Category Archives: Greenlash

Greenlash

How Salmon Farming Endangers Salmon

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From Society for Conservation Biology’s Journal Watch Online:

Long-held suspicions that fish farms act as disease reservoirs for wild populations are well founded, according to findings published this week in Science. University of Alberta mathematical biologist Marty Krkošek and colleagues show that outbreaks of salmon lice Lepeophtheirus salmonis among wild pink salmon Oncorhynchus gorbuscha populations — the direct result of infestations within the open-net aquaculture pens the juveniles must swim past on their migration to the sea — can bring virtual extinction in just four generations. The pressure wild stocks are placed under by the disease risk from fish farms is much greater than that caused by over-exploitative harvesting: the very factor that prompted aquaculture in the first place. It’s surely time for a re-think on fish farming. Source: Krkošek M, Ford JS, Morton A, Lele S, Myers RA & Lewis MA (2007) Declining wild salmon populations in relation to parasites from farm salmon. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1148744

Also see article in New York Times which quotes:

Ray Hilborn, a fisheries biologist from the University of Washington who was not involved in the study but is familiar with its findings, called the data persuasive and said they raised “serious concerns about proposed aquaculture for other species, such as cod, halibut and sablefish.”

“These high-density fish farms are natural breeding grounds for pathogens,” not necessarily limited to sea lice, he said in an interview. Dr. Hilborn noted, however, that the study involved pink salmon, not species like sockeye or chinook, which are usually larger and presumably less vulnerable to sea lice. Pink salmon are the most abundant salmon species in the northern Pacific.

Greenlash

David Quammen on Emerging Infectious Disease

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From National Geographic

David Quammen writes about emerging infectious diseases in National Geographic (Oct 2007):

Infectious disease is all around us. Infectious disease is a kind of natural mortar binding one creature to another, one species to another, within the elaborate edifices we call ecosystems. It’s one of the basic processes that ecologists study, including also predation, competition, and photosynthesis. Predators are relatively big beasts that eat their prey from outside. Pathogens (disease-causing agents, such as viruses) are relatively small beasts that eat their prey from within. Although infectious disease can seem grisly and dreadful, under ordinary conditions it’s every bit as natural as what lions do to wildebeests, zebras, and gazelles.

But conditions aren’t always ordinary.

Just as predators have their accustomed prey species, their favored targets, so do pathogens. And just as a lion might occasionally depart from its normal behavior—to kill a cow instead of a wildebeest, a human instead of a zebra—so can a pathogen shift to a new target. Accidents happen. Aberrations occur. Circumstances change and, with them, opportunities and exigencies also change. When a pathogen leaps from some nonhuman animal into a person, and succeeds there in making trouble, the result is what’s known as a zoonosis.

The word zoonosis is unfamiliar to most people. But it helps clarify the biological reality behind the scary headlines about bird flu, SARS, other forms of nasty new disease, and the threat of a coming pandemic. It says something essential about the origin of HIV. It’s a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the 21st century.

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Close contact between humans and other species can occur in various ways: through killing and eating of wild animals (as in Mayibout II), through caregiving to domestic animals (as in Hendra), through fondling of pets (as with monkeypox, brought into the American pet trade by way of imported African rodents), through taming enticements (feeding bananas to the monkeys at a Balinese temple), through intensive animal husbandry combined with habitat destruction (as on Malaysian pig farms), and through any other sort of disruptive penetration of humans into wild landscape—of which, needless to say, there’s plenty happening around the world. Once the contact has occurred and the pathogen has crossed over, two other factors contribute to the possibility of cataclysmic consequences: the sheer abundance of humans on Earth, all available for infection, and the speed of our travel from one place to another. When a bad new disease catches hold, one that manages to be transmissible from person to person by a handshake, a kiss, or a sneeze, it might easily circle the world and kill millions of people before medical science can find a way to control it.

But our safety, our health, isn’t the only issue. Another thing worth remembering is that disease can go both ways: from humans to other species as well as from them to us. Measles, polio, scabies, influenza, tuberculosis, and other human diseases are considered threats to non-human primates. The label for those infections is anthropozoonotic. Any of them might be carried by a tourist, a researcher, or a local person, with potentially devastating impacts on a tiny, isolated population of great apes with a relatively small gene pool, such as the mountain gorillas of Rwanda or the chimps of Gombe. 

Ecological Economics, General, Greenlash

Stern: In Bali the rich must pay

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Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank and who led the Stern review on the economics of climate change, writes in the Guardian (Nov 30, 2007), that in Bali the rich must pay to produce a system to tackle climate change that is effective, efficient and equitable. He writes that A fair and global effort to tackle climate change needs wealthy states to take the lead in CO2 cuts:

The Bali summit on climate change, which starts next week, will seek to lay the foundations for a new global agreement on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause rising temperatures and climate change. Ambitious targets for emission reduction must be at the heart of that agreement, together with effective market mechanisms that encourage emission trading between countries, rich and poor. The problem of climate change involves a fundamental failure of markets: those who damage others by emitting greenhouse gases generally do not pay. Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen.The evidence on the seriousness of the risks from inaction is now overwhelming. We risk damage on a scale larger than the two world wars of the past century. The problem is global and the response must be collaboration on a global scale. The rich countries must lead the way in taking action. And in thinking about global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we must invoke three basic criteria.

The first is effectiveness: the scale of the response must be commensurate with the challenge. This means setting a target for emission reduction that can keep the risks at acceptable levels.

The overall targets of 50% reductions in emissions by 2050 (relative to 1990) agreed at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm last June are essential if we are to have a reasonable chance of keeping temperature increases below 2C or 3C. While these targets involve strong action, they are not overambitious relative to the risk of failing to achieve them.

The second criterion is efficiency: we must keep down the costs of emission reduction, using prices or taxes wherever possible. Emission trading between countries must be a central part of the story. And helping poor countries cover their costs of emission reduction gives them an incentive to join a global deal.

Third, we should be concerned about equity. Our starting point is deeply inequitable with poor countries certain to be hit earliest and hardest by climate change. But rich countries are responsible for the bulk of past emissions: US emissions are currently more than 20 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per annum, Europe’s are 10-15 tonnes, China’s five or more tonnes, India’s around one tonne, and most of Africa much less than one.

For a 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050, the world average per capita must drop from seven tonnes to two or three. Within these global targets, even a minimal view of equity demands that the rich countries’ reductions should be at least 80% – either made directly or purchased. An 80% target for rich countries would bring equality of only the flow of current emissions – around the two to three tonnes per capita level. In fact, they will have consumed the big majority of the available space in the atmosphere.

Rich countries also need to provide funding for three more key elements of a global deal. First, there should be an international programme to combat deforestation, which contributes 15-20% of emissions. For $10bn-$15bn per year, half the deforestation could be stopped.

Second, there needs to be promotion of rapid technological advance to mitigate the effects of climate change. The development of technologies must be accelerated and methods found to promote their sharing. Carbon capture and storage for coal (CCS) is particularly urgent since coal-fired electric power is currently the dominant technology around the world, and emerging nations will be investing heavily in these technologies. For $5bn a year, it should be possible to create 30 commercial-scale coal-fired CCS stations within seven or eight years.

Finally, rich countries should honour their commitment to 0.7% of GDP in aid by 2015. This would yield increases in flows of $150bn-$200bn per year. The extra costs that developing countries face as a result of climate change are likely to be upwards of $80bn a year, and it is vital that extra resources are available. This proposed programme of action can be built if rich countries take a lead in Bali on their targets, the promotion of trading mechanisms and funding for deforestation and technology. With leadership and the right incentives, developing countries will join.

The building of the deal, and its enforcement, will come from the willing participation of countries driven by the understanding that action is vital. It will not be a wait-and-see game as in World Trade Organisation talks, where nothing is done until everything is settled.

The necessary commitments are increasingly being demonstrated by political action and elections around the world. A clear idea of where we are going as a world will make action at the individual, community and country level much easier and more coherent.

These commitments must, of course, be translated into action. There is a solution in our hands. It will not be easy to build. But the alternative is too destructive to accept. Bali is an opportunity to draw the outline of a common understanding, which will both guide action now and build towards the deal.

via Globalization and Environment

Adaptation, Cities, Greenlash, Scenarios, Visualization

Climate Change Escapism

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In Spain Greenpeace has published a short photo book Photoclima that uses estimates from IPPC and photomontages to show six landscapes of Spain a changed climate. The book is bilingual in Spanish and English.

By Pedro Armestre and Mario Gómez. La Manga del Mar menor, Murcia now and after a few decades of climate change,

On BLDGBLOG Geoff Manaugh comments on how this project, and how not to envision the future in Climate Change Escapism:

The basic idea here is that these visions of flooded resort hotels, parched farmlands, and abandoned villages, half-buried in sand, will inspire us to take action against climate change. Seeing these pictures, such logic goes, will traumatize people into changing how they live, vote, consume, and think. You can visually shock them into action, in other words: one or two glimpses of pictures like these and you’ll never think the same way about climate change again.
But I’m not at all convinced that that’s what these images really do.
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In fact, these and other visions of altered planetary conditions might inadvertantly be stimulating people’s interest in experiencing the earth’s unearthly future. Why travel to alien landscapes when you can simply hang around, driving your Hummer…?
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Climate change is the adventure tour of a lifetime – and all it requires is that you wait. Then all the flooded hotels of Spain and south Florida will be yours for the taking.
Given images like these, the future looks exciting again.
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Of course, such thinking is absurd; thinking that flooded cities and continent-spanning droughts and forest fires will simply be a convenient way to escape your mortgage payments is ridiculous. Viewing famine, mass extinction, and global human displacement into diarrhea-wracked refugee camps as some sort of Outward Bound holiday – on the scale of a planet – overlooks some rather obvious downsides to the potentially catastrophic impact of uncontrolled climate alteration.

Whether you’re talking about infant mortality, skin cancer, mass violence and rape, waterborne diseases, vermin, blindness, drowning, and so on, climate change entails radically negative effects that aren’t being factored into these escapist thought processes.

But none of those things are depicted in these images.

These images, and images like them, don’t show us identifiable human suffering.

Cities, Greenlash, Vulnerability

How slow change increased California’s fire risk

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California firesThe Christian Science Monitor article California’s age of megafires describes how California’s fire risk has been increased by slow changes in fire suppression (but probably not in California), climate change, longer fire season, and house construction in the wildland-urban interface:

Megafires, also called “siege fires,” are the increasingly frequent blazes that burn 500,000 acres or more – 10 times the size of the average forest fire of 20 years ago. One of the current wildfires is the sixth biggest in California ever, in terms of acreage burned, according to state figures and news reports.The trend to more superhot fires, experts say, has been driven by a century-long policy of the US Forest Service to stop wildfires as quickly as possible. The unintentional consequence was to halt the natural eradication of underbrush, now the primary fuel for megafires.

Three other factors contribute to the trend, they add. First is climate change marked by a 1-degree F. rise in average yearly temperature across the West. Second is a fire season that on average is 78 days longer than in the late 1980s. Third is increased building of homes and other structures in wooded areas.

“We are increasingly building our homes … in fire-prone ecosystems,” says Dominik Kulakowski, adjunct professor of biology at Clark University Graduate School of Geography in Worcester, Mass. Doing that “in many of the forests of the Western US … is like building homes on the side of an active volcano.”

In California, where population growth has averaged more than 600,000 a year for at least a decade, housing has pushed into such areas.

“What once was open space is now residential homes providing fuel to make fires burn with greater intensity,” says Terry McHale of the California Department of Forestry firefighters union. “With so much dryness, so many communities to catch fire, so many fronts to fight, it becomes an almost incredible job.”

Ecosystem services, Greenlash, Regime Shifts

Eutrophication creates deformed frogs

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Pieter T. J. Johnson et al have a new paper in PNAS Aquatic eutrophication promotes pathogenic infection in amphibians.

That shows how nutrient runoff from agriculture increase algal growth, which in turn leads to increases in snail populations that host parastites.  These parasites can then infect and deformed  frogs. What is particularly important is eutrophication, which is expected to increase with increased agricultural production, could enhance the spread of other diseases that harm people as well as wildlife.  The authors write:

Our results have broad applicability to other multihost parasites and their hosts. Recent increases in a variety of human and wildlife multihost parasites have been linked to eutrophication, including cholera, salmonid whirling disease, West Nile virus, coral diseases, and malaria.

Trematode parasites similar to Ribeiroia that use snails as intermediate hosts also infect humans, ranging from the nuisance, but relatively innocuous, cercarial dermatitis to the pathogenic schistosomiasis, which is estimated to afflict 200 million people across Africa and Asia.  If the life cycles of Schistosoma spp. are similarly affected by eutrophication, forecasted increases in agricultural nutrient applications in developing countries where schistosomiasis is endemic could hinder or inhibit efforts to control this disease.

For more see Wisconsin State Journal.

General, Greenlash

Great Lakes hemorrahagic fish virus surprise

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Viral hemorrhagic septicemia (V.H.S.) is an invasive virus that causes internal bleeding and organ failure of most of the sport and commercial fish in the Great Lakes. It has already killed tens of thousands of fish in the eastern Great Lakes, and is now spreading through the Great Lakes. It is likely to indirectly change the Great Lakes’ already unstable ecological structure. A New York Times article Fish-Killing Virus Spreading in the Great Lakes and the Toronto Star article Pathogen stalks fish report on the spread of the virus:

One of Dr. Casey’s colleagues researching the virus, Dr. Paul Bowser, a professor of aquatic animal medicine, added, “This is a new pathogen and for the first number of years — 4, 5 or 10 years — things are going to be pretty rough, then the animals will become more immune and resistant and the mortalities will decline.”

No one is sure where the virus came from or how it got to the Great Lakes. In the late 1980s, scientists saw a version of V.H.S. in salmon in the Pacific Northwest, which was the first sighting anywhere in North America. V.H.S. is also present in the Atlantic Ocean. But the genesis of a new, highly aggressive mutated strain concentrating on the Great Lakes is a biological mystery.

“We really don’t know how it got there,” said Jill Roland, a fish pathologist and assistant director for aquaculture at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “People’s awareness of V.H.S. in the lakes was unknown until 2005. But archived samples showed the virus was there as early as 2003.”

Scientists pointed to likely suspects, mainly oceangoing vessels that dump ballast water from around the world into the Great Lakes. (Ships carry ballast water to help provide stability, but it is often contaminated and provides a home for foreign species. The water is loaded and discharged as needed for balance.)

Fish migrate naturally, but also move with people as they cast nets for sport, for instance, or move contaminated water on pleasure boats from lake to lake.

The United States Department of Agriculture issued an emergency order in October to prohibit the movement of live fish that are susceptible to the virus out of the Great Lakes or bordering states. The order was later amended to allow limited movement of fish that tested negative for the virus.

“Getting rid of it is extremely hard to foresee,” said Henry Henderson, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Midwest office in Chicago. “These species spread, and reproduce. It is a living pollution.”

From the Toronto Star:

The deaths to date are just a small fraction of the millions of fish in the lakes. Even so, governments around the lakes are worried enough to try unprecedented steps to contain the virus.

VHS is suspected to be the latest on a growing list of destructive species – including zebra mussels and round gobies – brought into the lakes from Europe and Asia, usually in the ballast water of ocean-going ships.

The potential impact on fish isn’t the only concern. VHS doesn’t harm humans, but that doesn’t mean others that follow will be so benign, says Jennifer Nalbone, of Great Lakes United, a cross-border advocacy group based in Buffalo that for years has demanded strict controls on ballast.

“It’s a wake-up call that the lakes are vulnerable to any pathogen getting in here. We need to try to slow the spread but also to close the door.”

 

Ecosystem services, Greenlash, Regime Shifts

Sandstorms and Land degradation in China

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Gaoming Jiang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Botany, writes about China’s failure to restore degraded arid land in a China Dialogue article Stopping the Sandstorms:

In Beijing, the weather forecast says that more sandstorms are on the way. The capital was hit by four sandstorms in March, and even Shanghai was recently smothered by dust clouds from the north. Television reports now describe these events as “sandy weather”, rather than “sandstorms”. But whatever you call them, they are becoming ever more frequent visitors to Beijing in springtime.

While everyone is cursing the weather, I find myself worrying: how many tonnes of soil are being lost? And how long will it be before there is nowhere in China for plants to take root? Academics argue to what extent these sandstorms are “imports” from Mongolia and the former Soviet Republics, or whether they are the “domestic” products of the arid deserts and damaged grasslands of China’s west. But either way, there is no denying the degree of environmental degradation in western China over the last three decades. Regardless of whether the capital’s weather comes from beyond its borders, China needs to put measures in place to restore the grasslands and reduce the risk of sandstorms.

Sixty billion yuan has been invested in projects to control the sandstorms that are hitting northeastern China. Tree-planting projects have also been running for 30 years across north China. But why haven’t they worked? And more importantly – what will?
Continue reading →

Greenlash, Regime Shifts, Vulnerability

Climate change and Tipping Points in the Amazon

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Most of the talks from a recent conference on Climate change and the fate of the Amazon at University of Oxford are available online as slides and podcasts. Some of the interesting points from the conference:

  • Intact forests may be more resistant to drought than climate-vegetation models usually assume (deep roots, large soil water reserves, hydraulic uplift)
  • The interaction of drought with forest fragmentation and fire ignition points can trigger tipping to savanna forest with less biodiversity and biomass.
  • Global demand for soybeans and biofuels could drive substantial land clearing.
  • Substantial opportuntities for land use change feedbacks exist in Amazonia. Climatic drying could allow the expansion of soy and sugarcane cultivation, which would feedback to stimulate further drying.
  • There is a need increase the resilience of the Amazon, because models estimate a non-trival chance of severe drought and forest dieback over the 21st century. Resilience can be enhanced by enhancing the recycling of water vapour that maintains mesic forests in the amazon.

David Oswald works on Amazonia forest resilience in my lab. He attended the conference and has these recommendations on the talks:

Carlos Nobre – Dr. Nobre is very well-known internationally and especially in Brazil. He is a climate scientist by training but is involved in the leadership of scientific research projects such as IGBP, CPTEC, and the LBA project. He alludes to the importance of Ecological Resilience and Stability in his talk, but more detail and a conceptual framework is required – (that is what I am working on).

Peter Cox – Dr. Cox is a well-known global climate modeller and first published a paper in 2000 about the “Dieback” of the Amazon. This was very controversial when it came out and inspired many people to look at this problem from different perspectives and also using different global climate models. The follow up work to the 2000 paper has similar results and unfortunately, one of the outcomes of the conference was that there is general concensus that increasing greenhouse gas emissions and the corresponding climate change could have very serious effects on the Amazon. Again, these research projects at this scale have a high degree of uncertainty, but the people presenting, who are all experts, came to similar conclusions. Check it out for yourself.

Chris Huntingford – Dr. Huntingford’s presentation was a follow up to Cox’s work, basically testing the hyothesis and strength of results.

Luiz Aragao – Dr. Aragao and his collaborators did some interesting work with remote sensing, similar to the type of approach I am taking. Very solid work.

Michael Keller – Dr. Keller is with the US Forest Service and has been involved with the LBA project in a leadership position since the early 90’s. He has a broad historical as well as sound scientific perspective on things.

Dan Neptad – Dr. Nepstad is extremely well known in Amazonian research and is at the Woods Hole Research center. He has done some very interesting work with water availability and ecosystem health in the Amazon and has designed some very cool experiments. Increasingly, his work is focused on the interaction between science and development policy in this region. His presentation speaks to that. He is a progressive thinker, and also very active on the ground in the Amazon.

Juan Carlos Riveros – Dr. Riveros gave a very interesting talk on conservation strategies in the Amazon. I was blown away by the extent of the research they have done and continue to do with respect to conservation strategies. They have done some very interesting spatial analytical work. Good for a geography-oriented person.

Diogenes Alves – Dr. Alves is an interesting person. By training, he is a computational mathematician. He has been involved extensively with the design and planning of the LBA project. His presentation outlined the epistemological framework they used and also some of the challenges they initally faced with the structuring of an international scientific research project that clearly was embedded in a complex social and economic situation. He alluded to Systems Theory in his talk, and that really appealed to me, so I am including this one for those that are interested in the links between Social Science and Natural Science and the practical realities one faces when doing this type of research.

Kevin Conrad – Mr. Conrad is with a group called the Rainforest Coalition. He presented a strategy for rainforest conservation based on using the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol as a means of attaching economic value on the carbon market to rainforests that are preserved and not degraded. I did not understand in depth this strategy, but it seems that there are positive merits to this approach. I personally, am not 100% sold on exclusively using market solutions but I think that they do play an important role. For more detail you can check out his presentation and come to your own conclusions.

Dr. Yadvinder Malhi’s provides a summary of the conference. He draws out the key points and overall conclusions.

Ecosystem services, Greenlash

More on bee declines

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There appears to have been a number surprising collapse of bee populations. These collapses are important because bees are key providers of pollination ecosystem services, which are important for agriculture. However, most of the suspected causes of this decline are due to agricultural practices. The Agricultural biodiversity weblog has been following this issue and have written a number of posts on the issue which they review in a recent post on the possible impact of GMO Bt Corn on bees:

… We pointed to a piece that said maybe the problems in the US weren’t any worse than they had been, just better reported. Maybe the problem is monoculture? Throughout the recent buzz of hive-related news, though, we’ve ignored a few items that laid the blame on GMO crops. Why? Because they seemed a bit shrill, maybe even a tad one-sided. But a long and apparently comprehensive piece in the German news magazine Der Spiegel is neither shrill nor one-sided. And it seems to adduce good evidence that bees who are suffering a parasite infestation are abnormally susceptible to pollen from maize engineered to express the Bt bacterial toxin from Bacillus thuringiensis.

The work Der Spiegel reports is a long way from conclusive. But it does give pause for thought, and it is causing huge excitement among opponents of GM in all its forms. At the very least, it deserves a closer look. But wouldn’t it be weird if it proved true? And how would industrial agriculture respond?