24 March 2016, Climate News Network, Humans tilt climate books out of balance. Greenhouse gases from cattle, fertilisers, manure and agriculture mean that human activities have turned the land and soil into part of the global warming machine. In the great book-keeping of climate change, scientists have just discovered a big mistake. They have been wrong, they now think, to count on the mountains, the plains, the forests and the grasslands as an agency that slows climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide. It does absorb carbon dioxide. But the chilling news is that the soil itself may be making the world warmer. That is because humans have changed the way the landscape and its living things works, and now – thanks to those other greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxides, from cattle, fertilisers, manure and agriculture – the terrestrial biosphere is actually accelerating climate change. Twenty-three scientists from 16 laboratories and institutions report in Nature journal that they re-examined the sums on which climate forecasts depend. They concluded: “We find that the cumulative warming capacity of concurrent biogenic methane and nitrous oxide emissions is a factor of about two larger than the cooling effect resulting from the global land carbon dioxide uptake from 2001 to 2010.” Read More here
Category Archives: Carrying Capacity
23 March 2016, The Age, 50 years after “The Lucky Country”, Australia’s sustainability challenge remains. More than 50 years ago Donald Horne, then working in an advertising agency, described Australia as “a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck”. The phrase “the lucky country” quickly became part of the language, though its message was often misrepresented. Horne’s 1964 book sounded three loud warnings about Australia’s future: the challenge of our geographical position, the need for “a revolution in economic priorities”, and the need for a discussion of what sort of country we want to become. Those warnings are even more urgent today after 50 years of inaction by our second-rate leaders. I’ve revisited Donald Horne’s ideas and updated them for the 21st century. An additional complication is the accumulating evidence that we are not living sustainably. Heading Backwards? The need for change was underlined by a 2015 UN report on sustainability. Australia ranks 18th of the 34 developed countries, below the UK, New Zealand and Canada, based on indicators covering economic, social and environmental progress. We are among the worst of the affluent countries on resource use, waste production, greenhouse gases released per unit of economic output, and our obesity rate. We are also well below average on social indicators such as education level, gender pay gap and proportion of women in parliament, as well as economic indicators such as the poverty rate and the degree of inequality. Interestingly, the top four countries were the Scandinavian nations of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. The United States ranked 29th. It is a reminder that only ideologues with no concern for evidence could still be seeing the United States as a model to which we should aspire, rather than the much more successful Scandinavian approach. Read More here
10 March 2016, The Guardian, Dangerous global warming will happen sooner than thought – study. Australian researchers say a global tracker monitoring energy use per person points to 2C warming by 2030. The world is on track to reach dangerous levels of global warming much sooner than expected, according to new Australian research that highlights the alarming implications of rising energy demand. University of Queensland and Griffith University researchers have developed a “global energy tracker” which predicts average world temperatures could climb 1.5C above pre-industrial levels by 2020. That forecast, based on new modelling using long-term average projections on economic growth, population growth and energy use per person, points to a 2C rise by 2030. The UN conference on climate change in Paris last year agreed to a 1.5C rise as the preferred limit to protect vulnerable island states, and a 2C rise as the absolute limit. The new modelling is the brainchild of Ben Hankamer from UQ’s institute for molecular bioscience and Liam Wagner from Griffith University’s department of accounting, finance and economics, whose work was published in the journal Plos One on Thursday. It is the first model to include energy use per person – which has more than doubled since 1950 – alongside economic and population growth as a way of predicting carbon emissions and corresponding temperature increases. The researchers said the earlier than expected advance of global warming revealed by their modelling added a new found urgency to the switch from fossil fuels to renewables. Read More here
10 March 2016, Science Daily, Cutting cattle carbon: Bad breath and flatulence. Cattle have bad breath and commonly suffer from severe, chronic flatus generating large amounts of methane, which is a greenhouse gas and a driver of anthropogenic global warming. There is an obvious answer to this problem, stop breeding cattle. Unfortunately a large proportion of us enjoy our bovine dairy products and meat too much. Until synthetic products that are indistinguishable from the real thing become available and accepted by milk drinkers and steak fans, we will have to look into alternative approaches to reducing the carbon emissions from these creatures. Writing in International Journal of Global Warming, Abdelmajid Moumen, Ghizlane Azizi, Kaoutar Ben Chekroun and Mourad Baghour of the Université Mohamed 1er, in Nador, Morocco, have reviewed the various approaches to reducing methane emissions from cattle and other livestock. These approaches involve improved genetic selection through breeding, modification of dietary composition, or through rumen microbial manipulation, vaccines against the methanogenic bacteria that generate the methane in these animals and various other techniques. It is possible that among the approaches or with a combination of approaches there might be a way to reduce the global burden of methane emissions from livestock. Read More here