From The Observer
If you were one of the 10 million air travellers shaking your fist at the departures board in April 2010, you will appreciate the fact that – even in this tectonically peaceful realm – we ignore volcanic threats at our peril. Despite being nothing to write home about in terms of size, the eruption from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano brought air travel chaos to the UK and mainland Europe when its ash cloud grounded an astonishing 107,000 flights in the biggest air traffic shutdown since the second world war. The eight days of mayhem brought airline CEOs to the point of apoplexy and, once the ash had settled, the air travel business was left with a €1.3bn bill.
The threat posed by Icelandic eruptions has since been recognised and added, retrospectively, to the UK’s National Risk Register, in the hope that next time we will be better prepared. But what about volcanic explosions further afield? These, it appears, are still regarded as posing no threat to our country, and so can be safely ignored. But turn the clock back 200 years and there is at least one event that suggests we ought to think twice.
In April 1815, the biggest known eruption of the historical period blew apart the Tambora volcano, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, 12,000 km. from the UK. What happened next testifies to the enormous reach of the biggest volcanic blasts.
The Tambora volcano had shown no signs of life for 1,000 years; a single eruption in the previous five millennia provided the only indication that magma was still churning far beneath. It is very likely that the residents of the island considered the volcano extinct, and possible even that they did not know the impressive 4,300 m. (14,107 ft.) mountain – at the time, probably the highest in the East Indies – was a volcano at all.
This all changed, however, with the rumblings and earthquakes of 1812, a full three years before the climactic blast. Over time, the seismic shocks were superseded by steam blasts and small ash explosions, engendering increasing trepidation on the island and signalling that something bigger might be imminent. It was.
On 5 April 1815, a titanic explosion hurled a cloud of ash to a height of more than 30 km. Violent, but short-lived, the blast lasted just two hours, after which the volcano returned to a state of brooding menace. According to the lieutenant governor, Thomas Stamford (later Sir Stamford) Bingley Raffles, to whom volcanologists are indebted for his accounts of the eruption, the detonation was so loud that it was mistaken across Java for cannon fire, causing consternation among the British troops, which had ousted the Dutch and French forces just a few years earlier.But the blast was small beer in comparison with what followed.
After five days of relative calm, the climactic phase of the eruption began with a colossal explosion that launched a towering column of ash to the edge of space. For four or five days, utter blackness reigned across the island as the hurricane blasts of hot ash and scalding gas – known as pyroclastic flows – scoured the flanks of the volcano of everything and everyone, and drifts of ash metres thick entombed what few signs of life remained.
When the explosions ceased and the darkness finally lifted, the view revealed was a vision of Tolkien’s Mordor; a grey landscape within which nothing lived or moved. The top 500 m. of the volcano was gone, blasted into smithereens, and replaced by a 6 km. wide maw from which steam spiraled skywards. Communities on the flanks of the volcano had vanished, along with the lives of around 12,000 men, women and children. These, perhaps, were the lucky ones, as a further 60,000 survivors of the eruption succumbed slowly and agonisingly to famine or disease.
But the consequences were not confined to this Indonesian backwater. The explosion was heard 2,600 km. away in Sumatra, while giant rafts of floating pumice – some kilometres in length – clogged shipping routes for years. The 50 cubic kilometres or so of ash ejected over the course of the eruption returned to earth in the following days and weeks, leaving a thick covering as far away as Borneo, 500 km. to the north. In addition to the ash, an estimated 200 million tonnes of microscopic sulphur particles pumped into the stratosphere, spread outwards from Sumbawa to form a giant aerosol veil that enclosed the planet and acted as a block to incoming sunlight.
The consequences for the developed societies of the northern hemisphere were dire. A dry, sulfurous, fog draped itself across the landscape of eastern North America, causing temperatures to plunge and bringing unprecedented summer cold. In New York State, snow fell in June, while the bitter cold and killing frosts wiped out crops and halved the length of the growing season across much of the region.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Europe saw summer temperatures down by 2C compared to the average for the decade; the unseasonal cold accompanied by incessant rains and – into the following winter – by unusually powerful storms. Analysis of climate records reveals that 1816, the so-called “year without a summer”, was the second coldest in the northern hemisphere of the past six centuries.
The alleged cultural implications of this “volcano weather” for Europe are somewhat whimsical. The brilliant, gas-charged, sunsets have been declared by some to have provided the inspiration for some of JMW Turner’s more flamboyant skies. In a similar vein, the damp and gloom of the 1816 summer has been charged with setting the scene for both Lord Byron’s grim vision Darkness, and Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein.
For the less well-to-do of Europe, however, the Tambora eruption brought nothing less than hunger, disease and death. Widespread harvest failure resulted in the most serious famine for more than a hundred years, doubling the price of grain and spawning bread riots and widespread civil unrest. Such was the degree of breakdown of food supply that economic historian John Post has called the episode “the last, great subsistence crisis in the western world”.
Malnourished and weakened, the starving succumbed rapidly to disease, with typhus in particular rife. Many tens of thousands are thought to have died across the continent, including more than 40,000 in Ireland alone.
How would we fare if faced with a Tambora-sized eruption today? Is it even something we could feasibly prepare for? Received wisdom has it that globalisation would make it easier to cope. Should the European harvest fail, so the thinking goes, we can always buy our food from elsewhere. The very interconnectedness of world markets may, however, make things worse – the collapse of food production across Europe, parts of North America and perhaps elsewhere, could result in global shortages which in turn would drive a dramatic rise in the cost of food commodities.
At the same time, the intense worldwide competition for food supplies, scarce as a consequence of the harvest failures, could drastically reduce the range of products available in the UK, interfere with supply and distribution, and bring about a collapse of the supermarkets’ ultra-sensitive, time-critical, stock-control systems, leaving their shelves increasingly depleted. While the less well-off could be priced out of purchasing even staple foodstuffs, panic buying by those who can afford it could quickly empty the stores.
On top of this, harvest disruption in response to volcano weather might extend far beyond Europe, and might – in ensuing decades – be exacerbated by the consequence of rampant climate change. In spite of our modern farming methods and distribution systems, the ramifications could be far more severe than we expect. It is also worth considering that while the Tambora blast was approximately 1,000 times bigger than the 2010 Icelandic eruption, it was a minor hiccup in comparison with the greatest volcanic explosions of history.
The Toba eruption that excavated the world’s largest volcanic crater in Sumatra, around 74,000 years ago, for example, injected hundreds of times more sulphur gases into the stratosphere than Tambora. The severe “volcanic winter” that followed probably lasted for several years and saw a third or more of the Earth covered with snow and ice and the wholesale dieback of vegetation.
So, if a Tambora-scale scenario would be bad news, far worse could be lying in wait.
While we can’t stop the next Tambora, nor handle its potential impacts on the climate and the harvest, we can ensure that contingency plans are in place to keep everyone adequately fed until the sulphur veil dissipates and temperatures return to normal. In the UK at present, contingency food supplies probably amount to little more than a few weeks’ worth. Some serious policy changes are needed if a future volcanic blast is not to bring about another subsistence crisis.
Hazarding a guess about when and where the next Tambora will explode is far from an exact science. Eruptions on such a scale seem to happen, on average, a few times every millennium and one estimate holds that there is a 1 in 10 chance of a comparable event in the next 50 years. The Earth does not, however, operate to a timetable so such an eruption is equally likely to occur in any single year.
There is even a chance that climate change may have a hand to play. Looking back at previous episodes of dramatic climate warming provides us with plenty of robust evidence for a vigorous volcanic response, most notably as our world heated up rapidly at the end of the last Ice Age. The reaction is most pronounced at ice-covered volcanoes, where melting reduces the weight acting on the volcanoes beneath, facilitating eruptions and even promoting the production of more magma. Coastal volcanoes may also be brought to eruption as the increased load of water, due to climbing sea levels, bends the crust around the margins of the oceans, squeezing magma upwards like toothpaste out of a tube.
No volcano erupts without warning signs, caused by rising magma triggering earthquake swarms and inflating the ground surface. The problem is that out of our world’s 1,300 or more active and potentially active volcanoes, we monitor only a few hundred. The Tambora eruption reinforces the unofficial volcanological axiom: the longer the wait, the bigger the bang. That rule of thumb is borne out by the fact that fully half of the biggest eruptions since 1800 originated at volcanoes that had previously been dormant throughout history.
What we should be keeping a special watch on then, in order to prepare ourselves for the next arrival of Vulcan’s shock troops, are those seemingly innocuous volcanoes that have kept their heads down for centuries or even millennia. While there are too many candidates to keep a serious eye on, the numbers can be narrowed down by focusing on those that have been recently “restless”; perhaps best regarded as the volcanologists’ term for “bubbling under”. Beyond that, though, it’s anyone’s guess.
(Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL. His latest book is Waking the Giant: how a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanoes)
Volcanoes: 10 to watch
1 Laguna del Maule (Chile)
Currently inflating at the astonishing rate of 25cm a year, above a growing body of magma just 5km beneath the surface.
2 Uturuncu (Bolivia)
A 70km-wide bulge that has been growing since the early 1990s could culminate in a gigantic eruption.
3 Alban Hills (Italy)
Just 20km south-east of Rome, this huge volcano has started to become restless following more than 30,000 quiet years.
4 Campi Flegrei (Italy)
The archetypal “restless volcano” on the edge of Naples has not erupted since 1538, but has shown worrying signs, on and off, since the 1970s.
5 Yellowstone (Wyoming, US)
No eruption for around 70,000 years, but congenitally restless.
6 Mount Fuji (Japan)
Quiet since 1707, but scientists recently warned that the volcano was in a “critical state” with a “high potential for eruption”.
7 Mammoth Mountain (California, USA)
In September 2014, up to 300 small earthquakes a day shook this part of the Long Valley supervolcano.
8 Askja (Iceland)
Swarms of small earthquakes and a crater-lake that was ice-free last winter hint at magma on the move for the first time since a major blast in 1875.
9 Mount Paektu (North Korea-China)
In 940 it hosted one of the greatest eruptions of the past 10,000 years; signs of unrest are again evident.
10 Cumbre Vieja (La Palma, Canaries)
A collapse of the unstable west flank could spawn a North Atlantic mega-tsunami.
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Friday, January 16, 2015
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:
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: ReutersHumans 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."
Saturday, January 10, 2015
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.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
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 2oC 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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Monday, October 13, 2014
The Arctic is the New Political Playing Field
Published on Oct 8, 2014
Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, the fifth President of Iceland, explains the perilous environmental situation in the Arctic in light of climate change.
The Arctic was for centuries largely unknown, a very remote part of the Western world, and it was only 100 years ago that discoverers starting to go to the North Pole and to these remote areas. And then the Cold War closed the Arctic in terms of military confrontation and the conflicts between the Soviet Union on one hand and the Western powers on the other. So, one of the most important things to remember when we look at the Arctic in the beginning of the 21st-century is that it is so recently that we as mankind have been able to come together to discuss and decide what do we do with respect to the Arctic future.
There is no part of planet Earth, which has so recently arrived on our desk as a challenge and as an opportunity. So therefore, the cooperation in the Arctic is one of the most crucial issues of the 21st-century for many reasons. One is that this is the front line of climate change. The aggressive melting of the ice in the Arctic will have consequences all over the world. If only a quarter of the Greenland ice sheet melts this will lead to two meters rising sea levels everywhere in the world. And already we are seeing that the present melting of the Arctic sea ice is causing extreme weather events in the United States, in Asia and in other parts of the world. In addition, the Arctic is one of the richest parts of the world in terms of untapped natural resources. And with the continuous melting of the Arctic sea ice there will be new shipping lines linking Asia to America and Europe in a revolutionary way like the Suez Canal on the Panama Canal did in it's time. That is why the Arctic has now become the new economic and political playing field.
In 2015 the United States takes on the chairmanship of the Arctic Council. It is the first time since the Arctic Council became a treaty making organization that the U.S. takes on that responsibility. And the chairmanship is not just a formal role, it is supposed to provide a vision, a policy agenda and a direction towards the future. So it's very important that all the people in the United States who are interested in climate change, who are interested in the environment, realize that in the next two or three years the U.S. will be in the leadership role with respect to the future of the Arctic, of course in partnership with other Arctic countries as well as the observer states from Asia and Europe. Although the Arctic Council is an intergovernmental body, there is a role for activists, environmentalist, experts, scientist, ordinary people in this process. And in order to facilitate that, together with many other partners from the Arctic I established last year what's called the Arctic Circle, which is a kind of an international assembly where everybody, whether it's an individual or citizen or a government or a corporation or a scientific institute or a university or an activist group, can come together where everybody has the same role, the same right to speak and discuss.
So I would encourage, especially in the two next two or three years, everybody who is concerned about these issues in the United States, first of all to look at the Arctic Circle on the website ArcticCircle.org and see if you want to come to the assembly, if you want to attend the following meetings that will take place in the United States, in Greenland and Singapore, as well as Iceland in the next 12 to 18 months, but overall be aware that your own country, the United States of America, will from 2015 to 2017 be the leader in making policy and agreement and map out the future for that part of planet earth where climate change is most aggressively taking place. There was a big great march in New York about climate and hundreds of thousands of people participated. I'm not sure if many of them realized that in the early months of next year it will be the U.S. who will chair the international cooperation on that part of Mother Earth where climate change is most aggressively taking place.
The Arctic was for centuries largely unknown, a very remote part of the Western world, and it was only 100 years ago that discoverers starting to go to the North Pole and to these remote areas. And then the Cold War closed the Arctic in terms of military confrontation and the conflicts between the Soviet Union on one hand and the Western powers on the other. So, one of the most important things to remember when we look at the Arctic in the beginning of the 21st-century is that it is so recently that we as mankind have been able to come together to discuss and decide what do we do with respect to the Arctic future.
There is no part of planet Earth, which has so recently arrived on our desk as a challenge and as an opportunity. So therefore, the cooperation in the Arctic is one of the most crucial issues of the 21st-century for many reasons. One is that this is the front line of climate change. The aggressive melting of the ice in the Arctic will have consequences all over the world. If only a quarter of the Greenland ice sheet melts this will lead to two meters rising sea levels everywhere in the world. And already we are seeing that the present melting of the Arctic sea ice is causing extreme weather events in the United States, in Asia and in other parts of the world. In addition, the Arctic is one of the richest parts of the world in terms of untapped natural resources. And with the continuous melting of the Arctic sea ice there will be new shipping lines linking Asia to America and Europe in a revolutionary way like the Suez Canal on the Panama Canal did in it's time. That is why the Arctic has now become the new economic and political playing field.
In 2015 the United States takes on the chairmanship of the Arctic Council. It is the first time since the Arctic Council became a treaty making organization that the U.S. takes on that responsibility. And the chairmanship is not just a formal role, it is supposed to provide a vision, a policy agenda and a direction towards the future. So it's very important that all the people in the United States who are interested in climate change, who are interested in the environment, realize that in the next two or three years the U.S. will be in the leadership role with respect to the future of the Arctic, of course in partnership with other Arctic countries as well as the observer states from Asia and Europe. Although the Arctic Council is an intergovernmental body, there is a role for activists, environmentalist, experts, scientist, ordinary people in this process. And in order to facilitate that, together with many other partners from the Arctic I established last year what's called the Arctic Circle, which is a kind of an international assembly where everybody, whether it's an individual or citizen or a government or a corporation or a scientific institute or a university or an activist group, can come together where everybody has the same role, the same right to speak and discuss.
So I would encourage, especially in the two next two or three years, everybody who is concerned about these issues in the United States, first of all to look at the Arctic Circle on the website ArcticCircle.org and see if you want to come to the assembly, if you want to attend the following meetings that will take place in the United States, in Greenland and Singapore, as well as Iceland in the next 12 to 18 months, but overall be aware that your own country, the United States of America, will from 2015 to 2017 be the leader in making policy and agreement and map out the future for that part of planet earth where climate change is most aggressively taking place. There was a big great march in New York about climate and hundreds of thousands of people participated. I'm not sure if many of them realized that in the early months of next year it will be the U.S. who will chair the international cooperation on that part of Mother Earth where climate change is most aggressively taking place.
Friday, July 25, 2014
Earth survived near-miss from 2012 solar storm: NASA
July 24, 2014 6:24 PM
Washington (AFP) - Back in 2012, the Sun erupted with a powerful solar storm that just missed the Earth but was big enough to "knock modern civilization back to the 18th century," NASA said.
The extreme space weather that tore through Earth's orbit on July 23, 2012, was the most powerful in 150 years, according to a statement posted on the US space agency website Wednesday.
However, few Earthlings had any idea what was going on.
"If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire," said Daniel Baker, professor of atmospheric and space physics at the University of Colorado.
Instead the storm cloud hit the STEREO-A spacecraft, a solar observatory that is "almost ideally equipped to measure the parameters of such an event," NASA said.
Scientists have analyzed the treasure trove of data it collected and concluded that it would have been comparable to the largest known space storm in 1859, known as the Carrington event.
It also would have been twice as bad as the 1989 solar storm that knocked out power across Quebec, scientists said.
"I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did," said Baker.
The National Academy of Sciences has said the economic impact of a storm like the one in 1859 could cost the modern economy more than two trillion dollars and cause damage that might take years to repair.
Experts say solar storms can cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything from radio to GPS communications to water supplies -- most of which rely on electric pumps.
They begin with an explosion on the Sun's surface, known as a solar flare, sending X-rays and extreme UV radiation toward Earth at light speed.
Hours later, energetic particles follow and these electrons and protons can electrify satellites and damage their electronics.
Next are the coronal mass ejections, billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma that take a day or more to cross the Sun-Earth divide.
These are often deflected by Earth's magnetic shield, but a direct hit could be devastating.
There is a 12 percent chance of a super solar storm the size of the Carrington event hitting Earth in the next 10 years, according to physicist Pete Riley, who published a paper in the journal Space Weather earlier this year on the topic.
His research was based on an analysis of solar storm records going back 50 years.
"Initially, I was quite surprised that the odds were so high, but the statistics appear to be correct," said Riley.
"It is a sobering figure."
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