit in this analysis is that if we did drop from 8 to under 1 billion, we could then enter a population free-fall. As a result, we might keep falling until we hit the bottom of Olduvai Gorge again. My numbers are an attempt to define how many people might stagger away from such a crash landing.  Some people seem to believe that such an event could be manageable.  I don't share that belief for a moment. These calculations are my way of getting that message out.

I figure if I'm going to draw a line in the sand, I'm going to do it on behalf of all life, not just our way of life.

What can we do? 

To be absolutely clear, after ten years of investigating what I affectionately call "The Global Clusterfuck", I do not think it can be prevented, mitigated or managed in any way.  If and when it happens, it will follow its own dynamic, and the force of events could easily make the Japanese and Andaman tsunamis seem like pleasant days at the beach.

The most effective preparations that we can make will all be done by individuals and small groups.  It will be up to each of us to decide what our skills, resources and motivations call us to do.  It will be different for each of us - even for people in the same neighborhood, let alone people on opposite sides of the world.

I've been saying for a couple of years that each of us will each do whatever we think is appropriate to the circumstances, in whatever part of the world we can influence. The outcome of our actions is ultimately unforeseeable, because it depends on how the efforts of all 7 billion of us converge, co-operate and compete.  The end result will be quite different from place to place - climate change impacts will vary, resources vary, social structures vary, values and belief systems are different all over the world.The best we can do is to do our best.

Here is my advice: 

• Stay awake to what's happening around us.
• Don't get hung up by other people’s "shoulds and shouldn'ts".
• Occasionally re-examine our personal values.  If they aren't in alignment with what we think the world needs, change them.
• Stop blaming people. Others are as much victims of the times as we are - even the CEOs and politicians.
• Blame, anger and outrage is pointless.  It wastes precious energy that we will need for more useful work.
• Laugh a lot, at everything - including ourselves.
• Hold all the world's various beliefs and "isms" lightly, including our own.
• Forgive others. Forgive ourselves. For everything.
• Love everything just as deeply as you can.

That's what I think might be helpful. If we get all that personal stuff right, then doing the physical stuff about food, water, housing,transportation, energy, politics and the rest of it will come easy – or at least a bit easier. And we will have a lot more fun doing it.

I wish you all the best of luck!

Bodhi Paul Chefurka
May 16, 2013

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Just So

This is how slowly the complexity of the ecosystem is crafted...and exactly how it collapses.

With thanks to Ugo Bardi's explanation of the Seneca Cliff.

The Arbitrary Indifference of Nature

Wisteria at Wit's End

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

~ Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Do you see the bee?

Nature is neither benevolent nor malicious - not even capricious.  When ecosystems collapse and famine results, we might attribute retribution for our transgressions to Nature, but there is no malevolent intent.  There is merely cause and effect.  Nature doesn't even know we exist, let alone bothers to scrutinize our motives for ruining her splendid creation.

After dry weeks of ominously unrelenting sunshine, we finally had some rain.  In a fusillade of green, the leaves exploded.

Once the skies cleared, it was time to go exploring.

Fungi commenced swelling in the woods.

This orange monstrosity spends part of its life cycle in apple orchards, but in the spring, after a rain, it festoons the native red cedars.

Everything I've ever read about it claims it does no harm to its host.

Nevertheless, every year there is more and more of it...

...and every year, more needles turn brown and fall off.

This is the first time I've seen it in this shape, ugh!

With the cool weather spring has been laggard, but now that trees are leafing out, it's becoming apparent that many will have branches that remain bare, even on young trees.

Nevertheless, the air is balmy and full of the scent of early flowering shrubs and bulbs, so it's hard to be glum just because trees are dying prematurely from invisible ozone pollution, and the entire ecosystem is collapsing as a result.  I went for a walk with my friend Catarina to Willowwood, an arboretum with so many exotics plantings, there is something new to find in every visit.

At the center of the gardens is the home of the landscape architect who originally designed the park, early in the last century.

 Clever how the groundskeeper put a potted plant in the hole between the boxwoods.

I have to wonder how long it will be before the hedge, which is now an eyesore, is removed entirely.  But it didn't used to be.  It was just beginning to yellow and lose leaves in July of 2009 when I took this photo:

Here's another comparison (there are more at an earlier post) of a pine tree in the meadow, 2009 (funny how back then I already saw this tree as an example of decline):

 By February 2012, it had seriously deteriorated:

And this is what it was reduced to by last Thursday, May 9:

Trees store an enormous amount of energy to tide them over extended awkwardly inclement weather episodes, and so they will leaf out, season after season, even when they are dying, and often produce bumper crops of seeds or cones in an attempt to reproduce.  So at this time of year, when the deciduous trees are trying their hardest to survive and sprout leaves, the trend is more easily observed in the evergreen species.

Everything from bamboo to rhododendron is pinched and sparse.

So many large conifers have died that the staff can't keep up with removing their carcasses.

Here's another:

The Mahonia has an extraordinary amount of yellowing leaves.

They eventually turn black and fall off.

Even more bizarre, the new growth is a distorted mutation.

Japanese andromeda, a staple of suburban landscaping, is speckled with the classic symptom of stomates damaged by absorbing pollution.

Perhaps most shocking, and sad, are the hollies, because they grow so slowly that this (once upon a time) magnificent and elegant hedge must have been planted long ago.  That yellow cast isn't an oddity of the photograph.

The leaves really are bright acid yellow, a prelude to falling off.

The transparency is as embarrassing as inappropriate nudity.

The leaves aren't just yellowing from an inability to photosynthesize, they are splotchily necrotic. 

The array in this park represents a persuasive counter-argument to the wearisome and nonsensical claim of foresters around the world, that the primary threat to trees is from new invasive pathogens from imported nursery stock.  Like many old estates in the UK, Willowwood is planted with dozens of specimens imported decades ago.  Take this huge Sawara cypress, from Japan.

The Amur barberry hales from Manchuria.

Another import from Manchuria is this crabapple - the biggest I've ever seen.

It was planted in 1942.

The bark is flaking off, unfortunately.

It had already finished flowering, and drifts of white petals buried the perennial bed like snow.

It was one of many exquisitely beautiful sights that day.

The Japanese wheel-tree was planted in 1951.

It is an evergreen, suited to the local hardiness zone.  Until recently, it was growing robustly to reach such heights.

But now the foliage is injured, identical to the holly and Mahonia.

All through the property, even the deciduous shrubs have been ruthlessly hacked, in the hopes of rejuvenating growth.

Despite great efforts, the remnants of the Sandy storm still mar the woods beyond the manicured areas.

As mentioned at Wit's End many times, Sandy did not have unprecedented winds when it made landfall, and many of the trees fell because they were rotting inside.

Too often people assume that trees are dying because they are old, forgetting that most trees should live for hundreds of years.

We stopped near this tree to sit in the shade and rest.

It's impossible not to find evidence of decay, like holes, in seemingly healthy trees.

Cankers result from a lethal fungus, and epicormic branching - new sprouts from the trunk - indicate a hormonal signal that the crown is decayed.

While we rested, a Baltimore Oriole sang nearby, high in a branch.  I barely caught him as he flew away.

How are birds going to survive when so many branches have no leaves?  How can they build a nest secure from wind and heavy rains?

On our way back to the parking lot, Catarina stopped for a picture by this tree, since it's so hard to depict the size.

When I got home I looked it up and found it is Carya ×nussbaumeri Sarg. [illinoinensis × laciniosa] a type of hickory.

According to the USDA it exists in only five midwestern states, so it too, was imported long ago.

Like virtually every other tree of any age, the bark is corroded and splitting.  This is a horrendous symptom comparable to leprosy or gangrene.

You could try it for yourself, just go to the nearest tree and see if you can break some bark off.  Or else a good facsimile to the horror is the scene in Psycho, when Lila reaches out to Norman's mother in the rocking chair, and finds a corpse instead of a living person.  Ha!

When we got back to the car, we realized the entire graveled lot was littered with fresh leaves falling off.  Which brings me reluctantly to items in the latest news. 

Everytime I think everything that can be said about ozone has been said, something new turns up and I feel compelled to report it.  In fact recently, several new things have come up of such importance, that they have even crept into the propaganda that passes as mainstream media.  So instead of sitting outside on a lovely day with my paints and easel, trying to create something that looks like a Rousseau jungle, I become mired in dreary scientific papers and have to content myself with sorting photos to intersperse with the graphs and charts.

Garnering the most attention - which finally achieved front page, miraculously above the fold at the New York Times - is the symbolic milestone of reaching 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Arguably one of the most important sentences in that article, as David of WindSpiritKeeper astutely pointed out to me, is the following:

Carbon dioxide rises and falls on a seasonal cycle, and the level will dip below 400 this summer as leaf growth in the Northern Hemisphere pulls about 10 billion tons of carbon out of the air.

As Ozonists and Ozonistas are painfully aware, the ability of vegetation to absorb carbon out of the air is being drastically crippled, due to the toxic effects of rising background tropospheric ozone pollution.

Barely had I finished the last post (It Tolls For Thee) which includes information about coffee plants dying from a mysteriously more virulent fungus, when two other disastrous crop failures fell suit.  Actually they are worse than coffee - except for the producers who depend on export sales - because they are about more basic foodstuffs.

Cassava disease in Africa is the most critical because it is a staple for millions of people, and oops, the other staple, wheat, is also imperiled by a rust (but that's yet another story).

Cassava can be prepared in a multitude of ways - boiled, roasted, or pounded into flour.  Additionally, it can be stored in the ground until needed and has been relied upon for its resistance to drought and heat.  These screenshots are from a video about the disease.

It begins with a floating leaf in flames, and shows the bitter-tasting rot in the root.

These excerpts from Scientist: Cassava Disease Spread at Alarming Rate were found at Desdemona Despair:

Scientists say a disease destroying entire crops of cassava has spread out of East Africa into the heart of the continent, is attacking plants as far south as Angola and now threatens to move west into Nigeria, the world's biggest producer of the potato-like root that helps feed 500 million Africans. 

"The extremely devastating results are already dramatic today but could be catastrophic tomorrow" if nothing is done to halt the Cassava Brown Streak Disease, or CBSD, scientist Claude Fauquet, co-founder of the Global Cassava Partnership for the 21st Century, told The Associated Press.

Africa, with a burgeoning population and debilitating food shortages, is losing 50 million tons a year of cassava to the disease, he said. 

In Uganda, a new strain of the virus identified five years ago is destroying 45 percent of the national crop and up to 80 percent of harvests in some areas, according to a new survey, said Chris Omongo, an entomologist and cassava expert at Uganda's National Crops Resources Research Institute.

"The new strain looks to us to be much more aggressive," Omongo said.

Fauquet said one problem is that the virus attacks the tubers underground, so a farmer can husband his crop for up to 18 months and only realize when he goes to dig up the cassava that all his fields are infected. 

Omongo has participated in a training video — funded by U.S. aid to the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa — where farmers in north Tanzania are shown digging up cassava and cutting into roots turned black and brown with rot. The farmers say the rotten bits taste bitter and are inedible. They say they spend hours trying to chop away blighted parts.

The disease is spreading too fast to measure its impact, say scientists. A moderate infection with up to 30 percent root damage decreases the market value of cassava tubers drastically, to less than $5 a ton instead of $55, according to a study published last year in the journal Advances in Virology. 

"Recent estimates indicate that CBSD causes economic losses of up to $100 million annually to the African farmer and these are probably an underestimate, as the disease has since spread into new areas," the article said.

Africa produced 150 million tons of the global harvest of 250 million tons last year, with Nigeria alone producing 50 million tons, according to Fauquet. 

The cassava disease is endemic along the Indian Ocean coast of East Africa, affecting Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique. In the past, it had not struck at high altitudes. But recently the disease has been found at up to 1,500 meters (nearly 5,000 feet) above sea level in Uganda, Congo and Tanzania's lake zones, the article in Advances in Virology reported. The disease also is found in Burundi and Rwanda.

In the past year, Fauquet said, symptoms of the virus have been found as far south as Angola and moving into West Africa. The white fly that acts as a vector for the disease also has been spotted in Cameroon, in central Africa, and in Zambia to the south. 

"If the disease makes it to the Congo Basin, which is a big cassava producer, and — really frightening — reaches West Africa and Nigeria, the biggest producer, you can just imagine the impact, the magnitude," Fauquet said.

Are we worried yet?

It makes me crazy to see papers like one titled "Emerging Infectious Diseases of Plants" with no mention of air pollution, or the fact that air pollution increases susceptibility to disease, insects and fungus.  This is no secret, it's well-known.  So why is the only mention of pollution in reference to invasive species as "polluters" in research that purports to study "the most significant drivers of emergence" of disease?

Emerging infectious diseases of plants:  pathogen pollution, climate change and agrotechnology drivers

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) are caused by pathogens that: (i) have increased in incidence, geographical or host range; (ii) have changed pathogenesis; (iii) have newly evolved; or (iv) have been discovered or newly recognized. Interest in EIDs has focused on those affecting humans, livestock and wildlife. Plant diseases impact negatively on human wellbeing through agricultural and economic loss, and also have consequences for biodiversity conservation. Here, we apply previously published definitions of EIDs to diseases of plants, analyse the factors that drive their emergence and review their impact on human wellbeing and biodiversity. We conclude with recommendations for improving strategies for the surveillance and control of plant EIDs.

 

The USDA webpage and this European site both explain fumigation experiments, field observations, symptoms and effects of ozone on annual agricultural crops.  They steer clear of effects on perennial crops even though it would seem inevitable that the growth of plants exposed to cumulative damage year after year would be even more reduced.  Here's a stark explanation from York University webpage designed as an introduction for potential graduate students:

Ozone - A threat to global food security?  Our continued ability to feed the world’s population over the next century is uncertain, as population increases, agricultural land decreases and degrades, and the impacts of climate change increase.

But how important is air pollution globally as a threat to food security? 

The most important air pollutant in terms of effects on crop production is ground level ozone. Unlike many pollutants, elevated concentrations are not restricted to the vicinity of urban or industrial areas; ozone can be found at damaging levels across large areas of the countryside. It is formed in hot sunny weather by emissions from transport, energy production and industry. 

 

Ozone concentrations frequently exceed WHO air quality guidelines set to protect agricultural crops across many of the more densely inhabited parts of the planet. Evidence of the harmful effects to vegetation caused by ozone has accumulated over recent decades. In Europe, for example, visible symptoms of ozone injury are commonly seen on Mediterranean crops, especially when they are grown under irrigation. Ozone can reduce crop yield significantly even in the absence of such visible symptoms. More detailed information on the assessment of damage to crops from ozone in Europe is provided at ICP Vegetation.

However, ozone is not a problem that is confined to Europe and North America. Its effects in causing damage to crops have been recognised in Latin America, northern and southern Africa, South Asia and China. For example, studies in south Asia during the 1980s and 1990s have indicated that current ambient O3 levels can cause both visible injury and significant reductions in the yield of staple crops (up to 40% for rice and near 50% for wheat in one study conducted in Pakistan). 

If effects of this size occurred across large areas, the implications for regional crop production and the livelihoods of individual farmers would be dramatic. Regional estimates in east Asia suggest that current economic losses resulting from ozone impacts on the yield of three major staple crops are about US$ 5 billion.

 

Furthermore, ozone levels in many areas are projected to increase in the future, both as a result of increased global background concentrations, and because of increased regional emissions. Hence, these yield losses from ground-level ozone may, within the next 2-3 decades, reach levels which would pose a serious risk to national and regional food security, unless effective measures are taken to control the emissions which lead to ozone formation. These changes need to be considered in the context of the wider impact of a changing climate on global agriculture which were discussed at a policy meeting at the Royal Society in April 2005.

 

I came across that excellent reference looking for information about ozone in Africa because of the cassava story, since the received wisdom is that air pollution is less of a problem in the Southern Hemisphere, which is far less industrialized than the north.  Yet, up popped that graph above, and this line from the excerpt:  "Its effects in causing damage to crops have been recognised in Latin America, northern and southern Africa, South Asia and China."

Really, I wondered?  What could be causing high levels of ozone in Africa?  NASA explains:

Scientists have long recognized that high levels of ozone in the South Atlantic are caused by lightning in nearby continents and by burning vegetation in parts of North Africa. But, these sources alone did not seem to entirely account for observed seasonal episodes of extreme ozone levels.

Chatfield and Thompson believe man-made pollutants from Asia flows southward, gets trapped in clouds, and then moves rapidly westward across Africa and the Atlantic, reaching as far as Brazil. During the periods of high ozone in the South Atlantic, especially during late winter, pollution from the Indian Ocean follows a similar westward track, hurried along by winds in the upper air, leading to a pollution "pile-up" in the South Atlantic, making the ozone even thicker.

I was astonished to see that there is quite a bit of research about ozone in the Southern Hemisphere.

A study published last fall reports of an earlier episode "...a strong connection between regions of high ozone and concentrated biomass burning, the latter identified using satellite-derived fire counts" and summarizes:  "...the O₃ maximum studied in October 1992 was caused by a coincidence of abundant O₃ precursors from biomass fires, a long residence time of stable air parcels over the eastern Atlantic and southern Africa, and deep convective transport of biomass burning products, with additional NO from lightning and occasionally biogenic sources."

This visual depicting the increase in ozone over time - in both hemispheres - was published in 2003.  The research started with the rhetorical question:

Tropospheric ozone: A continuing threat to global forests?

It might better have been titled not merely continuing, but a worsening threat to global forests, since the background level is constantly increasing.  The important part of the abstract is highlighted:

Ozone (O₃) has a critical role in tropospheric chemistry. It absorbs radiation in the infrared and ultraviolet regions and is very reactive and biologically toxic at appropriate levels of exposure. At the earth's surface, O₃ is subject to long-range transport and is the most pervasive air pollutant affecting the world's forests today. The existence of O₃ has been known since 1840 and smog-induced foliar injury on plants was first identified in the 1950s. Levels were ∼10–15 ppb during the second half of the 1800s, compared with 30–40 ppb measured as the global background today.

 

By 2100, fully 50% (17 million km²) of world forests are predicted to be exposed to O₃ at concentrations >60 ppb. Ozone induces a variety of symptoms and pattern of injury that are dependant upon species, genotype, leaf position on the plant, leaf age, exposure dynamics, and meteorological factors or growth conditions. It is absolutely essential to have knowledge on species sensitivities, O₃ profiles and toxicity concentrations for the species under investigation before diagnosis can be confirmed.

 

Ozone is generally detrimental to tree growth and ecosystem productivity, often through induced changes in patterns of carbon allocation or pre-disposition to insects and disease. The development of ozone exposure–forest response relationships that are scientifically defensible and applicable in air quality regulation has been difficult due to serious limitations encountered in scaling-up experimental data. In terms of air quality regulations, North America and Europe have adopted different approaches toward ambient ozone standard setting, with Europe opting for an approach that protects vegetation. The US and Canada, in their individual countries, implement separate or identical standards to protect both human health and the environment.

 

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany published results in 2006 from a five year experiment which they called "Tropospheric Ozone:  the role of African emissions", which begins:

Tropospheric ozone has become a major concern over the last few decades, due to its noxious effects on human-beings and vegetation. It is also a greenhouse gas, thereby contributing to climate change. Its two sources are transport from the stratosphere and production from photochemical reactions involving emitted species (e.g. volatile organic compounds (VOCs), NOx and CO). In any given year, Africa is known to contribute about 28%, 24% and 18% to global CO, VOCs and NOx emissions respectively. Therefore, how much of the tropospheric ozone is due to African air pollution? This is what we investigate in this paper.

 

The results of their investigation indicate that by far the majority of ozone is from biomass burning:

Biomass burning has the highest influence on surface ozone concentration over Africa, while lightning has no effect. Anthropogenic emissions is influencing the ozone of only 3 countries: Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt.

From their poster:

An animated .gif developed from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) shows a movie of monthly mean tropospheric column ozone (with NCEP tropopause) from July 1995 to June 2003.  I would love to know what has happened in the ten years since the last image, but these two screen shots give an idea of the variability and the potential for abundance in the southern hemisphere.

From NASA satellite photos, Mongabay reported "Much of Africa Burning":

Season after season, year after year, people set fire to African landscapes to create and maintain farmland and grazing areas. People use fire to keep less desirable plants from invading crop or rangeland, to drive grazing animals away from areas more desirable for farming, to remove crop stubble and return nutrients to the soil, and to convert natural ecosystems to agricultural land.

The burning area shifts from north to south over the course of the year, in step with the coming and going of Africa's rainy and dry seasons. 

Finally, the smoke and accompanying gases and particles create a public health hazard; during an area's burning season, the amounts of ground-level ozone and other air pollutants can become hazardous to human health.

This map shows the potential distribution of the cassava disease:

Source

Ironically maybe solutions will be found by the fuel industry, as even Biofuels Digest expresses concern about the once-impervious cassava, a plant now succumbing to various diseases especially to CBSD.  Accroding to their article, CBSD was first identified 35 years ago and was a negligible threat until very recently, when it has become labeled a "scourge" and a "pandemic".

In Italy, cassava experts are reporting a triple threat against cassava, including Cassava Brown Streak Disease virus, Cassava Mosaic Disease and a possible whitefly “superbug”.  CBSD alone could cause a could cause a 50% drop in cassava production. This is worrisome because agriculture experts have been looking to the otherwise resilient cassava plant—which is also used to produce starch, flour, biofuel, beer and can be used in bioplastic production – as the perfect crop for helping to feed a continent where growing conditions in many regions are deteriorating in the face of climate change. Cassava has a known ability to survive high temperatures, but those same temperatures appear to be one of several factors causing an explosion of whiteflies.

 

Less than a day passed after the cassava story was published before warnings of the demise of the citrus industry in Florida were being trumpeted (again).  Statements in The New York Times  about the unprecedented speed echo the other reports about coffee and cassava - and so does the deafening silence about the influence of pollution:

Citrus Disease With No Cure Is Ravaging Florida Groves
Florida’s citrus industry is grappling with the most serious threat in its history: a bacterial disease with no cure that has infected all 32 of the state’s citrus-growing counties.

 

Although the disease, citrus greening, was first spotted in Florida in 2005, this year’s losses from it are by far the most extensive. While the bacteria, which causes fruit to turn bitter and drop from the trees when still unripe, affects all citrus fruits, it has been most devastating to oranges, the largest crop. So many have been affected that the United States Department of Agriculture has downgraded its crop estimates five months in a row, an extraordinary move, analysts said. 

With the harvest not yet over, orange production has already decreased 10 percent from the initial estimate, a major swing, they said.

 

“The long and short of it is that the industry that made Florida, that is synonymous with Florida, that is a staple on every American breakfast table, is totally threatened,” said Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who helped obtain $11 million in federal money for research to fight the disease. “If we don’t find a cure, it will eliminate the citrus industry.”

 

The relentless migration of the disease from southern to northern Florida — and beyond — has deepened concerns this year among orange juice processors, investors, growers and lawmakers. Florida is the second-largest producer of orange juice in the world, behind Brazil, and the state’s $9 billion citrus industry is a major economic force, contributing 76,000 jobs.

 

The industry, lashed over the years by canker disease, hard freezes and multiple hurricanes, is no stranger to hardship. But citrus greening is by far the most worrisome. 

The disease, which can lie dormant for two to five years, is spread by an insect no larger than the head of a pin, the Asian citrus psyllid. It snacks on citrus trees, depositing bacteria that gradually starves trees of nutrients. Psyllids fly from tree to tree, leaving a trail of infection.

 

Concerted efforts by growers and millions of dollars spent on research to fight the disease have so far failed, growers and scientists said. The situation was worsened this season by an unusual weather pattern, including a dry winter, growers said. 

“We have got a real big problem,” said Vic Story, a lifelong citrus grower and the head of The Story Companies, which owns 2,000 acres of groves in Central Florida and manages an additional 3,000 acres, all of which are affected at varying levels. “It’s definitely the biggest threat in my lifetime, and I’m 68. This is a tree killer.” 

...Across the Wheeler Farms groves here in Avon Park and beyond, the evidence of greening is obvious on some trees. Leaves turn yellow, then fall off, leaving behind sparse foliage. That is often the beginning of the end.

 

The psyllids are thought to have arrived through the Port of Miami a decade ago, scientists said. And while the bacteria does not harm humans, it devastates trees, leaving behind bitter, misshapen oranges. 

Greening has crippled citrus production around the world, including in Asia and Africa, researchers at the University of Florida said. A decade ago, psyllids were discovered in Brazil, which, with its abundant rural land, has tried to outrun the disease by removing countless trees and planting new acres.

 

Aware of the potential consequences, Florida’s thousands of growers have aggressively moved to curtail its spread. They have spent $60 million over six years, money raised mostly from a self-imposed tax, to create a research foundation seeking to eradicate greening. The federal Department of Agriculture also has dedicated millions of dollars to the effort.

 

More money is coming. The Florida Legislature this month approved $8 million toward greening research, a record sum. And Mr. Nelson is pushing a bill in Congress to set up a research trust fund using money from a tariff on imported orange juice. 

Florida is no longer alone in its battle against greening. The disease has spread to Texas, California and Arizona, where officials are anxiously watching developments in Florida. They are also joining the fight to speed up research.

"Greening has crippled citrus production around the world, including in Asia."  So if it's because it's an invasive from Asia, why is it crippling citrus production there too?

Since there have been massive crop failures in the past, it's worth wondering if the casssava and citrus situations aren't just normal, naturally occurring periodic events.

I haven't mentioned this before, and I probably won't again, since first of all, it doesn't really change anything and secondly, it is almost certainly impossible to prove.  However just this once I would like to point out that it has occurred to me (since I might be the only full-time Ozonista in the world, I have to speculate about these things) that ozone may have played a role in possibly the worst and certainly most famously absolute crop failure in history - the blight leading to the potato famine in Ireland.  Although the English and Irish argue to this day about how much politics and religion had to do with the loss, either by death or migration, of a quarter of Ireland's population, the crop failure, which was eventually linked to a fungus, could have been at least partially the result of pollution.

But!  1845 you say!  True, but consider that ozone derives not only from the burning of fossil fuels and nitrogen pollution, but also from the same precursors emitted from the incineration of plant material - as the evidence above indicates.  In fact it may well be that what is currently pushing ecosystems over the edge is peroxyacetyl nitrates from burning ethanol and/or emissions of methane.

Often lost in climate change studies which tend to focus on the unprecedented burst of fossil fuel use beginning with the Industrial Revolution, is the fact that humans have been burning wood, peat and coal, thereby releasing greenhouse gases, for much longer.  Of course the quantity was trivial in comparison to the modern era, but the point remains that where burning fuel releases CO2, it also inevitably releases ozone precursors which could be, on local scales, poisonous to the inhabitants and plantlife.  Smithsonian Magazine reported on research published in the journal Nature with the headline:

Air Pollution Has Been a Problem Since the Days of Ancient Rome

By testing ice cores in Greenland, scientists can look back at environmental data from millennia past

The article follows but first, two thoughts:  1) methane is an ozone precursor and 2) in the chart below, a massive jump begins in 1800.

Before the Industrial Revolution, our planet’s atmosphere was still untainted by human-made pollutants. At least, that’s what scientists thought until recently, when bubbles trapped in Greenland’s ice revealed that we began emitting greenhouse gases at least 2,000 years ago. 

Célia Sapart of Utrecht University in the Netherlands led 15 scientists from Europe and the United States in a study that charted the chemi­cal signature of methane in ice samples spanning 2,100 years. The gas methane naturally occurs in the atmosphere in low concentrations. But it’s now considered a greenhouse gas implicated in climate change because of emissions from landfills, large-scale cattle ranching, natural gas pipeline leaks and land-clearing fires.

 

Scientists often gauge past climate and atmosphere conditions from pristine ancient ice samples. The new research was based on 1,600-foot-long ice cores extracted from Greenland’s 1.5-mile-thick ice sheet, which is made up of layers of snow that have accumulated over the past 115,000 years.

 

Sapart and her colleagues chemically analyzed the methane in microscopic air bubbles trapped in each ice layer. They wanted to know if warmer periods over the past two millennia increased gas levels, possibly by spur- ring bacteria to break down organics in wetlands. The goal was to learn more about how future warm spells might boost atmospheric methane and accelerate climate change. 

The researchers did find that methane concentrations went up—but not in step with warm periods. “The changes we observed must have been coming from something else,” Sapart says.

 

That “something else” turned out to be human activity, notably metallurgy and large-scale agriculture starting around 100 B.C. The ancient Romans kept domesticated livestock—cows, sheep and goats—which excrete methane gas, a byproduct of digestion. Around the same time, in China, the Han dynasty expanded its rice fields, which harbor methane-producing bacteria. Also, blacksmiths in both empires produced methane gas when they burned wood to fashion metal weapons. After those civilizations declined, emissions briefly decreased.

 

Then, as human population and land use for agriculture increased worldwide over the centuries, atmospheric methane slowly climbed. Between 100 B.C. and A.D. 1600, methane emissions rose by nearly 31 million tons per year. According to the most recent data, the United States alone generates some 36 million tons of methane per year. 

“The ice core data show that as far back as the time of the Roman Empire, human [activities] emitted enough methane gas to have had an impact on the methane signature of the entire atmosphere,” Sapart says.

 

Although such emissions weren’t enough to alter the climate, she says, the discovery that humans already were altering the atmosphere on a global scale was “tremendously surprising.” 

The discovery will compel scientists to rethink predictions about how future methane emissions will affect climate. “It used to be that before 1750, everything was considered ‘natural,’” Sapart says, “so the base line needs to be reconsidered, and we need to look farther back in time to see how much methane there was before humans got involved.”

Manchester, Getting Up the Steam, 1853
from The Chimney of the World

Reflecting upon the complexities of the potato famine is an instructive cautionary tale, about overdependence on a single food source and overpopulation to say the least.  However, it's still true that Ireland was particularly polluted because of their habit of burning massive amounts of readily available and abundant peat, which although not fossilized still derives from many years of concentrated carbon from plants.  Since it isn't renewable in any meaningful time frame, it is classified as a fossil fuel.  In addition to many fascinating characteristics and an unappreciated role in history which can be glimpsed at wiki, peat also has a rather unique property, of smouldering beneath the surface.  This picture depicts one episode in Indonesia.  The white is aerosols that remained in the vicinity of the fires, while the other colors are ozone, moving west to Africa.

Perhaps you'll remember the horrific event in Russia:  "In the summer of 2010, an unusually high heat wave of up to 40 °C (104 °F) ignited large deposits of peat in Central Russia, burning thousands of houses and covering the capital of Moscow with a toxic smoke blanket. The situation remained critical until the end of August 2010."

A study of pollution from the Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland mentions a long history of health effects as recorded in The Big Smoke, a book by Peter Brimblecombe and summarizes:

It has been known for centuries that air pollution can be harmful to health. In his book documentation references to air pollution through the ages, Brimblecombe references Swift in Dublin, recording that doctors “advised their ill patients to move to the suburbs away from the foul air of the city”. Another interesting aspect to Brimblecombe is that a significant amount of the pollution events he refers to are due to coal burning, and he discussed policies introduced to reduce coal usage, in the 15th to 19th centuries.

A 2001 study, Phytophthora infestans enters the genomics era, describes the infection:

Host range: Infects a wide range of solanaceous species.  Economically important hosts are potato, tomato, eggplant and some other South American hosts (tree tomato and pear melon) on which it causes late blight. 

Disease symptoms: Infected foliage is initially yellow, becomes water soaked and eventually blackens. Leaf symptoms comprise purple-black or brown-black lesions at the leaf tip, later spreading across the leaf to the stem. Whitish masses of sporangia develop on the underside of the leaf. Tubers become infected later in the season and, in the early stages, consist of slightly brown or purple blotches on the skin. In damp soils the tuber decays rapidly before harvest. Tuber infection is quickly followed by secondary fungal or bacterial infection known as ‘wet rot’.

 

INTRODUCTION
In the mid-1840s, a devastating potato disease swept continental Europe, the British Isles and Ireland. It is estimated that Ireland, as a direct consequence of late blight, lost more than a quarter of its 8 million inhabitants to starvation and emigration, making this one of the most significant crop diseases in history. 

In the latter part of that decade, 20 years before the germ theory of Pasteur was widely accepted, a controversial debate raged through Europe and the USA as to whether the disease was caused by a fungus, excessive dampness, genetic deterioration in the cultivated potato, or by a ‘poisonous miasma borne on the air’, the offered sources of which included pollution, volcanic exhalations or ‘some aerial taint originating in outer space’ (reviewed in Bourke, 1991).  However, it was not until 1876 that a micro-organism named Phytophthora (meaning ‘plant destroyer’) infestans was conclusively demonstrated to be responsible for potato late blight (de Bary, 1876)."

That same agent causes what is currently known as "late blight" in tomato plants today - which, as many backyard gardeners have been lamenting, now comes "early".

In 2009, the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, published Effects of air pollution on ecosystems and biological diversity in the eastern United States.  Despite a clarion call for abatement, it appears to have gone quickly into the dustbin of history.

Abstract
Conservation organizations have most often focused on land-use change, climate change, and invasive species as prime threats to biodiversity conservation. Although air pollution is an acknowledged widespread problem, it is rarely considered in conservation planning or management. In this synthesis, the state of scientific knowledge on the effects of air pollution on plants and animals in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States is summarized. Four air pollutants (sulfur, nitrogen, ozone, and mercury) and eight ecosystem types ranging from estuaries to alpine tundra are considered.

 

Effects of air pollution were identified, with varying levels of certainty, in all the ecosystem types examined. None of these ecosystem types is free of the impacts of air pollution, and most are affected by multiple pollutants. In aquatic ecosystems, effects of acidity, nitrogen, and mercury on organisms and biogeochemical processes are well documented. Air pollution causes or contributes to acidification of lakes, eutrophication of estuaries and coastal waters, and mercury bioaccumulation in aquatic food webs. 

In terrestrial ecosystems, the effects of air pollution on biogeochemical cycling are also very well documented, but the effects on most organisms and the interaction of air pollution with other stressors are less well understood. Nevertheless, there is strong evidence for effects of nitrogen deposition on plants in grasslands, alpine areas, and bogs, and for nitrogen effects on forest mycorrhizae. Soil acidification is widespread in forest ecosystems across the eastern United States and is likely to affect the composition and function of forests in acid-sensitive areas over the long term. Ozone is known to cause reductions in photosynthesis in many terrestrial plant species.

 

For the most part, the effects of these pollutants are chronic, not acute, at the exposure levels common in the eastern United States. Mortality is often observed only at experimentally elevated exposure levels or in combination with other stresses such as drought, freezing, or pathogens. The notable exceptions are the acid/aluminum effects on aquatic organisms, which can be lethal at levels of acidity observed in many surface waters in the region.

 

Although the effects are often subtle, they are important to biological conservation. Changes in species composition caused by terrestrial or aquatic acidification or eutrophication can propagate throughout the food webs to affect many organisms beyond those that are directly sensitive to the pollution. 

Likewise, sublethal doses of toxic pollutants may reduce the reproductive success of the affected organisms or make them more susceptible to potentially lethal pathogens. Many serious gaps in knowledge that warrant further research were identified. Among those gaps are the effects of acidification, ozone, and mercury on alpine systems, effects of nitrogen on species composition of forests, effects of mercury in terrestrial food webs, interactive effects of multiple pollutants, and interactions among air pollution and other environmental changes such as climate change and invasive species.

 

These gaps in knowledge, coupled with the strong likelihood of impacts on ecosystems that have not been studied in the region, suggests that current knowledge underestimates the actual impact of air pollutants on biodiversity. Nonetheless, because known or likely impacts of air pollution on the biodiversity and function of natural ecosystems are widespread in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, the effects of air pollution should be considered in any long-term conservation strategy. It is recommended that ecologically relevant standards, such as "critical loads," be adopted for air pollutants and the importance of long-term monitoring of air pollution and its effects is emphasized.

 

Way back when, when I first learned the extent to which pollution damages trees, I began collecting research and photos at Wit's End because I had hope that if enough people found out, something could be done to rescue them (and us) from extinction.  (After all, we can't live long without trees).

Since those days of naivety, I have run into more than a few insurmountable obstacles, such as, most people simply won't even acknowledge that there is a dangerously accelerating global trend of premature mortality, across species and ages of trees.

In the intervening years - while it has become more obvious to some observers, and several scientific surveys have documented a decline around the world - most people, including professional nurserymen and expert foresters, still refuse to recognize the underlying, common cause.

Worse yet, I have come to the realization that no matter how irrefutable the evidence becomes, most people will NEVER admit that tropospheric ozone underlies all the diseases, insects and fungus opportunistically attacking vegetation, because to do so would implicitly require conceding that there are limits to our consumption and growth.  I expect this is true of many climate change deniers as well - no matter how many hurricanes or persistent droughts, they will never admit culpability.  I've become convinced that, contrary to my preferred belief that humans have historically made progress, in fact we have simply become more clever and ruthless about hiding our pollution and the slave labor that manufactures our toys and trinkets.  Moreover, our genetically programmed predisposition towards competition precludes any societal-wide, systemic reduction in the destructive activities that are exploiting and ultimately destroying the very natural world we depend on for life itself.

It turns out there are countless fascinating writings by philosophers along these lines, as well as studies in the field of evolutionary biology, which I've been reading about lately.  Scribbled notes and scraps and dog-eared books are cluttering the kitchen table, but every time I think I'll have time to collate them all into a somewhat cogent essay, more evidence that tropospheric ozone is arguably the most rapidly looming - and perhaps only avoidable - existential threat out of many turns up in the news.  I'm faced again with the bizarre nightmare that Wit's End is, as far as I know, the only place (other than WindSpirit) exclusively devoted to documenting the inexorably worsening threat from ozone - not just to forests and trees directly but to all the ramifications that follow - the loss of evapotranspiration creating precious rain, the loss a major CO2 sink mitigating even worse climate destabilization, the implosion of wildlife habitat.

Perhaps most ominous are the stories like those featured above, about the threats to agricultural products impacting our food supply.

I think it was around the 90's when science and activists decided to become obsessed with climate change to the exclusion of all other environmental issues - pollution, population, ocean acidification, habitat destruction, over-exploitation etc - thereby ruining any chance we would actually do anything about climate change.  And I think this has to do with the powerful and delusional impulse many scientists and activists share that climate change can be fixed with so-called green energy, and if necessary geo-engineering technology, requiring no sacrifice on the part of consumers.

Bill McKibben's recent sermon posted at DailyKos epitomizes this bogus assumption.  My comment to this quote - "...It's not that Americans are addicted to fossil fuel; most of us would be just as happy if our power came from the sun and the wind, if our cars ran on electricity." - was:

 * [new] the fallacy

Sure, they would be just as happy!  But you really can't fool the people.  They know there is no form of energy on earth, other than fossil fuels, that will provide enough renewable, clean fuel for personal automobiles and the other trappings of industrial civilization to which they have become accustomed.

Sure, the big corporations are evil, and the 1% is greedy.  But there's no point preaching against them if you aren't going to be realistic and point out that a drastic reduction in overall consumption and human population is required, in addition to "cleaner" energy, especially in the developed countries.

That is the only social justice and the only solution.  Pandering to the wishes of Americans by pretending it would be possible to continue their orgy of consumption will get us no closer to sustainable harmony with nature.  by witsendnj on Sun May 12, 2013 at 07:40:32 

I wasn't going to open the religious can of worms in that comment but personally, I tend to think that any belief in any sort of deity is an obstacle to fully engaging the reality of climate change.  They are not compatible - rather they are just fundamentally, diametrically opposed.  If you're going to subscribe to the idea that some deity exists, then there are only two possibilities and neither of them can allow for anthropogenic destruction of a habitable earth - either the deity won't allow it - or the deity wants it to happen.  Either way, it's out of our hands.  Since this is a highly contentious and unpopular opinion, it was refreshing to find a blog called Preposterous Universe, with this motto at the top:

in truth, only atoms and the void

Naturally I felt compelled to google that intriguing line - in truth, only atoms and the void - and found as I so often do, that I am woefully ignorant.  Wiki attributes the quote to Democritus, the Laughing Philosopher, and so I find another topic I need to devote study.

Agostino Carracci, 1557-1602

Democritus (c. 460 BC - 370 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. He is popularly known as "the laughing philosopher" for advocating a cheerful outlook, and for his rhetorical use of irony and ridicule. Of his voluminous writings, only a few fragments of his ethical theory and descriptions by other writers of his atomic theory remain.

• Nothing exists except atoms and empty space, everything else is opinion.  Diogenes Laërtius, 'Democrites of Abdera', Vol. IX

• Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, colour by convention; atoms and Void [alone] exist in reality.  Freeman (1948), p. 142

• Variant: By convention [nomos] sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.

 

What a delight to find atoms, a void, irony and ridicule in good company.  There is much to be cheerful about, and there is much to look forward to.  For instance, a new satellite project - called Biomass -  has been funded by the European Space Agency, which is going to measure the bulk and weight of forests, imagine how useful that will be!!  The bad news is that it won't launch until 2020, and by then, there will be almost no forests to measure.

Cynics might note that the information is to be used in calculating REDD credits, while complete misanthropes might wonder about this:

"Currently, Biomass will not be permitted to operate over North America, Europe and the Arctic.

The US Department of Defense (DoD) says the spacecraft's radar would interfere with its missile early-warning and space-tracking systems."

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

~ TS Eliot, Four Quartets

You might think that all this is depressing but no! Every day is a gift, and there is so much I want to learn, so much I want to see that I feel I must cram it all in, taste every morsel and inhale every waft while I can.  The hard part of reconciling with our headlong rush to self-imposed extinction is frustration with the colossal stupidity of it all, but even harder than that, for me, has been the crushing, stifling guilt.  I never felt particularly guilty about adding to overpopulation because at the time, I really had no idea what a problem it is.  If I thought about it at all, I guess I believed that we had plenty of time (space) left to deal with it.

However, I have felt horribly guilty that I brought my children into a world where, sooner or later, their generation will have to pay for our folly.  But at long last, after several years mulling it over, I no longer do.

My reasoning - and more important my inner conviction and feeling - is that no matter how horrible the future becomes, it will have been worth it for them.  Between the three, they have climbed Mount Kilamanjaro, Machu Pichu, and volcanoes in Hawaii.  They have held baby koala bears in Australia and bune jumped into a New Zealand ravine, gone scuba diving in Indonesia, become competitive equestriennes, earned degrees at Ivy League schools, visited the great art museums in Europe, read lots of books, and been to some pretty fabulous restaurants and parties.  Everybody has to die sometime, and when it's painless it's just dumb luck, because that is never assured.  But I plan to go to my grave without blaming myself for the fact that I and my fellow humans behave like a cancer on the earth.

Life is too short - and wonderful - to waste it feeling guilty.  If I am able to think coherently when I die, with my last thought I will go Knowing that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her. ~ William Wordsworth

I will end this post with the joyous sound of Bob Marley, whose song might be a pure medley of the irony and cheer posited by Democritus...I recommend you crank it up and dance, and then, go outside and hug a tree.

Check out the real situation

Nation war against nation.
Where did it all begin?
When will it end?
Well, it seems like: total destruction the only solution,
And there ain't no use: no one can stop them now.
Ain't no use: nobody can stop them now.