Rate of environmental degradation puts life on Earth at risk, say scientists

A different perspective of the future of humans, far from the vision of Sir Martin Rees expressed in the previous post, comes from this article by Oliver Gilman in the newspaper The Guardian on January 15, 2015:

"Humans are ‘eating away at our own life support systems’ at a rate unseen in the past 10,000 years, two new research papers say.

The view from the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory in the middle of the Amazon forest. Researchers say that of the nine processes needed to sustain life on Earth, four have exceeded “safe” levels. Photograph: Reuters


Humans are “eating away at our own life support systems” at a rate unseen in the past 10,000 years by degrading land and freshwater systems, emitting greenhouse gases and releasing vast amounts of agricultural chemicals into the environment, new research has found.

Two major new studies by an international team of researchers have pinpointed the key factors that ensure a livable planet for humans, with stark results.

Of nine worldwide processes that underpin life on Earth, four have exceeded “safe” levels – human-driven climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land system change and the high level of phosphorus and nitrogen flowing into the oceans due to fertiliser use.

Researchers spent five years identifying these core components of a planet suitable for human life, using the long-term average state of each measure to provide a baseline for the analysis.

They found that the changes of the last 60 years are unprecedented in the previous 10,000 years, a period in which the world has had a relatively stable climate and human civilisation has advanced significantly.

Carbon dioxide levels, at 395.5 parts per million, are at historic highs, while loss of biosphere integrity is resulting in species becoming extinct at a rate more than 100 times faster than the previous norm.

Since 1950 urban populations have increased seven-fold, primary energy use has soared by a factor of five, while the amount of fertiliser used is now eight times higher. The amount of nitrogen entering the oceans has quadrupled.

All of these changes are shifting Earth into a “new state” that is becoming less hospitable to human life, researchers said.

“These indicators have shot up since 1950 and there are no signs they are slowing down,” said Prof Will Steffen of the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Steffen is the lead author on both of the studies.

“When economic systems went into overdrive, there was a massive increase in resource use and pollution. It used to be confined to local and regional areas but we’re now seeing this occurring on a global scale. These changes are down to human activity, not natural variability.”
View of aluminium-polluted water, which flows into the Yuanjiang River, in Taoyuan county, Changde city, central China’s Hunan province, 19 November 2014. Photograph: Imaginechina/Corbis

Steffen said direct human influence upon the land was contributing to a loss in pollination and a disruption in the provision of nutrients and fresh water.

“We are clearing land, we are degrading land, we introduce feral animals and take the top predators out, we change the marine ecosystem by overfishing – it’s a death by a thousand cuts,” he said. “That direct impact upon the land is the most important factor right now, even more than climate change.”

There are large variations in conditions around the world, according to the research. For example, land clearing is now concentrated in tropical areas, such as Indonesia and the Amazon, with the practice reversed in parts of Europe. But the overall picture is one of deterioration at a rapid rate.

“It’s fairly safe to say that we haven’t seen conditions in the past similar to ones we see today and there is strong evidence that there [are] tipping points we don’t want to cross,” Steffen said.

“If the Earth is going to move to a warmer state, 5-6C warmer, with no ice caps, it will do so and that won’t be good for large mammals like us. People say the world is robust and that’s true, there will be life on Earth, but the Earth won’t be robust for us.

“Some people say we can adapt due to technology, but that’s a belief system, it’s not based on fact. There is no convincing evidence that a large mammal, with a core body temperature of 37C, will be able to evolve that quickly. Insects can, but humans can’t and that’s a problem.”

Steffen said the research showed the economic system was “fundamentally flawed” as it ignored critically important life support systems.

“It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive,” he said. “History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today.”

The two studies, published in Science and Anthropocene Review, featured the work of scientists from countries including the US, Sweden, Germany and India. The findings will be presented in seven seminars at the World Economic Forum in Davos, which takes place between 21 and 25 January.
Trash accumulates on Nash Run, a creek that empties into the Anacostia River, in Washington DC, US, 4 December 2014. Environmental groups routinely list the Anacostia as one of the most polluted waterways in America. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA."

A Vision of the Future

By Martin Rees

8:23AM BST 03 May 2013

The best science fiction, from H G Wells onwards, can nourish everyone’s imagination. It can widen the perspective of astronomers too – that strange breed of which I’m a member. Many of us are avid consumers of the genre – though I think we’d expect aliens, if they exist, to be far stranger, and far less humanoid, than those portrayed in Star Trek. Indeed, possibilities once in the realms of science fiction have shifted into serious scientific debate – “cyborgs” and “post-humans”, alien life, and even parallel universes.

The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture (though maybe not in the United States Bible Belt, nor in parts of the Islamic world). Most people are at ease with the idea that our present biosphere is the outcome of four billion years of Darwinian evolution. But the even longer time-horizons that stretch ahead – familiar to every astronomer – haven’t permeated our culture to the same extent. Our Sun is less than halfway through its life. It formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got six billion more before the fuel runs out. It will then flare up, engulfing the inner planets and vaporising any life that might then remain on Earth. But even after the Sun’s demise, the expanding universe will continue – perhaps for ever – destined to become ever colder, ever emptier. To quote Woody Allen, “eternity is very long, especially towards the end.”

Scientific forecasters have a dismal record. One of my predecessors as Astronomer Royal said, as late as the Fifties, that space travel was “utter bilge”. Few in the mid-20th century envisaged the transformative impact of the silicon chip or the double helix. The iPhone would have seemed magical even 20 years ago. So, looking even a century ahead, we must keep our minds open, or at least ajar, to what may now seem science fiction. Some proponents of the “singularity” – the takeover of humanity by intelligent machines – claim this transition could happen within 50 years.

The Soviet Sputnik was launched in 1957. Four years later, Yuri Gagarin was the first human to go into orbit. Eight years after that, and only 66 years after the Wright brothers’ first flight, Neil Armstrong made his “one small step”. The Apollo programme was a heroic episode. Yet since 1972, humans have done no more than circle the Earth in low orbit – more recently, in the international space station. This has proved neither very useful nor very inspiring. On the other hand, space technology has burgeoned – for communication, environmental monitoring, satnav and so forth. We depend on it every day. And unmanned probes to other planets have beamed back pictures of varied and distinctive worlds.

Had the momentum of the Sixties been maintained over the next 40 years, there would be footprints on Mars by now. But after Apollo the political impetus for manned space flight was lost. This was one of many instances of the widening gap between what could be achieved technologically, and what is actually done. As with many technical forecasts, we can be more confident of what could happen than of how. Development of supersonic airliners, for instance, has languished (Concorde having gone the way of the dinosaurs); in contrast, the sophistication and worldwide penetration of internet and smartphones advanced much faster than most forecasters predicted.

Nasa’s manned programme, ever since Apollo, has been impeded by public and political pressure, and is too risk-averse. The space shuttle failed twice in 135 launches. Astronauts or test pilots would willingly accept this risk level, but the shuttle had, unwisely, been promoted as a safe vehicle for civilians. So each failure caused a national trauma and was followed by a hiatus while costly efforts were made (with very limited effect) to reduce the risk still further.

Unless motivated by pure prestige and bankrolled by superpowers, manned missions beyond the Moon will need perforce to be cut-price ventures, accepting high risks – perhaps even “one-way tickets”. These missions will be privately funded; no Western governmental agency would expose civilians to such hazards. There would, despite the risks, be many volunteers – driven by the same motives as early explorers, mountaineers, and the like. Private companies already offer orbital flights. Maybe within a decade adventurers will be able to sign up for a week-long trip around the far side of the Moon – voyaging farther from Earth than anyone has been before (but avoiding the greater challenge of a Moon landing and blast-off). Dennis Tito hopes that a voyage around Mars (though not landing) could be achieved in the 2020s. And Elon Musk, the visionary head of SpaceX, hopes to land on Mars himself.

(The phrase “space tourism” should however be avoided. It lulls people into believing that such ventures are routine and low-risk. And if that’s the perception, the inevitable accidents will be as traumatic as those of the space shuttle were. Instead, these cut-price ventures must be “sold” as dangerous sports, or intrepid exploration.)

I’d venture a confident forecast that during this century the entire solar system – planets, moons and asteroids – will be explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft. The next step would be space mining and fabrication. (And fabrication in space will be a better use of materials mined from asteroids than bringing them back to Earth.) The Hubble telescope’s successors, with huge gossamer-thin mirrors assembled under zero gravity, will further expand our vision of stars, galaxies and the wider cosmos.

But don’t ever expect mass emigration. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest. Space doesn’t offer an escape from Earth’s problems. And even with nuclear fuel, the transit time to nearby stars exceeds a human lifetime. Interstellar travel is therefore, in my view, an enterprise for post-humans, evolved from our species not via natural selection but by design. They could be silicon-based, or they could be organic creatures who had won the battle with death, or perfected the techniques of hibernation or suspended animation.

A sustained, if not enhanced, rate of innovation in biotech, nanotech and in information science could lead to entities with superhuman intellect within a few centuries. A century or two from now, there may be small groups of pioneers living independent from the Earth – on Mars or on asteroids.

What about travel beyond our solar system? Even the nearest stars are so far away that no present technology could reach them. The first voyagers to the stars will be creatures whose life cycle is matched to the voyage: the aeons involved in traversing the galaxy are not daunting to immortal beings. By the end of the third millennium, travel to other stars could be technically feasible. But would there be sufficient motive?

Would even the most intrepid leave the solar system? We can’t predict what inscrutable goals might drive post-humans. But the motive would surely be stronger if it turned out that many stars were orbited by planets that might harbour life.

How bright are the prospects that there is life out there already? There may be simple organisms on Mars, or remnants of creatures that lived early in the planet’s history; and there could be life, too, in the ice-covered oceans of Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede. But few would bet on it; and certainly nobody expects a complex biosphere in such locations. For that, we must look to the distant stars – far beyond the range of any probe we can now construct.

In the past 20 years (and especially in the past five) the night sky has become far more interesting, and far more enticing to explorers, than it was to our forebears. Astronomers have discovered that many stars – perhaps even most – are orbited by retinues of planets, just like the Sun is. These planets are not detected directly. Instead, they reveal their presence by effects on their parent star that can be detected by precise measurements: small periodic motions in the star induced by an orbiting planet’s gravity, and slight recurrent dimmings in a star’s brightness when a planet transits in front of it, blocking out a small fraction of its light.

But do we expect alien life on these extrasolar planets? We know too little about how life began on Earth to lay confident odds. And it might be too anthropocentric to limit attention to Earthlike planets.

Science fiction writers have other ideas – balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of Jupiter-like planets, swarms of intelligent insects, nanoscale robots etc. We should be mindful that seemingly artificial signals could come from super-intelligent (though not necessarily conscious) computers, created by a race of alien beings that had already died out. Maybe we will one day find ET.

If we do find ET, we will at least have something in common with them. They may live on planet Zog and have seven tentacles, but they will be made of the same kinds of atoms as us. If they have eyes, they will gaze out on the same cosmos as we do. They will, like us, trace their origins back to a “big bang” 13.8 billion years ago. But is that all there is to physical reality?

We are well aware that our knowledge of space and time is incomplete. What we’ve traditionally called “the universe” – the aftermath of “our” big bang – may be just one island, just one patch of space, in a perhaps-infinite archipelago. There may have been an infinity of big bangs, not just one. Each constituent of this “multiverse” cooled down differently, ending up governed by different laws. Just as Earth is a very special planet among zillions of others, so – on a far grander scale – our big bang was also a very special one.

In this hugely expanded cosmic perspective, the laws of Einstein and the quantum could be mere parochial bylaws governing our cosmic patch. Space and time may have a structure as intricate as the fauna of a rich ecosystem, but on a scale far larger than the horizon of our observations. Our current concept of physical reality could be as constricted, in relation to the whole, as the perspective of the Earth available to a plankton whose “universe” is a spoonful of water.

And that’s not all – there is a final disconcerting twist. Post-human intelligence will develop hypercomputers with the processing power to simulate living things – even entire worlds. Perhaps advanced beings could use hypercomputers to surpass the best “special effects” in movies or computer games so vastly that they could simulate a world, fully, as complex as the one we perceive ourselves to be in. Maybe these kinds of super-intelligences already exist elsewhere in the multiverse – in universes that are older than ours, or better tuned for the evolution of intelligence. What would these super-intelligences do with their hypercomputers? They could create virtual worlds vastly outnumbering the “real” ones. So perhaps we are “artificial life” in a virtual universe.

It is remarkable that our brains, which have changed little since our ancestors roamed the African savannah, have allowed us to understand the counterintuitive worlds of the quantum and the cosmos. But some of these insights may have to await post-human intelligence. There may be phenomena, crucial to our long-term destiny, that we are not aware of, any more than a monkey comprehends the nature of stars and galaxies.

Fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground to avoid dangerous climate change

A third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80% of current coal reserves globally should remain in the ground and not be used before 2050 if global warming is to stay below the 2°C target agreed by policy makers, according to new research by the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources.

The study funded by the UK Energy Research Centre and published in Nature today, also identifies the geographic location of existing reserves that should remain unused and so sets out the regions that stand to lose most from achieving the 2°C goal.

The authors show that the overwhelming majority of the huge coal reserves in China, Russia and the United States should remain unused along with over 260 thousand million barrels oil reserves in the Middle East, equivalent to all of the oil reserves held by Saudi Arabia. The Middle East should also leave over 60% of its gas reserves in the ground.

The development of resources in the Arctic and any increase in unconventional oil -- oil of a poor quality which is hard to extract -- are also found to be inconsistent with efforts to limit climate change.

For the study, the scientists first developed an innovative method for estimating the quantities, locations and nature of the world's oil, gas and coal reserves and resources. They then used an integrated assessment model to explore which of these, along with low-carbon energy sources, should be used up to 2050 to meet the world's energy needs. The model, which uses an internationally-recognised modelling framework, has multiple improvements on previous models, allowing it to provide a world-leading representation of the long-term production dynamics and resource potential of fossil fuels.

Lead author Dr Christophe McGlade, Research Associate at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources said: "We've now got tangible figures of the quantities and locations of fossil fuels that should remain unused in trying to keep within the 2°C temperature limit.

"Policy makers must realise that their instincts to completely use the fossil fuels within their countries are wholly incompatible with their commitments to the 2°C goal. If they go ahead with developing their own resources, they must be asked which reserves elsewhere should remain unburnt in order for the carbon budget not to be exceeded."

Co-author Professor Paul Ekins, Professor of Resources and Environmental Policy at and Director of the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources, who received an OBE for services to environmental policy in the 2015 New Year's Honours list, said: "Companies spent over $670 billion (£430 billion) last year searching for and developing new fossil fuel resources. They will need to rethink such substantial budgets if policies are implemented to support the 2^oC limit, especially as new discoveries cannot lead to increased aggregate production.

"Investors in these companies should also question spending such budgets. The greater global attention to climate policy also means that fossil fuel companies are becoming increasingly risky for investors in terms of the delivery of long-term returns. I would expect prudent investors in energy to shift increasingly towards low-carbon energy sources."

The scientists' analysis shows that their results are consistent with a wide variety of alternative modelling approaches from groups across the world with differing assumptions. Building on this analysis, their future work aims to investigate further the shifts in cumulative fossil fuel production between scenarios that lead to different long-term average global temperature rises
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