Biomass energy with conventional tropical crops is a bad idea because rainforests get destroyed to make room for more palm plantations resulting in habitat loss.
The continued expansion of oil palm plantations will worsen the dual environmental crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, unless rainforests are better protected, warn scientists in the most comprehensive review of the subject to date.
Lead author, Emily Fitzherbert from the Zoological Society of London and University of East Anglia said: "There has been much debate over the role of palm oil production in tropical deforestation and its impacts on biodiversity. We wanted to put the discussion on a firm scientific footing."
Palm oil, used in food, cosmetics, biofuels and other products, is now the world's leading vegetable oil. It is derived from the fruit of the oil palm, grown on more than 50,000-square miles of moist, tropical lowland areas, mostly in Malaysia and Indonesia. These areas, once covered in tropical rainforest, the globe's richest wildlife habitat on land, are also home to some of the most threatened species on earth.
The review, published today in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, singles out deforestation associated with plantation development as by far the biggest ecological impact, but finds that the links between the two are often much more complex than portrayed in the popular press.
Growing palm oil demand threatens to wipe out yet more of the dwindling rainforests.
Within countries, oil palm is usually grown in a few productive areas, but it looks set to spread further. Demand is increasing rapidly and 'its potential as a future agent of deforestation is enormous', the study says.
Most of the suitable land left is within the last remaining large areas of tropical rainforest in Central Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. Where oil palm has replaced tropical forest the impact on wildlife depends on what species survive in the new oil palm habitat.
The study confirmed that oil palm is a poor substitute habitat for the majority of tropical forest species, particularly forest specialists and those of conservation concern.
The coming of Peak Oil will boost the demand for biomass energy and speed the destruction of rainforests and other habitats. We need more environmentally friendly energy sources to replace dwindling fossil fuels.
Animal migrations keep sinking.
Animal migration surely ranks as one of nature's most visible and widespread phenomena. Every minute of every day, somewhere, some place, animals are on the move. The migrants span the animal kingdom, from whales and warblers to dragonflies and salamanders. But is migration an endangered phenomenon? Around the world, many of the most spectacular migrations have either disappeared due to human activities or are in steep decline. Those of us living in eastern North America can no longer experience the flocks of millions of passenger pigeons that temporarily obscured the sun as they migrated to and from their breeding grounds. Nor can residents of the Great Plains climb to the top of a hill and gaze down up hundreds of thousands of bison trekking across the prairies, as was possible less than two centuries ago.
I view this as a loss. I realize some of my readers see the expansion of humanity as some sort of Manifest Destiny which is a value that trumps all other values (really). But I do not see why the expansion of the human race up to 7, 8, 9+ billion people enriches my life. Seems quite the opposite is the case.
I think migrating geese honking at high altitudes are really cool. If I could go back in a time machine I would go back and (among other things) watch the massive carrier pigeon migration before hunters wiped them out entirely Non-migratory species aren't shrinking as much as migratory species.
Even the less iconic migrations show signs of trouble. Birdwatchers in North America and Europe, for example, complain that fewer songbirds are returning each spring from their winter quarters in Latin America and Africa, respectively. Indeed, a recent continent-wide analysis of European breeding birds concluded that long-distance migrants (i.e., those species that breed in Europe but winter in sub-Saharan Africa) have suffered sustained and often severe population declines, more so than related nonmigratory species [1]. In central Asia, the number of saiga, a peculiar migratory antelope of the dry steppe grasslands and semi-desert, has dropped by over 95% in the past two decades, from over one million to fewer than 50,000 [2].
The causes of all these declines vary depending on the species and the locale, but in general, the threats to migrants fall into four nonexclusive categories: habitat destruction, the creation of obstacles and barriers such as dams and fences, overexploitation, and climate change. Most of the migrants are in little immediate danger of extinction; rather, they are becoming less and less common. Thus, birdwatchers can still see all of the species of migratory songbirds they seek each spring; they simply have to work harder to do so. Bison still roam national parks and private ranches in the American West, but today's herds number in the hundreds or low thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands or millions. And there are still lots of salmon to catch off the coast of Norway or British Columbia—just not as many as there used to be.
Migrant species that are not in immediate danger of extinction will come under greater pressure as more billions of humans populate the Earth and each human uses a larger ecological footprint. Do you care?
Salmon are a dim shadow of their former numbers.
Prior to European settlement, 160–226 million kilograms of salmon migrated each year up the rivers of Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and California. Today, after decades of dam construction, overfishing, water withdrawals for irrigation, logging, and streamside grazing by livestock, salmon populations have plummeted. The total biomass of spawning salmon in the Pacific Northwest is now estimated to be only 12–14 million kilograms. Gresh et al. [3] have calculated that the rivers of the Northwest receive just 6%–7% of the marine-derived nitrogen and phosphorus they once received from the abundant salmon population. How this shortfall may be affecting the ecology of the region's rivers or adjacent farmlands is largely unknown.
Migratory bird numbers might undergo a big shrinking. Wetlands destruction probably will contribute to that. Biomass energy crops will reduce available habitats as well.
We can imagine an analogous situation developing with respect to migratory birds. Each spring, more than 30,000 tons of migratory songbirds migrate from their wintering grounds in Latin America and the Caribbean to their breeding grounds in the United States and Canada. (This biomass value is derived by combining breeding population totals from the North American Landbird Conservation Plan with species-specific weights from various sources.) If we assume these birds consume 10%–35% of their body weight per day in insects (roughly matching the requirements of a 100-gram bird and a 10-gram bird, respectively), then they are eating anywhere from 3,000–10,500 tons of insects per day. (During the breeding season, when the birds are feeding offspring, these figures would be much higher.) Several studies have shown that birds reduce insect populations in temperate forests, thus raising the question of whether ongoing declines in migratory birds pose a threat to the health of our forests and farmlands.
Similarly, one wonders how the ecology of the Serengeti would change if its migratory population of wildebeest (exceeding 1 million individuals) were to collapse, given the major role these animals surely play in terms of consuming herbaceous vegetation and redistributing nutrients via their urine and dung (Figure 1).
$1 billion per year could prevent one tenth of tropical deforestation.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Wealthy nations willing to collectively spend about $1 billion annually could prevent the emission of roughly half a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year for the next 25 years, new research suggests.
It would take about that much money to put an end to a tenth of the tropical deforestation in the world, one of the top contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, researchers estimate.
Reduced carbon emissions aside, the reduction in habitat destruction would be great. Why not advocate this measure just to cut down on habitat loss? Whatever happened to the environmental movement that used to place so much emphasis on ecosystem preservation? Nowadays carbon dioxide emissions get all the attention. This does not seem sensible to me. If CO2 had no effects on temperatures the destruction of rain forests would still be wiping out species.
Though I wonder if this program would really have its desired effect. Or would the preservation of some rain forests just increase the rush to destroy the unprotected rain forests? My guess is these researchers aren't aiming high enough.
This sounds roughly analogous to existing practice of paying farmers not to till land that is considered valuable habitat.
If adopted, this type of program could have potential to reduce global carbon emissions by between 2 and 10 percent.
The calculation is one of several estimates described by a team of scientists and economists this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The calculations, based on three different forestry and land-use models, provide the best estimates so far of how much it would cost developed nations to participate in a program called “avoided deforestation” to reduce worldwide carbon emissions.
One fifth of CO2 emissions come from tropical deforestation.
Under such a program, wealthy nations would help achieve reduced emissions globally by paying landowners in developing nations not to cut down wide swaths of forested land to make way for agricultural uses. Tropical deforestation, the cutting and burning of trees to convert land to grow crops and raise livestock, accounts for about a fifth of all human-caused carbon emissions in the world.
Rising demand for palm oil will decimate biodiversity unless producers and politicians can work together to preserve as much remaining natural forest as possible, ecologists have warned. A new study of the potential ecological impact of various management strategies published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology found that very little can be done to make palm oil plantations more hospitable for local birds and butterflies. The findings have major implications for the booming market in biofuels and its impact on biodiversity.
Dr Lian Pin Koh of ETH Zürich looked at the number of birds and butterflies in 15 palm oil plantations in East Sabah, Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. He found that palm oil plantations supported between one and 13 butterfly species, and between seven and 14 species of bird. Previous research by other ecologists found at least 85 butterfly and 103 bird species in neighbouring undisturbed rain forest.
Management techniques – such as encouraging epiphytes, beneficial plants or weed cover in palm oil plantations – increased species richness by only 0.4 species for butterflies and 2.2 species for birds. Preserving remaining natural forests – for example by creating forest buffer zones between plantations – made a little more impact, increasing species richness by 3.7 in the case of butterflies and 2.5 for birds.
JAKARTA, Indonesia -- The global resource boom is threatening one of the world's last tropical-forest frontiers: the Merauke region of Indonesia's remote Papua province.
Indonesian companies are lining up to develop pulp-and-paper mills in Merauke; investors from South Korea want to expand palm-oil plantations; and Indonesian officials have tried to persuade International Paper Co to invest in the region.
The demand for wood and palm oil might drive orangutans into extinction. The demand for supposedly carbon-neutral energy sources (except that wiping out forests releases large amounts of CO2) is contributing to the extinction of orangutans.
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — Orangutan numbers have declined sharply on the only two islands where they still live in the wild and they could become the first great ape species to go extinct if urgent action isn't taken, a new study says.
The declines in Indonesia and Malaysia since 2004 are mostly because of illegal logging and the expansion of palm oil plantations, Serge Wich, a scientist at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, said on Saturday.
This problem is going to get worse as more people in China, India, and southeast Asia start working in industrial jobs and their growing buying power lets them buy furniture, housing, and energy. The higher oil prices will boost European demand for biomass energy. Down will go the forests.
Update: In addition to rain forests, wetlands are getting destroyed too.
Covering just 6% of Earth's land surface, wetlands (including marshes, peat bogs, swamps, river deltas, mangroves, tundra, lagoons and river floodplains) store 10-20% of its terrestrial carbon. Wetlands slow the decay of organic material trapped and locked away over the ages in low oxygen conditions.
These waterlogged (either seasonally or year-round) areas contain an estimated 771 gigatonnes (771 billion tonnes) of greenhouse gases – both CO2 and more potent methane – an amount in CO2 equivalent comparable to the carbon content of today's atmosphere.
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Some 60% of wetlands worldwide – and up to 90% in Europe – have been destroyed in the past 100 years, principally due to drainage for agriculture but also through pollution, dams, canals, groundwater pumping, urban development and peat extraction.
Notwithstanding recent efforts in such countries as Australia and the U.S. (which has lost 50 million of an estimated 90 million hectares of wetlands 500 years ago) to protect wetlands and reverse past damage, at a world scale they continue to shrink.
"Wetlands act as sponges and their role as sources, reservoirs and regulators of water is largely underappreciated by many farmers and others who rely on steady water supplies," says Prof. Junk. "They also cleanse water of organic pollutants, prevent downstream flood inundations, protect riverbanks and seashores from erosion, recycle nutrients and capture sediment."
Population growth, industrialization, and depletion of available fossil fuels all create pressures that result in more destruction of rain forests and wetlands. So the problem is going to get worse.
Click thru on that link and read lots of facts about the value of wetlands.
Add billions more people to the planet. Plus, let economic growth increase the buying power of those already here. What you get? Massive forest destruction.
LONDON (14 July 2008) -- Escalating global demand for fuel, food and wood fibre will destroy the world's forests, if efforts to address climate change and poverty fail to empower the billion-plus forest-dependent poor, according to two reports released today by the U.S.-based Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), an international coalition comprising the world's foremost organisations on forest governance and conservation.
The studies were delivered today at an event in the House of Commons hosted by Martin Horwood, MP for Cheltenham. Sponsored by RRI and the UK-based Forest Peoples Programme, speakers included Gareth Thomas, the UK Minister for Trade and Development; authors of the two reports; as well as advocates for forest communities in Africa and Asia.
According to the findings released today in RRI's comprehensive study, Seeing People through the Trees: Scaling Up Efforts to Advance Rights and Address Poverty, Conflict and Climate Change, the world will need a minimum of 515 million more hectares by 2030, in order to grow food, bioenergy, and wood products. This is almost twice the amount of land that will be available, equal to a land mass 12 times the size of Germany.
At the same time, a second RRI study, From Exclusion to Ownership? Challenges and Opportunities in Advancing Forest Tenure Reform, finds that developing country governments still claim an overwhelming majority of forests and have made limited progress in recognizing local land rights, leaving open the potential for great violence, as some of the world's poorest peoples struggle to hold on to their only asset—millions of hectares of the world's most valuable and vulnerable forestlands.
The studies also report a sharp increase in government allocations of forests to industrial plantations, and suggest that the booming growth in demand for food and fuel is rapidly eating up vast forestlands in the Amazon and Southeast Asia.
They foresee big increases in the amount of land under cultivation. More land for humans means less land for wild critters. How about humans make fewer babies and leave more room for the critters?
- In Brazil, 28 Mha are currently under cultivation for soy and sugarcane. By 2020, soy and sugarcane plantations are expected to cover 88 to 128 Mha of Brazilian land.
- In Indonesia, 6.5 Mha of land are dedicated to oil palm plantations. By 2025, oil palm plantations are projected to require 16.5 to 26 Mha of land.
- In China, biofuel cultivation alone is expected to require an additional 13.3 Mha of land by 2020.
Peak Oil is going to make this problem worse as the demand for biomass energy soars. Also, high fertilizer costs will limit yield per area of land and therefore lead to more land getting put under cultivation.
Their study found that PNG's forests were being cleared or degraded at a rate of 1.4% per year in 2002, increasing to 1.7% per year in 2007. If clearing and degradation continues unchecked, over half of the forest that existed when PNG became independent from Australia in 1975 will have been destroyed by 2021, according to the report. The Brazilian Amazon is losing forest at the rate of 0.9% per year.
Asian industrialization is raising the demand for timber. So the rate of destruction will probably accelerate.
PNG has a lot of unique species.
Logging and road building are already leading to erosion and fragmentation of ecosystems harboring some of the world’s most varied, and least-studied, wildlife, said Phil Shearman, the lead author and director of the Remote Sensing Center of the University of Papua New Guinea. The study is available online at gis.mortonblacketer.com.au/upngis/.
PNG has a disproportionate fraction of all the planet's species.
Although it only accounts for less than 0.5% of the Earth's land cover, the heavily forested island nation is home to an estimated 6-7% of the planet's species.
Papua New Guinea's tropical rainforest - the world's third largest - is not only being logged by timber firms but also cleared for subsistence farming, in a country of 6m people with one of the highest population growth rates in the world.
So far I do not see technological advances slowing the rate of habitat destruction. The opposite seems to be the case.
The rate of rain forest destruction has accelerated.
From Brazil to central Africa to once-lush islands in Asia's archipelagos, human encroachment is shrinking the world's rain forests.
The alarm was sounded decades ago by environmentalists _ and was little heeded. The picture, meanwhile, has changed: Africa is now a leader in destructiveness. The numbers have changed: U.N. specialists estimate 60 acres of tropical forest are felled worldwide every minute, up from 50 a generation back. And the fears have changed.
The best solution to this problem? Free contraceptives and other forms of birth control to everyone in the world. We have too many people. We aren't going to persuade them all to consume less. They will gobble up more and more habitat.
Since large chunks of our elites have decided (in a sort of madness of the intellectual crowds) that anthropogenic global warming (now renamed as Climate Change as part of that madness) is the biggest problem facing the planet they have decided that habitat loss must be seen through the lens of global warming (er, climate change).
"If we lose forests, we lose the fight against climate change," declared more than 300 scientists, conservation groups, religious leaders and others in an appeal for action at December's climate conference in Bali, Indonesia.
They can't imagine really mobilizing to stop the problem of habitat destruction unless they can shout "Climate Change!" It is not enough for them to say "Oh wait, it sure is nice to see elephants, lions, tigers, orangutans, bonobos, and lots of other species living in their native habitats and we should prevent the destruction of those habitats at the hands of human population expansion and economic growth." Nope, they need a core source of motivation that points its way back to industrial activity rather than destruction of habitats as the core evil. I think they aren't making sense.
Isn't this pretty bad even if it does not change average global temperature? Do we really need to be able to forecast a change in average global temperature in order to decide this trend is really bad? I mean, I don't need to consider the temperature effects of so much deforestation in order to decide this is bad.
"Deforestation continues at an alarming rate of about 13 million hectares (32 million acres) a year," the U.N. body said in its latest "State of the World's Forests" report.
Because northern forests remain essentially stable, that means 50,000 square miles of tropical forest are being cleared every 12 months _ equivalent to one Mississippi or more than half a Britain.
The Brazilian government has announced a huge rise in the rate of Amazon deforestation, months after celebrating its success in achieving a reduction.
In the last five months of 2007, 3,235 sq km (1,250 sq miles) were lost.
Gilberto Camara, of INPE, an institute that provides satellite imaging of the area, said the rate of loss was unprecedented for the time of year.
Growing demand for cattle and soy beans is driving the Amazon destruction.
In the past 40 years, close to 20% of the Amazon has been cut down.
Land cleared for cattle is the leading cause of deforestation, while the growth in soya bean production is becoming increasingly significant. Illegal logging is also a factor.
Deforestation and forest fires are now responsible for nearly 75% of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions.
Whether it was arming forest police or backing schemes to certify legal logs, no tactic could silence the chain saws or douse the intentional fires that each day destroy 20 more square miles (50 more square kilometers) of Indonesia's rain forests, and an estimated 110 square miles (285 square kilometers) elsewhere in the world's tropics.
I do not see global warming as an unsolvable problem or as a reason to stop using oil (especially since I think we are running out of oil anyway). We can use one cheap way to do climate engineering or yet another to keep down world temperatures. But as I've stated on previous occasions, CO2 build-up in the oceans seems like it might be the reason to worry about atmospheric CO2 build-up.
Since I think we are running out of oil and natural gas the question I most want answered with regard to the environment is how much coal does the world really have left that is accessible to extract and burn? American coal reserves and world coal reserves might be smaller than commonly thought. However, if the amount of accessible coal is large then CO2 emitted by burning coal for electricity and other purposes could acidify the oceans and kill all the coral reefs.
Stanford, CA — Carbon emissions from human activities are not just heating up the globe, they are changing the ocean’s chemistry. This could soon be fatal to coral reefs, which are havens for marine biodiversity and underpin the economies of many coastal communities. Scientists from the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology have calculated that if current carbon dioxide emission trends continue, by mid-century 98% of present-day reef habitats will be bathed in water too acidic for reef growth. Among the first victims will be Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest organic structure.
Chemical oceanographers Ken Caldeira and Long Cao are presenting their results in a multi-author paper in the December 14 issue of Science* and at the annual meeting of American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on the same date. The work is based on computer simulations of ocean chemistry under levels of atmospheric CO2 ranging from 280 parts per million (pre-industrial levels) to 5000 ppm. Present levels are 380 ppm and rapidly rising due to accelerating emissions from human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels.
By the time we reach 550 ppm all the coral reefs are dead. Likely other ocean species will bite the dust as well. Time to switch to nuclear power. But in case we don't make that move, well, I've always wanted to see Australia's Coral Reefs. So I guess I need to fly down there on a fossil fuel burning CO2 emitting jumbo jet to see the Great Barrier Reef in all its glory before everyone else uses so much fossil that the reefs are dead. Some of you are thinking "what a twisted guy that FuturePundit is to think that". Yes, I'm pretty twisted in my thinking. But in this case that idea did not come from my imagination. Nope, I read it in the New York Times There's a growing travel industry in taking people to see what humanity is ruining and wrecking.
From the tropics to the ice fields, doom is big business. Quark Expeditions, a leader in arctic travel, doubled capacity for its 2008 season of trips to the northern and southernmost reaches of the planet. Travel agents report clients are increasingly requesting trips to see the melting glaciers of Patagonia, the threatened coral of the Great Barrier Reef, and the eroding atolls of the Maldives, Mr. Shapiro said.
Meet humanity. Why do some people say how wonderful it is?
So what should we do? Even if industrialized countries kick the carbon habit Asia and other places are course to boost atmospheric CO2 levels.
Richard Richels, an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute, helped produce an ominous forecast: even if the established industrial powers turned off every power plant and car right now, unless there are changes in policy in poorer countries the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could still reach 450 parts per million — a level deemed unacceptably dangerous by many scientists — by 2070. (If no one does anything, that threshold is reached in 2040.)
In my view this tells us that we need to develop cheaper alternatives to fossil fuels. We need to develop clean energy sources cheap enough that the developing countries will be lured away from coal to these alternatives.
Energy usage to manufacture goods for export is a major source of CO2 emissions in China.
Yet one of the biggest is the enormous increase in China’s production of manufactured goods for export. Indeed, a study by the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in Britain estimated that in 2004, net exports accounted for 23 percent of Chinese greenhouse gas emissions.
Think George W. Bush is an enemy of the environment? He's an environmentalist compared to the Chinese. China is bypassing the US as biggest CO2 emitter and probably is already the biggest emitter of conventional pollutants. Yet China is just getting started. Their emissions are going to get far worse (and not just on CO2) before they get better. More mercury. More particulates. More pollutants in rivers and the oceans. China's industrialization is a disaster for the world's environment.
A team of economists led by Dieter Helm at Oxford University claims that Britain's decrease in CO2 emissions is an illusion caused in part by importing products whose domestic manufacture used to cause domestic CO2 emissions.
The analysis says pollution from aviation, shipping, overseas trade and tourism, which are not measured in the official figures, means that UK carbon consumption has risen significantly over the past decade, and that the government's claims to have tackled global warming are an "illusion".
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Under Kyoto, Britain must reduce its greenhouse gas output to 12.5% below 1990 levels by 2012. According to official figures filed with the UN, Britain's emissions are currently down 15% compared with 1990.
But the new report says UK carbon output has actually risen by 19% over that period, once the missing emissions are included in the figures.
Britain has basically exported some of its fossil fuels using industries (as have the United States and other Western countries) to countries like China whose leaders think nothing about setting new records in rates of pollution emissions. Again, doesn't this argue for a much more rapid development of technologies for cleaner energy to make those cleaner sources cheaper? We can't appeal to altruism or enlightened self interest about long term costs. Such arguments aren't going to work with China or India. They haven't even worked with Canada which signed Kyoto and then, under a left-of-center government, went on to greatly increase CO2 emissions since signing the treaty. Japan and other Kyoto signatories didn't meet their treaty obligations either.
Governments around the world aren't willing to impose much hardship on their populaces to reduce fossil fuels use. Some talk a good game. But coal mines are getting reopened in Germany and Britain.
The letter, sent Sunday, calls for at least $30 billion a year in spending to promote sustained research akin to the Apollo space program or the Manhattan Project.
It was drafted by Martin I. Hoffert, an emeritus physics professor at New York University; Kenneth Caldeira, a Carnegie Institution scientist based at Stanford University; and John Katzenberger, director of the Aspen Global Change Institute, a private research group. Other signers include Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, economics, and medicine.
Gregory Benford, Lowell Wood, and Nobelist Paul Crutzen are among the signers. You can read the full letter (PDF format). Note the graph showing types and levels of research funding from 1955 till today.
Update: Also see Andrew Revkin's article from a year ago: Budgets Falling in Race to Fight Global Warming.
The National Audobon Society of the United States says bird species are in decline.
Audubon's unprecedented analysis of forty years of citizen-science bird population data from our own Christmas Bird Count plus the Breeding Bird Survey reveals the alarming decline of many of our most common and beloved birds.
Since 1967 the average population of the common birds in steepest decline has fallen by 68 percent; some individual species nose-dived as much as 80 percent. All 20 birds on the national Common Birds in Decline list lost at least half their populations in just four decades.
The findings point to serious problems with both local habitats and national environmental trends. Only citizen action can make a difference for the birds and the state of our future.
What citizen action could work? I see a problem here which will prevent action on a scale needed to preserve large habitats: The human instinct to reproduce combined with our ability to generate more technology. We now out-compete a growing portion of all the species on the planet and our ability to harness a growing and very substantial portion of the world's land and biomass to our own purposes. If more environmentally minded people have fewer babies it won't matter because those with stronger genetic instincts to reproduce will make up a larger fraction of the next generation and fertility will eventually recover.
On your computer you can see or hear the 20 top decliners. So these birds will live on in cyberspace. Here is the full report.
Nathaniel T. Wheelwright says it feels as if the lights are dimming.
In his later years, my grandfather used to grumble that birds were becoming scarcer and scarcer. It was tempting to write off his gloom as the natural tendency of the elderly to romanticize the past, or maybe just an old man's deteriorating hearing and eyesight. But it was true that the whippoorwill that had kept me awake nights when I visited him as a boy had gone quiet, and the woods and fields of the Northeast felt emptier to me.
Earlier this summer, the National Audubon Society released a definitive study of population trends of North American birds, a monumental effort based on decades of Christmas bird counts and breeding bird surveys. The study confirms what my grandfather feared and what most of us now know. Birds that I used to see routinely growing up in New England – evening grosbeaks, eastern meadowlarks, northern bobwhites – are in free fall. The losses are mind-boggling. Since my grandfather introduced me to birds just half a lifetime ago, once-common species have declined by as much as 80 percent due to the usual suspects: habitat loss, pesticides, introduced species, and climate change. The songs of tens of millions of birds have been silenced. It feels as if the lights are dimming.
When some people read about cellulosic technology they think "environmentally friendly green energy". By contrast I think "yet another way to convert land from habitat for other species into biofactories to power cars and SUVs". The birdies are going bye bye because of human population expansion and economic growth. We need policies that decrease the human footprint. Or we have to accept the decline of most other species. My guess is we will continue to opt for the latter.
A recent research report published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences USA by a group of German and Austrian researchers find that humans are already using a quarter of the world's biomass.
Human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP), the aggregate impact of land use on biomass available each year in ecosystems, is a prominent measure of the human domination of the biosphere. We present a comprehensive assessment of global HANPP based on vegetation modeling, agricultural and forestry statistics, and geographical information systems data on land use, land cover, and soil degradation that localizes human impact on ecosystems. We found an aggregate global HANPP value of 15.6 Pg C/yr or 23.8% of potential net primary productivity, of which 53% was contributed by harvest, 40% by land-use-induced productivity changes, and 7% by human-induced fires. This is a remarkable impact on the biosphere caused by just one species. We present maps quantifying human-induced changes in trophic energy flows in ecosystems that illustrate spatial patterns in the human domination of ecosystems, thus emphasizing land use as a pervasive factor of global importance. Land use transforms earth's terrestrial surface, resulting in changes in biogeochemical cycles and in the ability of ecosystems to deliver services critical to human well being. The results suggest that large-scale schemes to substitute biomass for fossil fuels should be viewed cautiously because massive additional pressures on ecosystems might result from increased biomass harvest.
One could dispute this result. How one measures biomass usage will affect how high a figure will be assigned to human usage. But consider for example the world's fisheries. We are cutting back on the sizes of the world's fisheries. One could argue that since we are using such a large fraction of all the fish we are effectively using all the algae and other microorganisms in the food chains of those fish which we eat.
If we plant lawns and fruit trees in our yards then are we appropriating that biomass for our use? Seems like it. If we didn't plant those lawns other plants would grow there and other species would make use of those plants in ways that we currently prevent (e.g. we battle to keep out gophers).
This result illustrates why I think biomass energy is a bad idea. We do not have large amounts of land as yet unused. We should avoid development of yet more ways to make land useful. Even without the development of biomass energy I expect both human population growth and human industrialization to increase human land use to an extent that wipes out lots of species. Human continue to greatly shrink the wilds with no end to that shrinkage in sight.
Industrialization will continue to raise the demand for timber. That will shift more lands from their natural state into forest monocultures. Industrialization will continue to increase the size of dwellings and of lawn areas around houses. This will decrease the amount of land available for nature. Rising living standards will increase the buying power of people who like meat. This will cause a shift of more lands toward agriculture to raise grain crops and for grazing.
The human population is about 6.6 billion people and the US Census Bureau projects it might reach 9.4 billion by 2050. If the Chinese government loses the ability to enforce its "One Child" policy then the world's population could go much higher. Also, the development of cures for major diseaes and rejuvenation therapies will drastically cut the death rate in industrialized countries.
Nanotech replications will make solar power and goods production extremely cheap. Therefore hundreds of millions or even billions of humans will gain the ability to use huge amounts of land just for massive mansions.
The full paper (PDF) is available with open access.
More people and more land development means fewer birds.
From the heartland's whippoorwills and meadowlarks to the Northern bobwhite and common terns of the nation's coasts, 20 common bird species tracked by the National Audubon Society have seen their numbers fall 54 percent overall since 1967, with some down about 80 percent, the group reported Thursday.
Most of the trouble lies with loss of bird habitat, and has for decades, due to expanding agriculture and suburban development. The Rufous hummingbird's population has fallen 58 percent due to logging and development in its Pacific Northwest breeding range – and in its winter range in Mexico. The same thing has happened to whipporwills, whose numbers are down 57 percent due to loss of their forest habitat. At the same time, scientists say changes in migration patterns due to global warming are emerging, too.
"Habitat loss is still the major concern," says Greg Butcher, Audubon's bird conservation director in an interview. "But we're also seeing increasing impact from large-scale problems like global warming."
Losses due to global warming are speculative at this point. But loss of land to human use is not speculative. Destruction of rain forests in the tropics will drive many species to extinction. Both industrialization and population growth are driving the loss of land.
This trend could get much worse. My fear with biotechnology for biomass energy is that biotechnology will make more land useful for human purposes. If genetic engineers create plants that make land more usable for energy production then use of land for energy production will cause orders of magnitude greater loss of habitats than is caused by drilling for oil and construction of oil pipelines. Shifting of land into production for biomass energy will get added to expansion of land use for food crops, logging, and human settlements.
The habitat loss problem is going to get much worse even without a massive shift to biomass energy. The population of the United States will hit about 400 million by 2050. Most of that population growth will come from immigrants and from children of immigrants.
That population growth rate is probably going to go up if the S.1348 immigration amnesty bill passes Congress. Why? Immigration amnesties cause fertility spikes.
According to a 2002 study by demographers Laura E. Hill and Hans P. Johnson of the Public Policy Institute of California, due to the 1986 amnesty (another "comprehensive" compromise, combining legalization with enforcement provisions that were never enforced), "Between 1987 and 1991, total fertility rates for foreign-born Hispanics [in California] increased from 3.2 to 4.4" expected babies per woman over her lifetime.
I believe we already have too many people on planet Earth and that we are going to lose a large number of species due to population growth and industrialization. Eventually we are going to develop rejuvenation therapies and current projections of future population growth will turn out to be very low. Seems to me we have about 4 choices with population growth:
- Keep having babies and continue to die from old age. The human population continues to increase and we lose an expanding list of species. Maybe declining fertility rates flatten out the world population but eventually natural selection reverses the fertility decline.
- When rejuvenation therapies become available and humans effectively cease to grow old then governments could enact laws restricting reproduction (e.g. China's One Child policy). The population stops growing and then slowly decreases due to accidents, suicide, murder, and natural disasters.
- Keep having babies but bottle up people in cities with huge high rises. Basically, make much of the world a natural park which people can visit but not live in for extended periods of time. This option won't work if human populations continue to grow indefinitely.
- Keep having babies and also start using rejuvenation therapies. Populations will explode and species extinctions will explode along with the human population growth.. The fraction of the population that is fertile will go up due to rejuvenation therapies. Women over the age 100 will make babies.
My guess is that the fourth option is the most likely. The instinct to reproduce is incredibly strong (even as many intellectuals erroneously claim we've somehow escaped our instincts). Also, the development of rejuvenation therapies seems inevitable barring a catastrophe that wipes out the human race.How can the fourth option be prevented? Maybe people will migrate to online virtual reality living and raise AI children. I doubt it. Maybe a Borg consciousness AI will take over a world government and control human behavior. For example, a massive AI (or a secret cabal of scientists and industrialists) could design viruses that infect the entire human race and reprogram their brains to dampen down desires to reproduce.