Fwd: [SALT] The Quantified Planet (Mark Lynas talk)
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----- Original message -----
From: "Stewart Brand" <s...@gbn.org>
To: "SALT list" <sa...@list.longnow.org>
Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2012 17:03:32 -0800
Subject: [SALT] The Quantified Planet (Mark Lynas talk)
“About 74,000 years ago,” Lynas began, “a volcanic event nearly
wiped out humanity. We were down to just a thousand or so embattled
breeding pairs. We’ve made a bit of a comeback since then. We’re
over seven billion strong. In half a million years we’ve gone from
prodding anthills with sticks to building a worldwide digital
communications network. Well done! But... there’s a small problem.
In doing this we’ve had to capture between a quarter and a third of
the entire photosynthetic production of the planet. We’ve raised the
temperature of the Earth system, reduced the alkalinity of the oceans,
altered the chemistry of the atmosphere, changed the reflectivity of the
planet, hugely affected the distribution of freshwater, and killed off
many of the species that share the planet with us. Welcome to the
Anthropocene, our very uniquely human geological era.”
Some of those global alterations made by humans may be approaching
tipping points---thresholds---that could destabilize the whole Earth
system. Drawing on a landmark paper in Nature in 2009 (“A Safe
Operating Space for Humanity,” by Johan Rockström et al.) Lynas
outlined the nine boundaries we should stay within, starting with three
we’ve already crossed. 1. Loss of biodiversity reduces every form of
ecological resilience. The boundary is 10 species going extinct per
million per year. Currently we lose over 100 species per million per
year. 2. Global warming is the most overwhelming boundary. Long-term
stability requires 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere; we’re currently at 391 ppm and rising fast. “The entire
human economy must become carbon neutral by 2050 and carbon negative
thereafter.” 3. Nitrogen pollution. With the invention a century
ago of the Haber-Bosch process for creating nitrogen fertilizer, we
doubled the terrestrial nitrogen cycle. We need to reduce the amount of
atmospheric nitrogen we fix per year to 35 million tons; we’re
currently at 121 million tons.
Other quantifiable boundaries have yet to be exceeded, but we’re
close. 4. Land use. Every bit of natural landscape lost threatens
ecosystem services like clean water and air and atmospheric carbon
balance. “Already 85% of the Earth’s ice-free land is fragmented or
substantially affected by human activity.” The danger point is 15% of
land being used for row crops; we’re currently at 12%. 5. Fresh water
scarcity. Increasing droughts from global warming will make the problem
ever worse. In the world’s rivers, “the blue arteries of the living
planet,” there are 800,000 dams with two new large ones built every
day. The numeric limit is thought to be 4,000 cubic kilometers of
runoff water consumed per year; the current number is 2,600. 6. Ocean
acidification from excess atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasingly
lethal to ocean life such as coral reefs. The measure here is
“aragonite saturation level.” Before the industrial revolution it
was 3.44; the limit is 2.75; we’re already down to 2.90. 7. The
ozone layer protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation. One man
(Thomas Midgley) invented the chlorofluorocarbon coolant that rapidly
reduced stratospheric ozone, and one remarkable agreement (Montreal
Protocol, 1987) cut back on CFCs and began restoring the ozone layer.
(In Dobson units the limit is 276; before Midgley it was 290; we’re
now back up to 283.)
Two boundaries are so far unquantifiable. 8. Chemical pollution. Rachel
Carson was right. Human toxics are showing up everywhere and causing
harm. Coal-fired power plants are one of the worst offenders in this
category. (Lynas added that nuclear waste belongs in this category but
“the supposedly unsolved problem of nuclear waste hasn’t so far
harmed a single living thing.” 9. Atmospheric aerosols---airborne
dust and smoke. It kills hundreds of thousands of people annually, the
soot causes ice to melt faster, and everyone wants to get rid of it.
But one beneficial effect it has is cooling, so Lynas proposes “we
could move this pollution from the troposphere where people have to
breathe it up to the stratosphere where it can still cool the Earth and
no one has to breathe it. That’s called geoengineering.”
Lynas proposed that the goal for the future should be to get the whole
world out of poverty by 2050 while staying within the planetary
boundaries. Among the solutions he proposed are: clean cookstoves for
the poor (they cause 1.6 million deaths a year); better GM crops for
nitrogen efficiency and concentrated land use; integral fast reactors
which run on nuclear waste (a recent calculation shows the UK could get
500 years of clean energy from its present waste, and the resulting IFR
waste is a problem for 300 years, not for thousands of years);
international treaties, which are crucial for dealing with global
problems; carbon capture (everything from clean coal to biochar); and
ongoing “dematerialization,” doing ever more with ever less,
including more intense farming on less land. “Peak consumption,”
Lynas noted, has already arrived in much of the developed world.
--Stewart Brand
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Stewart Brand -- s...@gbn.org
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