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Cumbria coal mine should be a no go for new levelling up secretary

Adam Vaughan — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 12:07:57 +0000

Greg Clark must think twice before giving the green light to the UK's first new coal mine in decades. It would be indefensible on climate grounds, says Adam Vaughan

China is putting nature at risk with its biodiversity summit delays

Adam Vaughan — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 10:25:54 +0000

It's time for China to put national pride aside and let another country host the UN COP15 biodiversity conference, for the sake of wildlife, plants and habitats worldwide, says Adam Vaughan

We need to ban the sale of all fireworks to the public right now

Michael Le Page — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 15:36:30 +0000

Fireworks injure thousands and pollute the air. Let's enjoy professional and licensed displays, but they shouldn't be sold to the public, says Michael Le Page

Drone pilots deserve medals even without risking their lives

David Hambling — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 14:29:07 +0000

Remote warfare raises questions about who gets military honours, but the stress and trauma drone crews face deserves recognition, says David Hambling

A third of UK adults question evolution. Does that matter?

Fern Elsdon-Baker — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 10:52:35 +0000

A snapshot of views on evolutionary science in the UK reveals a surprising level of scepticism. And not just on religious grounds, says Fern Elsdon-Baker

Giant ocean fish farms to solve food security? There’s a catch

Olive Heffernan — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 11:04:19 +0000

Some species cope better in crowded pens than others

BORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images

Despite decades of overfishing, . While this growing appetite for seafood is , it’s harming life in the oceans. Almost .

By 2050, with a and climate change shrinking fish populations at a rate of 20 to 30 per cent for every 1°C rise in sea temperature, we may be seeking novel protein sources.

But fear not. A solution could be in sight, say researchers who have totted up the area of ocean suitable for aquaculture. led by Rebecca Gentry of the University of California, Santa Barbara, identified areas up to 200 metres deep that are right for farming fish and shellfish, but currently unexploited. They amounted to more than 11 million square kilometres, and did not include areas already used for other purposes, such as shipping, oil exploration or conservation.

How can we feed the world substainably?

We would only need to farm only a tiny fraction of the space identified – no larger than Lake Michigan – to match current landings from wild-caught fisheries, the team says. Better still, if we used all ocean space suitable for aquaculture, . That’s 100 times more than we currently eat each year.

All of this suggests we could farm our way out of the fisheries crisis and possibly global food security issues. Already more than half of the fish we eat are raised rather than wild-caught and fish production is growing faster than that of chicken, pork or beef. People want to eat more seafood, and we seem to have plentiful space to farm it. It sounds so simple – except that it’s not.

For starters, not all suitable areas will become fish farms for many reasons, such as worries about habitat damage or local opposition to processing plants. Then there’s the bigger problem of unintended effects. Rather than saving wild fisheries, aquaculture can denigrate them further by spreading disease and pollution, not to mention the senseless . , but they would add to pressure on farm land.

A lesser worry is that we’ll end up with a restricted menu of delicacies. Raising species such as mussels and oysters seems the obvious choice, as they extract their own food from the sea, but this suggests a less diverse future.

What’s more, the reality of farming is that some species take to it better than others. Salmon, for example, cope well with the crowded conditions of pens whereas other favourites like cod are less resilient to problems of captivity such as sea lice.

There’s also the fact that warm waters are the most productive – many of the regions the study identified as suitable for farming are tropical. Herring need not apply.

Knowing that we have all the space we need to grow aquaculture well beyond our current needs offers some comfort. But there are plenty of caveats. And if we continue feasting on wild-caught fish with reckless abandon, we may soon have to accept that our diet will change in ways we haven’t anticipated.

We really can run the world on renewable energy – here’s how

Mark Jacobson — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 16:00:57 +0000

Can the planet change over to 100 per cent clean and renewable energy fast enough to avoid extreme climate impacts? Yes it can, says Mark Jacobson

Simple equation shows how human activity is trashing the planet

Owen Gaffney — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 15:39:51 +0000

How climate change adds up

Getty

Homo sapiens now rivals the great forces of nature. Humanity is a prime driver of change of the Earth system. Industrialised societies alter the planet on a scale equivalent to an asteroid impact. This is how the Anthropocene – the proposed new geological period in which human activity profoundly shapes the environment – is often described in soundbites. But is it possible to formalise such statements mathematically? I think so, and believe doing this creates an unequivocal statement of the risks industrialised societies are taking at a time when action is vital. Following the maxim of keeping everything as simple as possible, but not simpler, Will Steffen from the Australian National University and I drew up an Anthropocene equation by homing in on the rate of change of Earth’s life support system: the atmosphere, oceans, forests and wetlands, waterways and ice sheets and fabulous diversity of life. For four billion years, the rate of change of the Earth system (E) has been a complex function of astronomical (A) and geophysical (G) forces plus internal dynamics (I): Earth’s orbit around the sun, gravitational interactions with other planets, the sun’s heat output, colliding continents, volcanoes and evolution, among others.

The rate of change of the Earth system (E) over the last 40 to 50 years is a purely a function of industrialised societies (H)

That rate of change has been anything but steady of late. If we take a baseline of the last 7000 years, until recently, global temperature decreased at a rate of 0.01 °C per century. The current rate (last 45 years) is a rise of 1.7 °C per century – 170 times the baseline and in the opposite direction. The warmest 12 years since records began have all occurred since 1998. The rate of carbon emissions to the atmosphere is arguably the highest in 66 million years, when the (non-avian) dinosaurs slipped off this mortal coil. The staggering loss of biodiversity in recent decades prompted researchers in 2015 to argue that the Anthropocene marks the third stage in the evolution of Earth’s biosphere, following on from the microbial stage 3.5 billion years ago and the Cambrian explosion 650 million years ago. Pulling this together, we conclude that the rate of change of the Earth system over the last 40 to 50 years is a purely a function of industrialised societies (H). In the equation, astronomical and geophysical forces tend to zero because of their slow nature or rarity, as do internal dynamics, for now. All these forces still exert pressure, but currently on orders of magnitude less than human impact. This is a bold statement. But viewed this way, arguments about humans versus natural causes disappear. In 2016, Earth experienced a massive El Niño event affecting the global climate. But this is balanced by the cooler La Niña – taken together, the net rate of change of the Earth system resulting from these is zero over a decade or so.

False sense of security

We should be concerned. For the last 2.5 million years, Earth settled into a rather unusual period of potential instability as we rocked back and forth between ice ages and intervening warm periods, or interglacials. Far from living on a deeply resilient planet, we live on a planet with hair triggers. Industrialised societies are fumbling around with the controls, lulled into a false sense of security by the deceptive stability of the Holocene, the last 11,700 years. Remarkably and accidentally, we have ejected the Earth system from the interglacial envelope and are heading in to unchartered waters. While the rate of change of the Earth system needs to drop to zero as soon as possible, the next few years may determine the trajectory for millennia. Yet the dominant neoliberal economic systems still assume Holocene-like boundary conditions – endless resources on an infinite planet. Instead, we need “biosphere positive” Anthropocene economics, where economic development stores carbon not releases it, enhances biodiversity not destroys it and purifies waters and soils not pollutes them. While it would seem imprudent to ignore the huge body of evidence pointing to profound risks, it comes at a challenging time geopolitically, when both fact-based world views and even international cooperation are questioned. Nowhere has this been clearer than in the US in recent weeks. It is perhaps surprising that in the 1990s, Stephen Bannon, White House strategist and ideologue, , a project in Arizona to create an artificial habitat for humans, partly to inform potential space colonisation missions. The delicate balance between humans and nature in Biosphere 2 collapsed into chaos and the experiment folded in 1994. While Biosphere 1 – Earth – is in no such short-term danger, societies are. The stakes could not be higher, yet critical knowledge and action needed for stability is in danger of becoming collateral damage in today’s war on facts. Ignorance and uncertainty are no longer rational excuses for inaction. Journal reference: The Anthropocene Review, doi:

Obama has finally done the right thing by freeing Manning early

Rebecca Dallison — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 16:19:11 +0000

Chelsea Manning’s 35-year sentence and treatment by the US military were unremittingly punitive. Her imminent freedom is welcome, says Rebecca Dallison

The alarming drop in US life expectancy shouldn’t be a surprise

Laudan Aron — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 14:42:04 +0000

Life expectancy is down in the US for the first time since the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. It is a critical moment for health policy, says Laudan Aron

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