Why rush to save the planet?

That was a view put to me only last week from a dairy farmer who had switched to stock rearing for an easier life. He believes that it is already too late. The tipping point has already been passed, and he may well have a point. But reflect that, even in 1990, people in the richer developed countries consumed two thirds of global energy. Even now, as George Monbiot points out, a citizen in China produces on average 2.7 tonnes of CO2 per year. Contrast that with the UK at 9.5 tonnes and the USA at 20, and one does see where the current problem lies: not yet with China but still with the West. As one Indian delegate at the recent IPCC conference put it, it is now up to all of us to share the global pool of technology to beat this problem, and help India and China leapfrog to a clean technology future.

Rise in temperature
Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted from fuels burned by the richer countries since the nineteenth century have already committed us to a rise in temperature of one degree centigrade. Extra carbon dioxide does not suddenly disappear from the atmosphere. It takes time for it to be reincorporated into biomass, taken into solution in the oceans or used by marine organisms. These are the 'carbon sinks' of the planet which lock up carbon perhaps for hundreds or even thousands of years. In the case of coal, the carbon has been locked up for millions of years.

Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are, of course, the basis of life on earth, and they move around the system in huge quantities.

The problem now is that the planet's carbon stores and sinks are under threat. There is no quick fix. We keep on pumping out more CO2 and methane into the atmosphere - and it has nowhere else to go in the global system.

Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will just keep on rising, perhaps even faster than before.

Carbon sinks are parts of the global system that absorb more carbon than they emit in the short term. They store it. Rainforests and oceans normally absorb more than they emit.

Any dead material in these stores may be fixed and of course be removed from the atmosphere for hundreds and sometimes millions of years. The problem is that when we interfere with the stores in these subsystems on a grand scale, as we are at present, the whole system may not continue to behave in the same way.

It was thought that the oceans would be the buffer to save us from increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. If we increased the amount of carbon dioxide then more of it would go into solution. In fact, it has been estimated that the oceans have absorbed about 50% of the extra carbon dioxide humans have been producing over the last 200 years. But, as the temperature of the oceans rises, the gas becomes less soluble in seawater. Also, the obvious has happened: the oceans are becoming more acidic, the water combining with the CO2 to form a weak carbonic acid. Research from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory warns that no such pH changes in oceans have occurred in the past 20 million years. This is man-made effect, and the further capacity of oceans to take up CO2 is limited.

Worse than that, the biological carbon sinks of the oceans may begin to fail. The phytoplankton of the ocean use carbon dioxide in photosynthesis, just like land plants.

The zooplankton (floating marine life) feed upon them. Both types, when they die, fall to the ocean floor sediments and lock up the atmospheric carbon once again. What is worrying the marine biologists now is that the acidity of sea water may be damaging not only the larger marine organisms, but the calcium carbonate based zooplankton as well.

Evidence of the effect of acidulation was reported last month from shellfish. French and Dutch research has found that more acid seawater is weakening molluscan shells making them more vulnerable to predation.

What is measurable and symptomatic of the problem in the larger marine life forms may also be damaging the microscopic forms, many of which also have calcium carbonate shells.

Forests lock up carbon in their biomass too, but are being destroyed in the race for quick profits from plantation crops and soya.

Paradoxically, the quest for biomass fuel from oil palm plantations is exacerbating forest destruction with dash for 'deforestation diesel'. The 'gain' from using these biofuels for transport might well be wiped out. Yet again, over-consumption of fuels and feeds to produce animal protein, are the culprits. It's our lifestyle which is at fault. One cannot expect to ship vast amounts of fuel and protein around the world without damaging results. The planet has exceeded its carrying capacity for humans at their present number and lifestyle, and something in the system has to give.

Recently making a splash on the TV News were the peat bogs of the Russian tundra. In fact reported as a problem several years ago, researchers now saw greenhouse gasses bubbling out of the peat as the tundra warmed up. Commenting on this, a Russian researcher said, 'This is an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to global warming'.

The peat bogs of the tundra overlie 'permafrost' - ground permanently frozen to great depths under the ice sheets of the last ice age. As the climate warms up, the permafrost is melting; the ground becomes watery and unstable, the overlying peat bogs collapsing into a landscape of bogs and pools.

Time bomb
Siberia's bogs contain an estimated 70 billion tons of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more effective than CO2, so the effect could be huge. Scientists at the Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK, estimate that if the gases were released, they could lead to a 25% increase in global warming Even in the UK, peatlands are now recognised as a 'time bomb' in the fight against increased temperatures. Bad land management, draining and drying out the bogs, and 'improving' grassland leads to a massive release of carbon as the humus biodegrades. The National Soil Research Institute estimates the emissions of carbon from such environments is the UK amount to a tenth of the emissions from industry.

Managed correctly, these upland soils could absorb carbon instead.

Natural systems tend to remain in balance.

There are minor fluctuations in productivity which correct themselves over period of time.

Adjustments take place due to negative feedback which returns a system to stability.

Although subjected to fluctuating energy input from the Sun, the materials on the earth (over our time span) are essentially fixed. But we are capable of moving around materials in that system, and it is where materials are stored that are presenting the problem. By altering the carbon stores, the system may not continue to behave the same way. In fact its behaviour may change radically if one change causes similar changes to take place in the same direction.

The forcing of excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is causing a reduced 'window' for terrestrial radiation to escape. In turn this atmospheric warming causes the tundra to melt, causing the release of methane (CH4) from the peat bogs. This in turn enhances the greenhouse effect which causes increased ice to melt. More rock and soil surfaces are exposed to absorb solar radiation (as dark bodies), again intensify the heating effect.

When one change initiates another change that pushes the system to move in the same direction rather than return it to stability, this is referred to as positive feedback. It is the same concept as the 'vicious circle'. Unfortunately for us, most feedback in the global system is now taking us in one direction, making the Earth much hotter. Although negative feed back loops are thought to also exist, they will not operate to restore the situation to stability in the short term - and there is other positive feedback too. The net effect is to force the system to a tipping point where there is sudden and irrevocable change: the hypothetical tipping point where the Atlantic circulation switches off; where the Amazon rain forest dries out; where the Greenland Ice Sheet collapses. If such a point is passed, the system cannot be restored, except on a geological time scale.

World average temperature has always fluctuated. In the Cretaceous, the atmosphere was CO2 rich, world sea levels stood far higher that today, and vast shallow seas collected marine deposits including that white rock, the Chalk (CaCo3). Global temperatures were also several degrees higher.

During the last glaciation, temperatures fluctuated between glacial and interglacial periods, and these fluctuations were accompanied by changes in CO2 and methane content as well. It was once thought that changes in temperature took place over thousands of years. But painstaking research, comparing ice cores in the Greenland ice sheet, has revealed that slow change is not normal.

What next?
Changes recorded in the ice have revealed that temperatures could shoot up by as much as 7 degrees in just 50 years. To get this kind of change, the atmospheric circulation must have changed dramatically.

Systems can flip. They can reach what is now graphically called a 'tipping point'.

Concentrations of CO2 in the modern atmosphere at 379 ppm (2005) are now above interglacial concentrations of around 280 ppm, and pre-Industrial Revolution figures of 279. So what will happen next?

Left out of this equation is the effect of the heat store of the oceans and their circulation.

The oceans act as a buffer in the global system, damping down immediate effects.

They are currently buffering the system by absorbing CO2. They are absorbing extra warmth and re-circulating it to great depths.

The melting of ice has the same effect too, due to latent heat needed to change its state from ice into water. However, this cannot continue ad infinitum without reaching a tipping point where the oceanic circulation and atmospheric circulation both radically change.

What are we to do?
If anything is to be done - it has to be done now. The longer things are left, the greater the problem becomes. Climate change on this scale has not been faced by mankind before.

The entire rise of the human population since the end of the Younger Dryas (11,500 years ago) has taken place during a period of warm, stable climate. It has even been suggested by the palaeoclimatologist, William Ruddiman, that that this was no coincidence The rise of agriculture meant an increase in deforestation, increase in animals and rice paddy fields, all of which added enough CO2 and methane to the atmosphere to dampen a cool glacial phase. Minor fluctuations in climate could be dealt with easily by subsistence economy hunters and gathers - they simply migrated. Where populations were more sedentary, they sometimes crashed. In a world where we are sedentary, over-populated, urbanized and tied by political boundaries and resource competition, the future could be bleak. That is, unless there is a radical shift in the use of resource and energy consumption.

Governments should of course take the lead, but are doing too little too late. Bush avoided Kyoto; Blair and Brown have not gone far enough. It's time to put new carbon capture/sequestration technology into practice; to give more incentives to save and generate energy at home; to build in mandatory energy-saving generation requirements to building regulations; to regulate the siting of buildings with respect to energy capture; to accustom everyone to a carbon quota; to make industrial compulsory carbon quotas bite.

Perhaps most important of all, we should all seriously examine how we use the environment and what we consume. 'In a consumer society and a market economy, the role of government is to facilitate collective responses to collective problems that cannot be solved by individual choice. Sustainable consumption falls squarely in this camp. It is extremely hard for one individual or business to deviate widely from the collective norms.

Only the minority that seek to define their identity around sustainability will do so. So we will need to move together' (1). Only an estimated 4% of people in the UK have made this move so far (2).

(1) I will if you will: Ed Mayo and Anna Fielder Consumer Policy Review, Volume 16, No 4, Consumers Association, 2006.

(2) George Monbiot, BBC Today, 5th April 2007