Dozens of population analyses have been published that focus on food, nutrition, and agriculture such as “Can the growing human population feed itself?” (Bongaarts, 1994).  Because producing enough food is both important and intuitively obvious, such papers are clearly appropriate and worthwhile.  

 

Most of these papers are flawed, however, because most of them are based on an assumption (that is almost always unstated) that food supplies are the most critical or most immediate factor affecting or limiting our population. 

 

This assumption, which is routinely unstated,  unquestioned, and unchallenged, diminishes what are otherwise excellent papers submitted by economists, demographers, and statisticians with limited expertise in biology.

 

The most immediate danger to our planet, its natural systems, and civilization may not be food, and we may be distracting ourselves if we imagine that it is. 

 

It may instead be that our ultimate, more immediate, and more serious dangers lie in the damage that we have inflicted, are inflicting, and will inflict on earth's biotic machinery, as well as the impacts of our industrial and societal wastes.

 

 

 

 

 

pg 153  -  Unintended Consequences

It has not been humanity's intention to melt the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.  It has not been our intention to melt the permafrost, change the earth's albedo (reflectivity), or to produce ice-free Arctic seas by the summer of 2050.**

 

Nor was it ever our intent that thousands of Arctic lakes should disappear in the last thirty years or that the greenhouse gas methane should literally bubble out of melting Arctic peat bogs.  Nor has it ever been our intent to potentially increase the acidity of the ocean.  Yet, all of these things have either already happened or are happening now or may occur sometime soon.

 

                    ** Early estimates of ice-free Arctic seas by 2050, when first

                        made, seemed hard to believe.  Now, just one year later,

                       NASA data on the 2007 Arctic sea ice suggest that the

                       summer ice could be entirely gone by 2020... or even as soon

                       as the summer of 2012.  This means that real events may be

                       developing faster than the projections of even some of the

                       worst-case models. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

pgs144-145  -  Melting permafrost

In 2005, researchers returning from western Siberia "...found an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometers - the size of France and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago...."

 

Researchers estimate the melting "...to have begun in the past three or four years" and have termed the change "an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible"  (Kirpotin and Marquand, 2005; Pearce, 2005).

 

This change is of global significance because, according to some estimates, the west Siberian permafrost contains up to 700 billion additional tons of trapped methane gas** (Pearce, 2005; Pielke, 2005; Sample, 2005). 

 

                       ** One molecule of methane has approximately twenty times

                                  the warming effect as one molecule of carbon dioxide. 

 

David Viner, a senior scientist at Great Britain's University of East Anglia points out that "this is a big deal because you can't put the permafrost back once it's gone."  He also warns that we can produce situations in which such processes become unstoppable where "...there are no brakes you can apply" (reported by Pearce, 2005).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

pg 146  -  Toppling dominos

Warming feedbacks result from disappearing ice and snow, which expose dark-colored ground and ocean which are more likely to absorb solar heat than the snow and ice.  Thus, if rising levels of CO2 represent a first domino, then melting of polar snow and ice represent a second domino which changes earth's albedo (reflectivity). 

 

Instead of white snow and ice reflecting light energy back into space, dark polar waters and soils instead absorb that solar energy, causing further warming.  In this scenario, earth's thawing permafrost thus represents a third domino, which, when tipped, releases additional billions of tons of methane gas, which causes still more warming. 

 

And finally, the frozen muds of deep-sea sediments are estimated to hold still more gigatons of methane gas, so that rising ocean temperatures might represent still another falling domino that amplifies warming still further.

 

In such an event, once the first domino (atmospheric CO2) reaches an unmarked, yet critical threshold and starts melting earth's snow, ice, and permafrost, the other dominos might irreversibly follow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Complacency...

       Articles and symposia...

                Stoplights and twisting mountain roads...

                             An experiment with Biosphere II...

                                         Food, oxygen, pharmaceuticals, and rainfall...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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