A Green Degree Blog: New Angles On Sustainability

December 17th 2012

‘Chasing Ice’ Should Be This Generation’s Silent Spring; We’re Well Overdue

I’m just gonna come right out and say it. ‘Chasing Ice’ should be regarded as the vital wake-up slap in the face of our generation, akin to how Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ or the Brundtland Report’s ‘Our Common Future’ brought about a seismic change in the way we perceive and treat our planet.

I say this because ‘Chasing Ice’ has within it a message so clear in its meaning and power that you would be hard-pressed not to come out of this film feeling all manner of things; depressed, angry, confused (perhaps even feeling a trip to the Arctic Circle), but one thing that all involved will share is the profound urgency and blatant apparentness of what the planet is going through. And yes, it is climate change, and yes, it is because of us. You only have to check out the unfortunately leaked IPCC 5th Report due next year to see that the reputable if not conservative climate body now judges, with 99% certainty, that humanity has caused the warming experienced since 1950, and we ain’t about to stop anytime soon.

But what the film, and it’s incredibly dedicated team lead by the indefatigable James Balog manage to accomplish, is something science, and to a wider extent politics has abysmally failed at doing until [hopefully] now - communicate a warming planet in a way which the lay person can absorb and understand, with as little data as possible, whilst still retaining the necessary evidenced nature without alienating those who have become so out of touch with climate this and climate that.

The images and photography employed throughout are, for lack of a better phrase, tragically sublime, and bring to life something we as humans simply cannot connect with emotionally or psychologically, as the global scale and intensely terrifying nature of climate change is too much for our caveman brains to comprehend. Glaciers are undoubtedly one of our most apt indicators of atmospheric warming, fluctuating back-and-forth in relation to the current global state, and it is this attribute that ‘Chasing Ice’ brings to the forefront, with intricately orchestrated time-lapse photography, condensing 3 years of glacial change into 20 seconds of bitesized, jaw-dropping footage.

One of the most emotionally-heavy scenes of the film comes when the team experience the largest ever recorded calving event in history; a 75-minute long peeling off of skyscraper-sized icebergs and quaking bass-booms, as the Ilulissat Glacier in Greenland crumbles into nothing before the filmmakers eyes. This video was instantly shared and shared again around the internet, but it’s only when you go and actually see the film and watch James Balog present this nigh-on unbelievable force of nature to a crowd during a lecture, do you see the entire footage; Think Manhattan Island, but several times taller and infinitely more important collapsing into nothing, and you’re some of the way to understanding the scale. If there’s any scene in this film which wraps up the entire issue in one immense swoop, it is this one.

The film goes on to show us progressive retreats in all of the glaciers filmed by the crew, in the same time-lapsed beauty that is so accessible and yet scientifically crucial to the entire theme of climate change, and even throws in some absolutely crazy shots of Balog and his team rappelling into deep moulins, cavernous channels (or entrances to Hell) carved into glacial surfaces, directing meltwater into the depths of the glacier and out to the oceans. These things have to be seen to be believed, and should hopefully scare the living s**t out of you as much as they did me, and we’re only seeing more of them as time passes. Think of them as the glacier’s wounds, with the water flowing underneath only aiding in speeding up it’s demise.

Throughout the documentary, the determination and sheer will the entire crew demonstrates as they scale valley walls and brave well-below zero temperatures and hurricane winds to mount recording equipment is inspiring, and at times, weathering to watch. Nowhere else is this near-insane passion for filming the project, named the Extreme Ice Survey, more apparent than in James Balog, the man who started it all. Trained in Earth sciences and an avid photographer, the once-climate skeptic pushes his body to the absolute limit to get what is needed done, even if it involves several knee operations and some stem-cell repair afterwards. He even goes out on duty with crutches at one point, a both funny and poignant moment in the film.

His message is a simple one, and it scares even himself. We are changing the very chemistry and physics of our atmosphere, and within it our planet, and it is at the poles where this is most horrifyingly obvious. Documenting it and showing it to the world is his way of doing all that he can to make up for our wrongs as a society, and this comes through in the emotion experienced when talking about his kids futures, or finds that for a whole season, one of the cameras has been failing to capture any footage of worth. These moments make for sobering watching, but do more to show us just how damn obsessed with this project he is than any words could.

There is of course science and data in this film, not much, but enough to allow conclusions to be made and bold claims stated without being at risk of ‘cherry-picking evidence’, or some other denial trash. His team surveyed glaciers across Greenland, Iceland, Alaska and parts of North America, with backing from bodies such as NASA, the RGS, National Geographic, NCAR and more, as well as the odd talking head in the form of glaciologists and climate scientists; it’s safe to say that his credentials are not in question here. What is in question is why, when we have such clarity on the climate change issue, never before seen with such innovative and explicit footage, are we not doing something?

Only this past month there have been reports from all manner of business, government and science, such as PWC, BP, Exxon, the IEA, NOAA, DECC and so many more I won’t go on. What is also common amongst these is that they are NOT all lefty, liberal-green bodies which could be seen as ‘eco-radical’ and twisting things in their favour. This long list consists of oil and gas companies, government departments, independent think-tanks, reputable scientific bodies and long-running experimental studies. What more could we possibly need?

Well, I would like to think that ‘Chasing Ice’ may be onto something. The breakdown in communication between science and the public is lamentable, and likely ranks as science’s greatest failure, but it is one that can be remedied. We’ve had game-changing paradigm shifts in policy and scientific debate before, almost on a decadal basis, with of course, Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ sitting pretty at the top of them all, and we did something globally significant because of them. We’re well overdue another one however, and I wholeheartedly believe this is it; and my God, do we need one right now. Climate change is the biggest risk we’ve ever faced, ever even conceived of, and it affects literally every facet of life in our civilisation as we know it, and yet we go on as though it’s all a lie, it will go away if we ignore it, that everything will be alright in the end.

It’s a fantastic skill of ours to be ignorant in the face of mountains of evidence so stoically and nobly, but we’ve run out of time. Some of you may not think some ice melting here or there matters to anybody, and that you can’t judge something as big as climate change off of some footage gathered by a crazy man, but you couldn’t be more wrong. Glaciers are our best medium through which to experience global warming, and James Balog recognises and captures this tragic reality in a way which is not only beautiful and public-centric, but which hammers home our disconnection with nature more powerfully than any other film, book, report or natural disaster ever has. I have only one question…

…Why the hell isn’t it playing in more cinemas?! This should outsell Avatar three times over, and then some, but alas, maybe I’m now being the ignorant one.

Posted at 11:05am and tagged with: glaciers, Chasing Ice, james balog, ice survey, science, climate change, warming, global, ice, film, documentary, poles, polar, geography, geology, photography, cinema,.

October 31st 2012

Reconciling China & The US Over Climate Change, Impossible? Just Improbable

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As part of my seminar work at university recently, we were tasked with acting out a mock debate between China and the United States, as though we were their respective leaders attempting to form an international agreement on climate change and emissions, all COP-like. Three of us were labelled China (me) and the other three the US, and for two weeks we prepared our sides of the argument with the ideas of fairness, equality and discussing topics which are rarely touched upon in the real world.

Now, our goal was to duke it out for 20 minutes or so, each bringing out our biggest guns on the topics of economy, climate policy, energy and poverty, with the ultimate goal of first debating who bore the better position on the global stage, before forming a bilateral framework to bring the rest of the world on board. Easy task eh! But fun nonetheless.

Our lecturer, an environmental barrister who has seen his fair share of global conventions and knows how they work and (mostly) don’t work, and was keen that we focus on one or two key attributes of a fair debate on this topic. Firstly, historical emissions, the idea that a figure can be derived to demonstrate how much greenhouse gas emissions had been accumulated over time by each industrialising country, generally from 1850 until the present. Secondly, the intent to damage, or mens rea, and associated legal issues such as liability were to be included, as these are generally ignored or swept under the rug in the conventions we’ve come to know and hate.

And who do you think holds the crown of the highest historical emissions between the US and China? Why the US of course, by a margin of about 220,000Gt of CO2, maxing out at ~340,000Gt, almost 30% of the entire worldwide past emissions accounted for. China on the other hand is responsible for around 9% of the share, and much of that has been in the last 30-40 years of rampant coal consumption and becoming the ‘manufacturer of the world’, a moniker the US has had much use out of. When you consider what we know of climate science and carbon dioxide today, that fantastically large proportion of emissions resulting from the States puts pretty much everything else into perspective, not least China’s emissions.

China has tried to use this against the US before, claiming that they should pay up for all the dirty CO2 and the years of unabated, joyful economic growth it brought with it; if China is to be expected to slow growth to mitigate climate change, then the US should compensate all those who have and will be affected by that 30% historical share, i.e. the entire planet. When they brought this demand to the table, the US used their secret weapon to shoot it down instantaneously, quickly brushing it out of sight before anything serious came of it. By claiming ignorance effectively, the US leaders merely stated that they could not have possibly known fossil fuel burning was damaging the environment as we now know, and to ask them to pay compensation for anything earlier than, say, the 1980s would be ludicrous. This is despite the fact that we as a society knew these emissions were damaging at least decades earlier, and certainly by the early 1970s, when the wider scientific community began studying the effects of carbon dioxide and other pollutants.

Posted at 10:01am and tagged with: us, china, energy, climate, COP, debate, money, global, climate change, science,.

September 9th 2012

Shell Gets The Arctic Green Light & Melting Ice Paves The Way For Offshore Madness

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What a summer we’ve had eh, not just here in the UK where it was terrible, but globally; a season where weather went mad and Arctic ice caps took a long-awaited vacation from their comfy ocean abodes, whisked into the atmosphere by a warming world and natural craziness that literally none of us saw coming. Considering the summer isn’t actually even over yet, the impact of these factors is made all the more potent, and is much of the reason for such fervour in the media over drought, floods and food prices. What next?

Well for one thing, more ignorant foolishness is on the horizon, in the form of offshore drilling, perhaps the most lucrative and most idiotic fossil fuel resource we [apparently] have easy access to. Whose leading the revolution at sea? Why Shell of course, with backing by the American Interior and Obama’s government.

As we all have undoubtedly heard via the blaring sirens of the news outlets and internet aggregators, summer Arctic ice hit some pretty fancy milestones last month; let’s go over them quickly to put this post into context.

The level of melt reached its peak last August, on the 26th, falling to levels not seen for 30 years of recording, and a full 3-4 weeks before the usual point at which summer temperatures drive the highest reductions in ice, around mid-September. Not only was this melt way off the charts in terms of rapidity and severity, but it has now been touted as a rate so ‘amazing’ that it is considered by Dr Hansen, the famed climate scientist, to be unprecedented in scale in at least as much as 1,500 years, let alone 30, and that we as polluters should be trembling in our boots.

Carrying on with this theme, Hansen recently released a video detailing data for Northern Hemisphere average temperatures, where he compares 1951-1980 ranges to 2000-2011 records, and there’s an obvious contrast. The most common peak temperatures are a whole standard deviation away from the 1951-1980 means, and altogether the data shows deviations of up to 5 towards warmer temperatures, effectively stating that as we’ve progressed as a society, the past decade has seen more N Hemisphere warming than the whole 30 year period studied prior. It’s not a huge leap of logic to see that these massively pumped up temperatures, only set to increase, are likely responsible for most, if not all of the accelerated ice-melt being experienced in the Arctic.

Posted at 9:19am and tagged with: oil, drilling, exploration, offshore, oil rig, Shell, BP, tar, disaster, money, politics, science, arctic, ice, melting, record, warming, temperature, climate, global, wind, energy, independence, obama, EPA, US, summer, Hansen, government, election,.

August 5th 2012

The Next Solution To Our Legion Of Global Issues…? ‘Neo-Environmentlism’

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The man you see above is Stewart Brand, a man of many talents, interests, circles and followings. Some of you may have seen him talking at length and with much passion on the subject of nuclear power over at TED, battling it out on the stage with equally intelligent minds who don’t quite hold the same love for atom-splitting. Alongside these appearances, he is a highly regarded environmentalist and President of the Long Now Foundation, a group which aims to seed longterm responsibility in all things sustainable and cultural, I’m assuming in an attempt to align our global conscious in the right direction. Personally I like him; he holds good values and is a smart man, and I too share his like of nuclear power despite its negative press.

Well now Mr. Brand can add yet another qualification, if you can call it that, to his growing list - spiritual leader of the newest in green movements, ‘neo-environmentalism’. This fashionable but youthful ideal mirrors many aspects of the neoliberal movements of times past, where radical solutions to sweeping problems and optimism in every corner reign supreme. In effect, this fad hopes to replace the ageing and withered currently held belief that science and data will eventually turn society around and set it back on the path in which we survive far into the future.

It isn’t hard to see that this science-lead approach has had its fair share of hard times, with many die-hard scientists and professional circles now coming out in almost complete despair at the chances of peer-reviewed evidence ever pulling the wool from our eyes. With so many things going wrong in modern times, from climate change to food crises, the public are consistently battered from all sides by doom and gloom news, and there’s no doubt the majority is starting to simply switch off and crawl into their denial shell. Those that power on through and keep on the science debate are fighting a monumental war, even if once-proclaimed deniers such as Koch finally come out and agree with what many of us have known for decades. Even though I still firmly believe that this approach is one of the best we have in our arsenal against stupidity and ignorance, it would seem that now is the perfect time for something a bit fresher.

Neo-environmentalism manages to tap this resource by looking at it down the lens of economics and business. Everybody knows that politicians and economists are [far too] powerful in their abilities to influence all levels of governance, technology, funding and society, and by choosing to take their viewpoint more practically, you instantly win over a large group of people.

Within this, the role of technology, Western ideals and rapid advancement alongside growth take a much more important seat next to sustainability, rather than the more, shall we say, realistic view of the current movement, which sees tempered growth, inclusion of the environment in economic measurement and persistent projection and mitigation of oncoming disasters. Of course, both of these can easily blur together, and often do even now, but this new form seems to want to take things slightly more to the extreme business side of things, for better or worse.

July 27th 2012

How Long Will We Continue Denying Climate Change’s Link To Weather?

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There’s no denying the weather has been really quite screwed up of late, and this isn’t just on a local scale but a global one, affecting small and large nations alike.

Currently, large parts of SE Asia such as Beijing and Japan are suffering horrendous flooding after record-breaking precipitation falls for weeks on end, and there have been similar historical rains in many areas of Europe, the UK in particular. Alongside this, intense drought and insolation has been baking most of the entire United States for weeks, severely damaging crops across the agricultural belt of the continent and knocking food prices up globally, stirring fears of yet another food crisis if the weather is to continue.

Storms and hurricanes are of much higher magnitudes, striking with little warning to those in their paths, and regions of the globe so comfortably used to heavy snowfall and consistently cold winters are enduring some of the driest, mildest and frankly oddest seasonal variations seen in decades, perhaps centuries.

One theme slashes through all of these freak events like a warm knife through butter; the frequency and rapidity in which our weather systems are flipping from one extreme to the other is unprecedented in this day and age, and wouldn’t even fit into normal life some centuries past. Torrential rain which may have sat in place for weeks will be abruptly interrupted by beaming sunshine and glass-clear skies for yet more weeks, before thunderstorms and intense winds complete the freaky cycle. The fact these events are occurring within the same month, let alone the same season is reason to worry enough, and in many parts of the world, many are winning gold medals in trumping historical weather readings from as far back as records began.

Only recently NASA has posted studies demonstrating how far this weather screwing has gone. At some point during mid-July, the Greenland ice sheet, one of two major ice bodies on the Earth’s surface, the other being the Antarctic, experienced thawing of up to 97% of the entire ice mass, that’s 97%. For context, normal values read around 50% for the same time of year. This happens due to warming of and melting of the much thinner coastal ice and glaciers as summer comes round, and despite rates increasing steadily over recent decades, this year more than ever data fly through the roof. What makes this event so shocking, is that the normally impregnable central ice, which exceeds two miles thick in many places, melted just like any other part of the sheet, albeit to much shallower depths.

This scared scientists and followers alike as it not only flags up warnings in regards to future sea level rise and glacier loss, but such injections of fresh water can set up yet more complex and potentially devastating feedbacks in the ocean-atmosphere system, making things exponentially worse. Although much of the central meltwater will refreeze before long, it shows clear signs that the extreme weather we’ve been seeing can and potentially is having a direct effect on ice sheets globally, and the results can be incredibly quick and powerful. After further study, it’s suggested some 70% or more, perhaps even 95% of the melting can be attributed to climate warming and it’s associated impacts on weather systems.

However, it is necessary to note that this sort of abnormal melting does seem to occur in 150 year cycles, with the last in 1889, and therefore some of the alarming data can be tempered with this in mind, but this should not take away from a few key points. The fact that this sheet has experienced melt like this in the past, when man-made warming could not have been in effect, is important, but not absolute; if we see this melting occurring more commonly over the next few years, we’re seeing clear signs of breaking the natural flow of things. Even if we don’t, it’s a stark reminder of what could easily happen to the ice sheets globally if we continue to pump GHGs into the atmosphere. To ignore this, natural or not, would surely be foolish?

Posted at 11:31am and tagged with: climate, science, news, greenland, melting, change, warming, global, america, UK, europe, freak, weather, storms, rain, flooding, disaster, nature, humans, emissions, carbon, fossil fuel, denial, NASA, UN, IPCC, data, antarctic, extreme, chaos theory,.

July 24th 2012

The Humble Carbon Tax: The Simplest Answer To Our Problems?

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‘Taxes’. It’s a word that tends to strike fear and hatred in many peoples hearts and minds, instilling thoughts of slashed income earnings, costly purchases and the downfall of many a society. When we see it plastered over the news headlines and atop papers, we instantly think that once again, our governments are stepping up their efforts to screw us over financially by taking our rightfully earned money and wasting it away on projet that us as the taxpayers never see the light of.

Tax however is something us in the developed economic world have to deal with, it’s a power we cannot afford to ignore (excuse the pun). Without income tax and VAT, our nations would be without the cash to make our lives as good as they are, and they are good, even if economic downturn and suffering seem so rife at the moment. It’s never so much the idea of the tax itself that angers us, but the level we have to deal with, and its no surprise that us Westerner experience some of the highest in the world. Then again, we also experience the best living standards globally, so it can’t be all that bad can it?

This is why it’s high time the developed world took a long hard look in the mirror (and wallet) and began seriously considering what has become known as the ‘carbon tax’. The concept has been around for decades, and has only grown in potential since its inception. Unfortunately, it has yet to latch firmly onto daily life, always sitting in the background as a mere point for consideration than an actual solution. This stance is well overdue in its updating, and now more than ever, the carbon tax could be the answer to so many of our problems.

In effect, a carbon tax places a price, usually called the ‘social cost of carbon’, on a single ton of CO2, taking into account estimated disadvantages to health, population, the economy and the environment, with a round figure calculated at the end. Once this value has been obtained, the government will then charge any polluter, small or large, for each ton of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, an element we know all too well as a highly damaging pollutant.

This encourages polluters to do many wonderful things, ranging from innovating greener technology, to reducing dirty practices, switching fuel and ultimately curbing climate change. At the same time, a massive stream of revenue is provided to the government which can be directly reinvested back into renewables and cleaner industries. I’ll get to the side-benefits later, but for now, that’s enough to know that carbon taxing has the potential to actually make a solid difference, both to the planet and our wallets.

July 18th 2012

Japan Has Reached Tether’s End, But Can It Afford To Fall Apart Now?

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Japan has always been a nation that many others look up to in their strives towards achieving a society that is happy and content with its position in things, which can stand up to most problems and smash right through them without a second thought. As a country, the Japanese are renowned for their extreme politeness, obedience and determination in doing what is expected for their proud country, a trait some see as borderline subservience, and others as the key to a successful government and industrial powerhouse.

However, it’s easy for us to forget the Japan has been through some tragically harsh times in its history, especially in recent times. I feel it a shame that, in many cases, we ignore these facts because of the developed status that Japan holds, sitting high as one of the most technically and economically advanced countries in the world, which can cloud reality. Japan has experienced horrible conflicts, extreme natural disasters and serious economic downturn, the last of which many of us had the pleasure of partaking in too, and now more than ever is this the case. Even so, despite their hardships, the Japanese people sure now how to rise from the ashes, more powerful than before and with an even stronger resolve to live on; it’s something of a personality that the entire world recognises. This however, seems to be changing.

The past two years have been undoubtedly hard for the humble nation. Recovering from poor economic climates, Japan was hit by one of the biggest ever recorded earthquakes, only to be followed up with an equally record-breaking and devastating tsunami. As the Fukushima-Daiichi plant blossomed radiation, thousands were relocated in an instant from the huge quarantine area imposed by the government, and even now many are not allowed back to their homes and see no hope of that changing anytime soon. Whilst this happened, horrendously high numbers of people were killed by the quake and tsunami, a combination of nature frightening in its ability to trash whole towns and render the landscape unrecognisable.

Despite this, the Japanese, although wounded, did what they do, and began to rise from the rubble, the composed and determined people we are used to seeing. We applauded them for their courage, and vilified their government. Now more than ever, the effects of this are being rapidly unwound. With all nuclear reactors shutdown in Fukushima’s wake, a shortfall of 30% in the nation’s electricity generation capacity was instantly apparent, and fears of blackouts nationwide set in.

July 5th 2012

The ‘Polluter Pays’ Principle V.2: Time For An Upgrade

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With Rio+20 long gone, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise to me that most of the global populace has quickly and without bother discarded any knowledge of the convention, as well as the few and flimsy results that come of it, as though the whole thing was one pointless affair.

You could easily be fooled into thinking this is the case, considering so little of any worth, useful to effectively nobody matured from the talks, of which a large majority of the human race were crossing their fingers in the hope of a final resolution on all our woes and sufferings. Yes, there were a few pieces here and there, and the aptly-named ‘Future We Want’ paper was signed, but you only have to look a little further to see that anything with possible leanings towards a solid commitment and legal bindings within text was literally wiped away, replaced by ‘ifs’ and ‘taking steps towards’.

So coming from this, I felt it prudent to look back on one of the key agreements signed and ratified under the ancestor of this failed attempt at global democracy, the Rio 1992 Declaration, which actually managed to achieve what practically all other conventions that have come our way have failed to reproduce since - something worthwhile to the global community, which has stuck to this day and actually made an impact on ALL of our lives.

The ‘polluter pays’ principle is at its most basic, a very simple law pertaining to pollution from industry, whereby those who pollute must pay for the damage and degradation they bring upon the surrounding environment, whether it be through monetary forms (hard cash), incentives or compensation, effectively ‘making up’ for their shortsightedness.

This principle had one major point when it was conceived and globally upheld, namely that the inclusion of ‘pollution’ meant such things as fertilisers or insecticides, but has been rapidly adapted since to include greenhouse gases which pollute the atmosphere, for instance methane or CFCs. Due to this principle, and many others working in tandem, values of damaging pollutants in the environment has dropped significantly, and we have been able to see a tangible change in our way of life involving these materials.