planetwater

Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months.

Maybe biofuels aren’t as great as politicians would like us believe…

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On thursday Jakob von Uexküll was awarded the Georg Fromm Preis 2008. The ceremonies, including a speech given by Uexküll took place in Stuttgart, and I had the opportunity to take part. Last year the price was awarded to Eugen Drewermann and Konstantin Wecker, which was very inspiring, so I was looking forward to the ceremony this year. You will hopefully see after you’re done reading that there is a link to planetwater!

It seems to me that Uexküll did two important things in his life:

• Initiated the World Future Council, an illustrious group of people with the goal to leave the planet earth at least in a state comparable to the state they found the planet in.
• Initiated the “Right Livelihood Foundation” who awards the “Right Livelihood Award”. This award is thought to be not a replacement of the Nobel Price, but an addition. People who advance human kind but can not be awarded a Nobel Price, because they work for example in not-traditional medicine (because they are member of a first nation), or in a field that is not recognized with a Nobel Price (ecology, f.ex). Uexküll mentioned that it is important to him that now a member of the Nobel family now talks at the award ceremony for the Right Livelihood Award.

Inspiring people:

Uexküll accomplished neither of the two things because of traits he learned at a school or at an university. But he had enough charisma, nuts, stamina, and he could convince enough people of the importance of these two organizations, so that he realized them. This fact alone is fascinating.

He is not a scientist by trait, but he deals a lot with science, recently with the science of global and climate change. Not so much because he is interested in the underlying processes of climate change, but because he sees that things are changing, and lead to a negative impact and hence he is alert and want to change things, so that future generations do not have to suffer because of his actions.

Things Can Change Quickly

Uexküll explained by example how quickly the climate changes. One of the first recipients of the Right Livelihood Award in the early 1980s was a member of a first nation in Australia who described how species that inhabited his homeland changed due to changing climate, and how he experiences that on a daily basis. Uexküll pointed out that back then nobody cared too much about this, and especially nobody really saw the global aspect of this problem. He also gave other examples for how quickly things can change: – It was a matter of a few months only after which the “iron curtain” broke down. Some people couldn’t adapt fast enough, and their leaders were no leaders anymore within a few days. – Environmental Change: There is evidence that icebergs melt way faster than we think.

The issue that anything can move forward into any direction after a certain threshold is exceeded is described in great fascinating detail in a book by Malcom Gladwell entitled “The Tipping Point“.

Society needs to change

The bigger picture is, that society needs to change in order for climate change not to occur in a destructive way. Uexküll has a rather philosophical approach to ideas how society can change. For me as an engineer this seems like a very interesting approach — I would rather look into technologies that can improve things.

According to Uexküll there are two main philosophical and ethical problems. One is that more consumption is not a good strategy: A city in Sweden decided that there should be no advertisement in public transport. And, another major city in the world, Sao Paolo, decided last fall that public advertisement is a form of pollution. For me, this seems dramatic! It goes back to Erich Fromm, his view on the importance on media, and how he described in his view of the 1950s general public in the US, that they take-in media, that any person, with the slightest degree of thought in it, would not be willing to accept. And where are we today… Anyways. The second problem is that there is a major rift between the values that our society still has and the way of life of most of society, especially western society.

Why is the general public not (yet) willing to change things dramatically? There is no more doubt in the scientific community that the climate is changing. How do you get society to change? Scientific proof obviously is not enough. Tradition very obviously is not enough, because in the last few generations so many things changed, and not in an environmentally friendly way. Religion… well, Religion has been a driver for societal change in the past. The Vatican has recently created a new sin, environmental pollution, but is that going to change anything? The Media? Is is a fact that US newspapers publish about 1/3 the amount of European newspapers on environmental issues in the broadest sense. So how is this going to change? How is any media that lives on the number of viewers or papers sold going to change a society towards a better and more environmentally friendly way? Politics? There are some good paths being walked along, some laws implemented in Germany for supporting energy efficiency in houses is one example. There are also bad examples, for example the endless discussion in Germany if we really should shut down atomic energy power plants after we had decided to do so… Markets? This is rather interesting too, and I’m not an economist. My feeling and observation in Germany over the last year or so is, that the less oil there is, the more expensive it gets. At least it seems as if oil is getting scarce… as a geologist I’m sure there’s more places that we could mine for more oil… right now a huge part of Alberta, Canada is being destroyed for that, and it seems as if Alaska is next. Right now the price increase in gas is also not enough yet to change any of my personal habits. And as long as national flights within Germany are cheaper than the railway, why would I use the slower railway?

One problem why change is not occurring is that there need to be real options (“alternatives” sounds in german a bit like tree-huggers). What other options do I have to go skiing than using a car? Not many… Now you might say, skiing might be over in the Alps in a couple of years, because winters will be too warm for snow. So what other option do I have than to drive to my hockey rink? What, do you say, you play hockey, and waste all that energy to make ice? Well, the option right now is that I go swimming and running. Well, maybe this is true, but then my argument is, that our society got so used to skiing, icehockey, associated with a lot of nature-destruction and car-usage, that we can’t stop really quickly… I guess not until we reach the tipping-point.

All speeches from the ceremony can be downloaded (pdfs, in German):

• General introduction by Heinz Glässgen (~37 kB)

• The laudatio by Hans-Peter Dürr (~47 kB)

• The speech for handing over the price by Rainer Funk (~115 kB)

• The Erich-Fromm-Lecture by Jakob von Uexküll (~69 kB)

National Geographic has a pretty cool video showing how the extent of the Columbia Glacier (Alaska) varies between May and September 2007

Here are some more links to planetwater related issues I found in the last little while:

Water and Sky Pollution

Here’s an article written in quite alarming words on high PCB levels in the Rhone River

Years of unchecked pollution in France’s Rhone River have taken their toll with the recent discovery of PCB levels at 10-12 times the safe limit in the river’s fish.

PCB is a well known contaminant in the environment. There are a lot of contaminants transported by water both in the subsurface and in rivers that until very recently have not gotten much attention. That’s why they are sometimes called “emerging contaminants”. Examples for emerging contaminants are medical drugs. Weird has recently published an overview article on that topic. Update 2008-03-18, 3:31pm: Weird also reports that there is some drive to test water more often and more carefully for emerging contaminants.

Like water, the sky is not a sterile environment. Some research indicates that bacteria serve as “nucleators”, little particles that help water to freeze in higher regions of the atmosphere. The frozen water melts as it falls towards the earth’s surface where it then can appear as rain.

Climate Change

This Report, entitled

“Impacts of Climate Change and Variability on Transportation Systems and Infrastructure: Gulf Coast Study”, analyzes how Gulf Coast roads and highways, transit services, oil and gas pipelines, freight handling ports, transcontinental railroad networks, waterway systems, and airports are likely to be harmed by heat waves, extreme precipitation events, sea level rise, increased hurricane intensity, and storm surge damage associated with climate change. The report outlines why changes must be incorporated in transportation planning now in order to avoid serious future problems.

Other Ramblings

According to this post, the first pieces of evidence based on bugs adapting to genetically engineered plants are available demonstrating that genetic evolution faster than technology

It’s not only me that says that computer clusters are the future. More on the initiative of google and IBM is available at the NSF and at google

The thing I like best about “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change” is a quote from Thomas C. Schelling:

… a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable. The contingency we have not considered looks strange; what looks strange is therefore improbable; what seems improbable need not be considered seriously

“The Ages of Consequences” is a report written by people who are or were advising key politicians in the US, or are in key positions at renowned research institutes. Currently, we do live in the “age of consequences” — bad things are happening and are happening very quickly. More quickly than we like to think. So the goal of this report is not to estimate what is with highest probability going to happen, but to look at the full range of things that seem plausible. Knowing this, it is not a surprise that the scenarios in this report are called expected, severe, and catastrophic. I’ve actually never read the apocalypse part of the bible. But what the catastrophic scenario looks like must come fairly close, which is the thing I like least about this report.

The catastrophic scenario, with average global temperatures increasing by 5.6°C by 2100, finds strong and surprising intersections between the two great security threats of the day—global climate change and international terrorism waged by Islamist extremists.

Further interesting points raised in this report include:

• Perhaps the most worrisome problems associated with rising temperatures and sea levels are from large-scale migrations of people —- both inside nations and across existing national borders.

• The term “global climate change” is misleading in that many of the effects will vary dramatically from region to region.

• A few countries may benefit from climate change in the short term, but there will be no “winners.”

• Climate change effects will aggravate existing international crises and problems.

• We lack rigorously tested data or reliable modeling to determine with any sense of certainty the ultimate path and pace of temperature increase or sea level rise associated with climate change in the decades ahead [see the post on measuring things].

Focus on Water

There is a rather interesting section focussing on how climate change effects water resources

As noted in the historical survey in the next section of this report, there is a long record of states dealing with scarcity of water. Given that history, it’s not surprising that much has been written on the subject, including the relationship between access to water and conflict. This body of literature is important, both because water scarcity is predicted to be one consequence of global warming and because it affects our understanding of the climate change debate.

The historical record shows that water scarcity has resulted in both conflict and cooperation. The Environmental Change and Security Program at the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson Center highlighted this dichotomy that environmental challenges such as climate change can threaten or bolster human security. “These factors can contribute to conflict or exacerbate other causes such as poverty, migration, and infectious diseases,” the group stated. “However, managing environmental issues and natural resources can also build confidence and contribute to peace by facilitating cooperation across lines of tension.”

In 1991, Joyce Starr published a landmark article in Foreign Policy titled “Water Wars.” The author warned that water shortages threatened conflict throughout much of North Africa and the Middle East. Many related articles and studies about armed clashes and other conflicts surrounding access to water followed. Peter Gleick’s 2000 chronology, for example, identifies water as a factor in at least 42 violent conflicts that have occurred worldwide since the beginning of the last century. However, Gleick’s chronology includes cases in which adversaries have employed water as a means of attack, such as when they bomb dams or poison wells. Other scholars have identified as few as seven cases of acute, water-related, trans-boundary conflicts—with exchanges of fire occurring in only four of them, including two between Israel and Syria.

There are also “water wars” skeptics. One report claimed that the last time parties fought a military conflict expressly over water could be when the Mesopotamian cities of Lagash and Umma battled each other 4,500 years ago. Noting that governments have signed thousands of international agreements regarding water issues, Sandra Postel and Aaron Wolf wrote that, in the case of water, “the history of cooperation, creativity and ingenuity is infinitely more rich than that of acute conflict.”

Scholars involved with the “Basins at Risk” project at Oregon State University—which studies developments relating to the Nile, Mekong, Euphrates, Amu Darya, Syr Darya, and Ganges—concluded that water scarcity does not increase the likelihood of interstate conflicts. Nevertheless, they maintain that tensions surrounding shared river basins can characterize relations between nations and undermine cooperation in other areas. As a result, governments may be more likely to turn to unilateral development projects, such as dams, that control water flow across international borders. Under favorable conditions, however, dialogue over water can promote cooperation and prevent conflict. For example, discussions between India and Pakistan over the Indus River led to the resumption of talks over other bilateral concerns. In other cases, trans-boundary water agreements and institutions have proven resilient even in the face of conflicts over other issues—as shown by the relationship between Israel and Jordan, the Mekong Committee, and the Indus River Commission.

This absence of a clear link between conflict and water may explain why some analysts are reluctant to systematically link environmental issues to national security more broadly.

Quite frequently this report mentions a phrase I learned from a math prof at Waterloo, whose son wrote this interesting little book: “The tipping point“

Even the US based National Groundwater Association (NGWA) has put a collection of drought related information together. Another piece of evidence that seems to suggest that a) the US-Southwest/Midwest has water problems, and that b) extremes get more and more important.

The US-Southwest is again in the Weired-news. What’s up with those guys? Either there is a real problem, or somebody at Weired is really a Southwesterner… In this latest article, Weird describes how Lake Powell and Lake Mead could run dry really soon. I have been to the Southwest when I was about in grade 10. Still, I looked the locations up in google.earth (click for larger view):

Notice the city of Los Angeles in the very South West of that map. The city of Las Vegas is just to the West of Lake Mead; The yellow line between the two lakes is 300km long.

It is a little while ago when I was in Laughlin, so my memories are a little weak. I do have one vivid memory however: We were driving the whole day through what for me essentially felt like a dessert. Our goal for the day was to reach the back then little town of Laughlin, Nevada, about 150km south of Las Vegas, downstream along the Colorado River. For me this town Laughlin seem to be totally crazy. In the middle of that dessert there were water sprinklers running to water the lush green grass of a golf course. We stayed for really cheap at a fancy hotel, with swimming pool and everything you would expect in say San Francisco. We had dinner, and that was the first moment I saw the Colorado River. A seemingly big, mighty river. Things changed dramatically over night. We had breakfast, and there was no more river. No more. They told us they pump the water out over night for irrigation. That scared me. Now, I’m no expert on the Southwest nor on the water resources there. Putting all my groundwater knowledge that I gained during university, the things I saw back then did not seem right for a dessert. I kind of doubt that water related things (water consumption) improved since then.

Human-generated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is slowly acidifying the ocean, threatening a catastrophic impact on marine life. And just as scientists are starting to grasp the magnitude of the problem, researchers have delivered more bad news: Acid rain is making things worse.

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Bringt es wirklich etwas, fuer fuenf Minuten das Licht auszuschalten, aber den Rest des Jahres nichts fuer die Umwelt zu tun? Ein provokanter Artikel ueber Klimaschutz und Klimasymbolismus.

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Climate Change and Groundwater

On a global scale, water levels are rising. The author of a recent Spiegel article claims that the effects of increasing saltwater intrusion has been neglected so far. Well… the US National Groundwater Association (NGWA) has saltwater intrusion covered since quite a while in their list of “Current and potential impacts of climate change” (part of this document). However, the author continues to mention that guys at Ohio State modelled how far saltwater extends from an ocean’s shore inland. And they found out that saltwater stretches further under continents than one has thought before.

Another point the author makes, one that I completely agree with, is that people don’t see the effects that global climate change has on groundwater resources. And people depend largely on groundwater. The author quotes a number from the USGS, according to which half of the US population derives its drinking water from groundwater

Latest UN Report

The latest UN report regarding Climate Change (and here) is a summary of the three reports that were published earlier this year. This summary will be the basis for discussion at the climate conference in Bali in December. Generally, the pictures painted in this summary-report are fairly dark: inundations, draughts, infectious diseases are all going to increase in magnitude and frequency.