Life Finds a Way, But Needs Our Help

by Carl Safina, UTNE Reader: http://www.utne.com

Carl Safina is a MacArthur fellow, Pew fellow, and Guggenheim fellow, an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University, and president of Blue Ocean Institute. 

His books include among others Song for the Blue Ocean,The View From Lazy Point, and his book about the 2010 Gulf blowout, A Sea in Flames. He is host of "Saving the Ocean," on PBS television. Safina was named an Utne Reader Visionary in 2011. Keep up with him and his work at CarlSafina.org.

I can’t remember who dragged me to see the movie Jurassic Park, but one resonant line in that movie was worth the price of admission, this unforgettable sentence: “Life finds a way.” It popped out at me because it so economically summed up a truth behind all of nature’s stunning diversity and the continuity of the living adventure of Life on Earth.

Australian ecologist Roger Bradbury has recently asserted that coral reefs are doomed, living-dead, “zombie ecosystems” that will inevitably - and soon - utterly collapse under the multiple fatal blows of overfishing, pollution and the ocean acidification and warming resulting from the global buildup of carbon dioxide (see his New York Times op-ed, “A World Without Coral Reefs").

Bradbury says we should give up. Any hope for reefs, he says, is a delusion (Andy Revkin collected a few responses from scientists at his New York Times Dot Earth blog).

Can that really be so? Certainly things die, lineages go extinct - and coral reefs are in a world of hurt. All true.

Also true is the existence of heat-tolerant corals, corals that are regularly exposed to (and routinely survive) the extreme stress of finding themselves out in the tropical air at low tide, and many ocean organisms that live through large swings in pH through tidal cycles.

Yes many coral reefs are degraded. Yes it doesn’t look good. But sometimes living diversity supplies marginal adaptations that suddenly fit perfectly into new conditions.

Someone (not Darwin) called it “survival of the fittest.” That’s what the phrase means; not survival of the strongest but of the ones who find themselves in the right place at the right time as conditions change to suddenly suit them. Look around; it works.

Agreed, it is past due to raise the alarm that coral reefs in many areas have largely collapsed, and that their future looks bleak.

As an anguished lover of reefs and living things generally, and as an ecologist by profession, I cannot picture what it will take for coral reef systems to survive and thrive. But I also cannot picture a world in which no reef corals adapt, persist, and flourish, simply because it’s true: Life finds a way.

To read further, go to: http://www.utne.com/realizing-the-vision/life-finds-way-but-needs-our-help.aspx?newsletter=1&utm_content=07.30.12+Arts+and+Culture&utm_campaign=2012+ENEWS&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email

Can Forest Conservation and Logging be Reconciled?

Hi everyone, here is an alternative view on the issue of logging and conversation. Do you agree or disagree? Comments are most welcome.

by Professor Jerry Vanclay, Dean of Science at Southern Cross University and Douglas Sheil, Director of the Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation at Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation, The Conversation: http://theconversation.edu.au

Logging and conservation (AAP/Greenpeace/Sutton-Hibbert)

Is there a role for logging in ensuring the future of the world’s tropical forests and their rich diversity of plants and animals?

For many this idea is absurd, because timber production achieving conservation goals have long been viewed as incompatible opposites. “Loggers” were tarred as planet plunderers, “greenies” were branded ignorant idealists, while researchers found themselves caught between warring factions with little interest in data from outside their own views and experiences.

Sadly, this myopic and highly polarised view of preservation versus production rarely helps save vulnerable landscapes. Fortunately these views are changing.

Finding outcomes that offer real improvements for conservation gains depend on recognising some myths and acknowledging the dynamic nature of forests. Many people, especially in Australia, generally imagine all “logging” as broad-scale clear-felling. However, timber harvesting takes many forms, and large-scale clear-felling is at one end of a broad spectrum.

In well-managed forests, foresters seek to harvest in an ecologically-appropriate way. Generally, clear-felling is appropriate only in forests that are naturally adapted to major disturbances (such as Australia’s wildfires).

At the other end of the harvesting spectrum, single-tree selection is appropriate in forests that evolved with small-scale disturbance (such as many species-rich where most trees die standing and finally collapse from decay), and where seedlings tolerate heavy shade.

In most tropical forests managed for sustainable timber production, harvesting is selective. Between two and 20 stems are removed from each hectare of forest, once every few decades. When done carefully this leaves over 90% of the trees in place. Thus a logged, rich, tropical forest is still a rich tropical forest and stems regrow to replace those removed.

Many of the technical arguments against timber production in tropical rainforests relate to species loss or to the increased likelihood of forest conversion (i.e. that the forest will then be converted to some other non-forest use).

There is ample evidence from various sites that logged forests lack many of the species - especially the larger animal species - found in more pristine forests. There are also many cases where forests that have been selectively logged for timber have subsequently been converted to pasture, oil palm, or other intensive uses. But, we now realise, the implied cause-and-effect relationships are not necessarily inevitable. Let’s deal with these issues one at a time.


First, how does timber harvest affect the biological value of tropical forests? Our recent study summarised over 100 scientific papers from a range of sites and concluded that 85% to 100% of the forest biodiversity was maintained in forests that have been logged once.

Other studies of forests harvested repeatedly have found similar results. This doesn’t mean that other older observations were wrong - just that they didn’t distinguish the cause of the species declines they observed.

Areas that are accessible for timber harvest are often accessible for hunting, pet-trade collecting, gold panning, and so on. Certainly, new logging roads often provide access into once inaccessible areas, and can exacerbate and facilitate other harmful activities, but whether they are the cause is a matter of semantics.

High levels of hunting can and do occur in strictly protected forests, too - but no-one would argue that that is a valid reason not to have strictly protected forests. In both cases, logged or protected forests, the answer is the same - stronger incentives and controls are required to favour the desired conservation outcome.


The question then is how to provide these incentives and controls. On the ground, control of activities like hunting is often more practical in actively-managed production forest than in national parks starved of staff and resources.

The need to control, and in some cases prohibit, hunting is now a common element of good practice in forest management and is implemented in many concessions (in Sarawak, Congo, and other concessions accredited by the Forest Stewardship Council).

To read further, go to: 

The West in Flames

by William deBuys

Dire fire conditions, like the inferno of heat, turbulence, and fuel that recently turned 346 homes in Colorado Springs to ash, are now common in the West.

A lethal combination of drought, insect plagues, windstorms, and legions of dead, dying, or stressed-out trees constitute what some pundits are calling wildfire’s “perfect storm.”

They are only half right.

This summer's conditions may indeed be perfect for fire in the Southwest and West, but if you think of it as a “storm,” perfect or otherwise - that is, sudden, violent, and temporary - then you don’t understand what’s happening in this country or on this planet.

Look at those 346 burnt homes again, or at the High Park fire that ate 87,284 acres and 259 homes west of Fort Collins, or at the Whitewater Baldy Complex fire in New Mexico that began in mid-May, consumed almost 300,000 acres, and is still smoldering, and what you have is evidence of the new normal in the American West.

For some time, climatologists have been warning us that much of the West is on the verge of downshifting to a new, perilous level of aridity. Droughts like those that shaped the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and the even drier 1950s will soon be “the new climatology” of the region - not passing phenomena but terrifying business-as-usual weather. Western forests already show the effects of this transformation.

If you surf the blogosphere looking for fire information, pretty quickly you’ll notice a dust devil of “facts” blowing back and forth: big fires are four times more common than they used to be; the biggest fires are six-and-a-half times larger than the monster fires of yesteryear; and owing to a warmer climate, fires are erupting earlier in the spring and subsiding later in the fall. Nowadays, the fire season is two and a half months longer than it was 30 years ago.

All of this is hair-raisingly true. Or at least it was, until things got worse. After all, those figures don’t come from this summer’s fire disasters but from a study published in 2006 that compared then-recent fires, including the record-setting blazes of the early 2000s, with what now seem the good old days of 1970 to 1986.

The data-gathering in the report, however, only ran through 2003. Since then, the western drought has intensified, and virtually every one of those recent records - for fire size, damage, and cost of suppression - has since been surpassed.

New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains are a case in point. Over the course of two weeks in 2000, the Cerro Grande fire burned 43,000 acres, destroying 400 homes in the nuclear research city of Los Alamos. At the time, to most of us living in New Mexico, Cerro Grande seemed a vision of the Apocalypse.

Then, the Las Conchas fire erupted in 2011 on land adjacent to Cerro Grande’s scar and gave a master class in what the oxygen planet can do when it really struts its stuff.

The Las Conchas fire burned 43,000 acres, equaling Cerro Grande’s achievement, in its first fourteen hours. Its smoke plume rose to the stratosphere, and if the light was right, you could see within it rose-red columns of fire - combusting gases - flashing like lightning a mile or more above the land. Eventually the Las Conchas fire spread to 156,593 acres, setting a record as New Mexico’s largest fire in historic times.

It was a stunning event. Its heat was so intense that, in some of the canyons it torched, every living plant died, even to the last sprigs of grass on isolated cliff ledges. In one instance, the needles of the ponderosa pines were not consumed, but bent horizontally as though by a ferocious wind.

No-one really knows how those trees died, but one explanation holds that they were flash-blazed by a superheated wind, perhaps a collapsing column of fire, and that the wind, having already burned up its supply of oxygen, welded the trees by heat alone into their final posture of death.

It seemed likely that the Las Conchas record would last years, if not decades. It didn’t. This year the Whitewater Baldy fire in the southwest of the state burned an area almost twice as large.

Half Now, Half Later?

In 2007, Tom Swetnam, a fire expert and director of the laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, gave an interview to CBS’s 60 Minutes. Asked to peer into his crystal ball, he said he thought the Southwest might lose half its existing forests to fire and insects over the several decades to come. He immediately regretted the statement. It wasn’t scientific; he couldn’t back it up; it was a shot from the hip, a WAG, a wild-ass guess.

Swetnam’s subsequent work, however, buttressed that WAG. In 2010, he and several colleagues quantified the loss of southwestern forestland from 1984 to 2008. It was a hefty 18%. They concluded that “only two more recurrences of droughts and die-offs similar or worse than the recent events” might cause total forest loss to exceed 50%.

With the colossal fires of 2011 and 2012, including Arizona’s Wallow fire, which consumed more than half-a-million acres, the region is on track to reach that mark by mid-century, or sooner. But that doesn’t mean we get to keep the other half.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast a temperature increase of 4ºC for the Southwest over the present century. Given a faster than expected build-up of greenhouse gases (and no effective mitigation), that number looks optimistic today.

Estimates vary, but let’s say our progress into the sweltering future is an increase of slightly less than 1ºC so far. That means we still have an awful long way to go. If the fires we’re seeing now are a taste of what the century will bring, imagine what the heat stress of a 4ºC increase will produce.

And these numbers reflect mean temperatures. The ones to worry about are the extremes, the record highs of future heat waves. In the amped-up climate of the future, it is fair to think that the extremes will increase faster than the means.

At some point, every pine, fir, and spruce will be imperiled. If, in 2007, Swetnam was out on a limb, these days it’s likely that the limb has burned off and it’s getting ever easier to imagine the destruction of forests on a region-wide scale, however disturbing that may be.

More than scenery is at stake, more even than the stability of soils, ecosystems, and watersheds: the forests of the western United States account for 20% to 40% of total U.S. carbon sequestration. At some point, as western forests succumb to the ills of climate change, they will become a net releaser of atmospheric carbon, rather than one of the planet’s principle means of storing it.

Contrary to the claims of climate deniers, the prevailing models scientists use to predict change are conservative. They fail to capture many of the feedback loops that are likely to intensify the dynamics of change. The release of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost, an especially gloomy prospect, is one of those feedbacks.

The release of carbon from burning or decaying forests is another. You used to hear scientists say, “If those things happen, the consequences will be severe.” Now they more often skip that “if” and say “when” instead, but we don’t yet have good estimates of what those consequences will be.

Read more: http://www.utne.com/environment/west-in-flames.aspx#ixzz21zDPtLxj

6 Star Mud Brick House Study

Composition: wall with mudbricks (Photo credit: 10b travelling)

by Caleb M Young

A study was conducted earlier this year to help determine the viability and potential costs involved in building a 6 Star mud brick home.

The study, funded by Sustainability Victoria, involved thermal energy assessments of four typical mud brick house designs using the FirstRate 5 house energy rating software. An objective was to determine simple and cost effective ways to take each design up to 6 Stars while maintaining each building's unique character.

All four designs successfully achieved the 6 Star target, however, some proved more difficult than others. In most cases, double glazing was required to the living areas of each home as a minimum, and higher levels of insulation was needed in the ceiling/roof. The more difficult cases benefited greatly from an insulated slab-on-ground or 'waffle pod' slab, and higher performance double glazing incorporating low-e coating and argon gas filled cavities.

One design was able to score an extra 1.2 stars by reducing the length of the northern eave to allow greater solar access in winter. This house was the only one in the study to achieve the 6 Star target without using any double glazing.

The orientation of the house also proved to have a great effect on the energy rating. One of the designs was assessed multiple times, each time facing in a different direction - north, south, east and west. It was found that when oriented in an optimal direction, the house was able to achieve the 6 Star target with no double glazing. When this same house was oriented in a less optimal position, double glazing was needed throughout the whole house in order to reach the target.

Findings also proved that with good orientation, generally the additional cost of building a 6 Star mud brick house was not unreasonable. Just as importantly, this goal could be achieved without compromising on the design features which make mud brick homes so unique.

The study was seen to be a success, as it found that a typical mud brick house could in fact achieve a 6 Star energy rating by employing a range of techniques, despite earlier misconceptions.

The Nillumbik Mudbrick Association (NMA) are intending to publish a hand book which will use the findings of this study to assist mud brick house designers, builders and home owners meet the mandatory 6 Star rating. The hand book is expected to be made available to NMA members later this year.

Green Rate is an experienced building energy consultancy - specialising in BCA Section J reports, 6 Star energy rating, and ESD reports for residential and commercial developments.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Caleb_M_Young
http://EzineArticles.com/?6-Star-Mud-Brick-House-Study&id=7183507

Plastic, Like Diamonds, is Forever: Time to Use Fewer Bags

Bag people. Flickr/Heal the Bay

by Dr Joseph Ting, Clinical Senior Lecturer at University of Queensland, The Conversation: http://theconversation.edu.au

Between 30 million and 50 million plastic bags enter the environment as litter in Australia each year.

These environmentally damaging bags - produced to be used once and then thrown away - are a symbol of our disposable society.

When future generations reflect on our convenience-maximising consumer behaviour, the permanence of disfigured, shredded, flying white flowers (A.K.A. plastic bags) will testify to a discard culture and dispose culture in the name of brief convenience.

Like a globally pervasive cancer, plastic bags everywhere entangle, drown, asphyxiate, and starve animals that mistake their wavy, sun-struck allure for food. Bags adorn trees and fences, becoming the new indestructible urban weed. A colony of bags visible from space (it is 15 million square kilometres!) has accrued in the Pacific, an enormous soup of tiny plastic nodules.

We know the bags do untold damage, but we only act on what costs us directly

Most of us are aware that plastic bags create litter, kill wildlife, clog drains, inflicting wounds on wild and inhabited environs alike.

But unfortunately, awareness of the peril of plastic has not changed behaviour at the check-out; if offered bags at no additional cost or inconvenience, most consumers will, without a second thought, allow their groceries or takeaway to be packed into lightweight 35-micron-thin polyethylene plastic bags that are usually used only once more to line their bins or pick up after their dogs.

When it matters most, the community’s apparent support for reducing plastic bag use is not backed up by altered packing behaviour at the check-out.

Most consumers do not:

• Re-use bags for storage or carriage until they are irreparable;
• Recycle single use bags;
• Bring their own durable reinforced bags;
• Refuse single use bags;
• Ask for biodegradable or compostable bags.

Flickr/Mr T in D.C.

Bear in mind that no human has, or will ever witness the entirety of a discarded non-biodegradable bag’s natural decomposition since it was invented by Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin in the early 1960s and patented in 1965.

We can only surmise that bags will take 50 generations to decompose, with most travelling through, or ending up in, Earth’s three elements: the soil (as landfill), water, and briefly afloat in air.

According to the European Union (EU) Executive, Europe alone produced 3.4 million tonnes of plastic bag carriers - the equivalent in weight of 2 million cars - in 2008. Only 6% of plastic bags were recycled in the EU in 2010.

Plastic bags are extraordinary travellers; I have had occasion to clear plastic litter delivered by trans-Siberian currents to a remote uninhabited Norwegian Arctic beach.

One million plastic bags are used every minute worldwide - plastic is endemic at supermarkets, groceries, liquor stores, pharmacists, newsagents, and retailers.

To read further, go to: http://theconversation.edu.au/plastic-like-diamonds-is-forever-time-to-use-fewer-bags-7736?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest+from+The+Conversation+for+27+July+2012&utm_content=Latest+from+The+Conversation+for+27+July+2012+CID_7cbda7126a807031ed96718a53442578&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=Plastic+like+diamonds+is+forever+time+to+use+fewer+bags

Climate Change and the Soothing Message of Luke-Warmism

by Dr Clive Hamilton, Vice Chancellor's Chair, Centre For Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) at Charles Sturt University, The Conversation: http://theconversation.edu.au

Luke-warm: Bjorn Lomborg. Flickr/McDermott

We are familiar with the tactics, arguments, and personnel of the denial industry.

Yet there is a perhaps more insidious and influential line of argument that is preventing the world from responding to the warnings of climate science.

“Luke-warmists” may be defined as those who appear to accept the body of climate science but interpret it in a way that is least threatening: emphasising uncertainties, playing down dangers, and advocating a slow and cautious response.

They are politically conservative and anxious about the threat to the social structure posed by the implications of climate science.

Their “pragmatic” approach is therefore alluring to political leaders looking for a justification for policy minimalism.

Among the notable US luke-warmists are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute. They have been accused of misrepresenting data on the energy savings of investment in energy efficiency and have criticized almost every proposed measure to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Their Institute has allied itself with anti-climate science organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute.

Another prominent luke-warmist is Roger Pielke Jr, a scientist who was bracketed by Foreign Policy journal with well-known deniers such as Richard Lindzen and Christopher Monckton in its guide to climate sceptics.

Daniel Sarewitz has a track record of attacking climate science, accusing it of mixing politics and values with factual analysis. In the UK, Mike Hulme, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, has branched out with a peculiar and incoherent argument about science being based on values and ideology.

The effect of luke-warmers’ contributions has been to sow doubt in the public mind about the credibility of the scientific warnings and the need to respond, just as Exxon-funded think tanks have.

Perhaps the pre-eminent luke-warmist is the Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg, who gained notoriety because his claim to be an environmentalist who had seen the light made him a poster boy of the conservative media (that he was young, gay and Scandinavian only added to his value as a defector).

Nowadays, Lomborg does not reject the principal conclusions of climate science but works assiduously to water down their implications and to boost “sensible” and cautious economic solutions that would allow continued exploitation of fossil fuels. In short he favours adapting to any change in the climate rather than trying to prevent it.

Although more high-brow and nuanced than literal deniers, the lines of argument of luke-warmists are remarkably similar. In 2010 several leading luke-warmists - including Nordhaus, Schellenberger, Pielke, Sarewitz, Hulme, and Oxford University anthropologist Steve Rayner - came together at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, UK, to write a paper advocating a “new direction for climate policy”.

The Hartwell paper claims to present a “radical” alternative to the failed UN process, although why the authors felt it necessary to describe a slow, cautious and conservative approach to climate policy as “radical” is a puzzle.

The paper begins by repeating allegations that the “Climategate” emails suggest that climate scientists cannot be trusted. The authors drew this conclusion before the string of official inquiries that vindicated the science and exonerated the scientists. Others, noting the emails had been selectively released just before the Copenhagen conference, smelt a rat and reserved judgement.

The Hartwell authors seem to have fallen for the Climategate spin because they wanted it to be true. They were also taken in by the campaign in the Murdoch press to undermine the IPCC by accepting uncritically alleged errors in its reports.

Errors in IPCC reports, they opined, are proof of the need to “restore trust in expert organizations” even though none of the claimed errors, manufactured by deniers in all but one case, dented the body of knowledge.

Following the deniers’ lead, the Hartwell authors emphasize the “inherent unknowability” and “systematic doubt” in the body of scientific knowledge. They express misgivings about the desirability of investments in renewable energy, referring to their “chilling history” and “serious financial and social consequences”, a theme pursued by the Breakthrough Institute and more recently taken up by Tea Party Republicans.

To read further, go to: http://theconversation.edu.au/climate-change-and-the-soothing-message-of-luke-warmism-8445?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest+from+The+Conversation+for+26+July+2012&utm_content=Latest+from+The+Conversation+for+26+July+2012+CID_7f11ae0d96d8ab772acaecfaef186107&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=Climate+change+and+the+soothing+message+of+luke-warmism

Why the Carbon-Tax ‘Python’ Won’t Squeeze the Economy

This carbon cycle diagram shows the storage and annual exchange of carbon between the atmosphere, hydrosphere and geosphere in gigatons - or billions of tons - of Carbon (GtC). Burning fossil fuels by people adds about 5.5 GtC of carbon per year into the atmosphere. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Alan Pears, Senior Lecturer, Global Studies, Social Science & Planning at RMIT University, The Conversation: http://theconversation.edu.au

Some critics of carbon pricing have pointed out that, over time, the carbon price will increase to a much higher level and devastate the economy.

Indeed, the image of a python squeezing the life out of the economy has been painted to describe this.

However, this view is based on a misunderstanding of how carbon pricing works, and confusion over the difference between the price per unit of carbon and the overall impact on household and business costs.

Most analysts expect the carbon price to increase over time as the “low hanging fruit” of abatement options is captured and we have to adopt more expensive ways (such as carbon capture and storage and costly forms of renewable energy) to make deeper emission cuts. By 2050, many estimates indicate the price might exceed $150 per tonne.

However, at the same time, the greenhouse intensity of energy, goods, and services will decline as businesses and households act to cut their emissions. This will reduce the impact of a higher carbon price per tonne on total carbon costs experienced by consumers.

For example, Treasury expects the greenhouse intensity of Australian electricity to fall by over three-quarters by 2050, as renewable energy and gas replaces coal fired power. On top of this, we will be more energy efficient, so we will use less electricity to deliver each service such as lighting, comfort, refrigeration, and so on.

Emissions down, efficiency up: carbon price will be offset

So if the greenhouse intensity (emissions per kilowatt-hour) of electricity falls by three-quarters, and we use, say, 30% less electricity per unit of service by becoming more energy efficient, the carbon price could increase to almost six times today’s price while having no more impact on a consumer’s overall electricity costs than today’s carbon price.

To read further, go to: http://theconversation.edu.au/why-the-carbon-tax-python-wont-squeeze-the-economy-8375?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest+from+The+Conversation+for+25+July+2012&utm_content=Latest+from+The+Conversation+for+25+July+2012+CID_b49002df34cf748462671bfce46b6c91&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=Why+the+carbon-tax+python+wont+squeeze+the+economy

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math: Three Simple Numbers That Add Up to Global Catastrophe - and That Make Clear who the Real Enemy Is

Illustration by Edel Rodriguez

Hi Readers,

This is a long article so be prepared - grab a drink and bunker down because this is a crucial argument and one that is worth reading. Comments are more than welcome - let's thrash this one out.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

by Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone:
http://www.rollingstone.com

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States.

That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere - the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation - in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any season on record."

The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world's nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend.

It was "a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no-one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by multitudes."

Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly - losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math.

For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public.

This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious - our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless - position with three simple numbers.

The First Number: 2° Celsius

If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate. The world's nations had gathered in the December gloom of the Danish capital for what a leading climate economist, Sir Nicholas Stern of Britain, called the "most important gathering since the Second World War, given what is at stake."

As Danish energy minister Connie Hedegaard, who presided over the conference, declared at the time: "This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we get a new and better one. If ever."

In the event, of course, we missed it. Copenhagen failed spectacularly. Neither China nor the United States, which between them are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, was prepared to offer dramatic concessions, and so the conference drifted aimlessly for two weeks until world leaders jetted in for the final day.

Amid considerable chaos, President Obama took the lead in drafting a face-saving "Copenhagen Accord" that fooled very few. Its purely voluntary agreements committed no-one to anything, and even if countries signaled their intentions to cut carbon emissions, there was no enforcement mechanism.

"Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight," an angry Greenpeace official declared, "with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport." Headline writers were equally brutal: COPENHAGEN: THE MUNICH OF OUR TIMES? asked one.

The accord did contain one important number, however. In Paragraph 1, it formally recognized "the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius." And in the very next paragraph, it declared that "we agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required ... so as to hold the increase in global temperature below two degrees Celsius."

By insisting on two degrees - about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit - the accord ratified positions taken earlier in 2009 by the G8, and the so-called Major Economies Forum. It was as conventional as conventional wisdom gets.

The number first gained prominence, in fact, at a 1995 climate conference chaired by Angela Merkel, then the German minister of the environment and now the center-right chancellor of the nation.

Some context: So far, we've raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected (a third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods).

Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target. "Any number much above one degree involves a gamble," writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, "and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up."

Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank's chief biodiversity adviser, puts it like this: "If we're seeing what we're seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much." NASA scientist James Hansen, the planet's most prominent climatologist, is even blunter: "The target that has been talked about in international negotiations for two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster."

At the Copenhagen summit, a spokesman for small island nations warned that many would not survive a two-degree rise: "Some countries will flat-out disappear." When delegates from developing nations were warned that two degrees would represent a "suicide pact" for drought-stricken Africa, many of them started chanting, "One degree, one Africa."

Despite such well-founded misgivings, political realism bested scientific data, and the world settled on the two-degree target - indeed, it's fair to say that it's the only thing about climate change the world has settled on.

All told, 167 countries responsible for more than 87 percent of the world's carbon emissions have signed on to the Copenhagen Accord, endorsing the two-degree target. Only a few dozen countries have rejected it, including Kuwait, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Even the United Arab Emirates, which makes most of its money exporting oil and gas, signed on.

The official position of planet Earth at the moment is that we can't raise the temperature more than two degrees Celsius - it's become the bottomest of bottom lines. Two degrees.

The Second Number: 565 Gigatons

Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees ("reasonable," in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter).

This idea of a global "carbon budget" emerged about a decade ago, as scientists began to calculate how much oil, coal and gas could still safely be burned. Since we've increased the Earth's temperature by 0.8 degrees so far, we're currently less than halfway to the target.

But, in fact, computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO₂ now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere. That means we're already three-quarters of the way to the two-degree target.

How good are these numbers? No-one is insisting that they're exact, but few dispute that they're generally right. The 565-gigaton figure was derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the past few decades. And the number is being further confirmed by the latest climate-simulation models currently being finalized in advance of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Looking at them as they come in, they hardly differ at all," says Tom Wigley, an Australian climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "There's maybe 40 models in the data set now, compared with 20 before. But so far the numbers are pretty much the same. We're just fine-tuning things. I don't think much has changed over the last decade."

William Collins, a senior climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, agrees. "I think the results of this round of simulations will be quite similar," he says. "We're not getting any free lunch from additional understanding of the climate system."

We're not getting any free lunch from the world's economies, either. With only a single year's lull in 2009 at the height of the financial crisis, we've continued to pour record amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, year after year.

In late May, the International Energy Agency published its latest figures - CO₂ emissions last year rose to 31.6 gigatons, up 3.2 percent from the year before.

America had a warm winter and converted more coal-fired power plants to natural gas, so its emissions fell slightly; China kept booming, so its carbon output (which recently surpassed the U.S.) rose 9.3 percent; the Japanese shut down their fleet of nukes post-Fukushima, so their emissions edged up 2.4 percent.

"There have been efforts to use more renewable energy and improve energy efficiency," said Corinne Le Quéré, who runs England's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. "But what this shows is that so far the effects have been marginal."

In fact, study after study predicts that carbon emissions will keep growing by roughly three percent a year - and at that rate, we'll blow through our 565-gigaton allowance in 16 years, around the time today's preschoolers will be graduating from high school.

"The new data provide further evidence that the door to a two-degree trajectory is about to close," said Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist. In fact, he continued, "When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of about six degrees." That's almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of science fiction.

So, new data in hand, everyone at the Rio conference renewed their ritual calls for serious international action to move us back to a two-degree trajectory. The charade will continue in November, when the next Conference of the Parties (COP) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change convenes in Qatar.

This will be COP 18 – COP 1 was held in Berlin in 1995, and since then the process has accomplished essentially nothing. Even scientists, who are notoriously reluctant to speak out, are slowly overcoming their natural preference to simply provide data.

"The message has been consistent for close to 30 years now," Collins says with a wry laugh, "and we have the instrumentation and the computer power required to present the evidence in detail. If we choose to continue on our present course of action, it should be done with a full evaluation of the evidence the scientific community has presented." He pauses, suddenly conscious of being on the record. "I should say, a fuller evaluation of the evidence."

So far, though, such calls have had little effect. We're in the same position we've been in for a quarter-century: scientific warning followed by political inaction. Among scientists speaking off the record, disgusted candor is the rule.

One senior scientist told me, "You know those new cigarette packs, where governments make them put a picture of someone with a hole in their throats? Gas pumps should have something like that." 

The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons

This number is the scariest of all - one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a team of London financial analysts and environmentalists who published a report in an effort to educate investors about the possible risks that climate change poses to their stock portfolios.

The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it's the fossil fuel we're currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number - 2,795 - is higher than 565. Five times higher.

The Carbon Tracker Initiative - led by James Leaton, an environmentalist who served as an adviser at the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers - combed through proprietary databases to figure out how much oil, gas and coal the world's major energy companies hold in reserve.

The numbers aren't perfect - they don't fully reflect the recent surge in unconventional energy sources like shale gas, and they don't accurately reflect coal reserves, which are subject to less stringent reporting requirements than oil and gas.

But for the biggest companies, the figures are quite exact: If you burned everything in the inventories of Russia's Lukoil and America's ExxonMobil, for instance, which lead the list of oil and gas companies, each would release more than 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Which is exactly why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit - equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit - the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it's already economically above ground - it's figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony.

It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide - those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It's why they've worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada's tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.

If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet.

John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today's market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in assets.

The numbers aren't exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won't necessarily burst - we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet -– but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can't have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That's how the story ends.

So far, as I said at the start, environmental efforts to tackle global warming have failed. The planet's emissions of carbon dioxide continue to soar, especially as developing countries emulate (and supplant) the industries of the West.

Even in rich countries, small reductions in emissions offer no sign of the real break with the status quo we'd need to upend the iron logic of these three numbers.

Germany is one of the only big countries that has actually tried hard to change its energy mix; on one sunny Saturday in late May, that northern-latitude nation generated nearly half its power from solar panels within its borders. That's a small miracle - and it demonstrates that we have the technology to solve our problems. But we lack the will. So far, Germany's the exception; the rule is ever more carbon.

This record of failure means we know a lot about what strategies don't work. Green groups, for instance, have spent a lot of time trying to change individual lifestyles: the iconic twisty light bulb has been installed by the millions, but so have a new generation of energy-sucking flatscreen TVs.

Most of us are fundamentally ambivalent about going green: We like cheap flights to warm places, and we're certainly not going to give them up if everyone else is still taking them. Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself - it's as if the gay-rights movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition movement from slaveholders.

People perceive - correctly - that their individual actions will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric concentration of CO2; by 2010, a poll found that "while recycling is widespread in America and 73 percent of those polled are paying bills online in order to save paper," only four percent had reduced their utility use and only three percent had purchased hybrid cars.

Given a hundred years, you could conceivably change lifestyles enough to matter - but time is precisely what we lack.

A more efficient method, of course, would be to work through the political system, and environmentalists have tried that, too, with the same limited success. They've patiently lobbied leaders, trying to convince them of our peril and assuming that politicians would heed the warnings.

Sometimes it has seemed to work. Barack Obama, for instance, campaigned more aggressively about climate change than any president before him - the night he won the nomination, he told supporters that his election would mark the moment "the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal."

And he has achieved one significant change: a steady increase in the fuel efficiency mandated for automobiles. It's the kind of measure, adopted a quarter-century ago, that would have helped enormously. But in light of the numbers I've just described, it's obviously a very small start indeed.

At this point, effective action would require actually keeping most of the carbon the fossil-fuel industry wants to burn safely in the soil, not just changing slightly the speed at which it's burned. And there the president, apparently haunted by the still-echoing cry of "Drill, baby, drill," has gone out of his way to frack and mine.

His secretary of interior, for instance, opened up a huge swath of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming for coal extraction: The total basin contains some 67.5 gigatons worth of carbon (or more than 10 percent of the available atmospheric space). He's doing the same thing with Arctic and offshore drilling; in fact, as he explained on the stump in March, "You have my word that we will keep drilling everywhere we can ... that's a commitment that I make."

The next day, in a yard full of oil pipe in Cushing, Oklahoma, the president promised to work on wind and solar energy but, at the same time, to speed up fossil-fuel development: "Producing more oil and gas here at home has been, and will continue to be, a critical part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy." That is, he's committed to finding even more stock to add to the 2,795-gigaton inventory of unburned carbon.

Sometimes the irony is almost Borat-scale obvious: In early June, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled on a Norwegian research trawler to see firsthand the growing damage from climate change. "Many of the predictions about warming in the Arctic are being surpassed by the actual data," she said, describing the sight as "sobering."

But the discussions she traveled to Scandinavia to have with other foreign ministers were mostly about how to make sure Western nations get their share of the estimated $9 trillion in oil (that's more than 90 billion barrels, or 37 gigatons of carbon) that will become accessible as the Arctic ice melts. Last month, the Obama administration indicated that it would give Shell permission to start drilling in sections of the Arctic.

Almost every government with deposits of hydrocarbons straddles the same divide. Canada, for instance, is a liberal democracy renowned for its internationalism - no wonder, then, that it signed on to the Kyoto treaty, promising to cut its carbon emissions substantially by 2012.

But the rising price of oil suddenly made the tar sands of Alberta economically attractive - and since, as NASA climatologist James Hansen pointed out in May, they contain as much as 240 gigatons of carbon (or almost half of the available space if we take the 565 limit seriously), that meant Canada's commitment to Kyoto was nonsense. In December, the Canadian government withdrew from the treaty before it faced fines for failing to meet its commitments.

The same kind of hypocrisy applies across the ideological board: In his speech to the Copenhagen conference, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez quoted Rosa Luxemburg, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and "Christ the Redeemer," insisting that "climate change is undoubtedly the most devastating environmental problem of this century."

But the next spring, in the Simon Bolivar Hall of the state-run oil company, he signed an agreement with a consortium of international players to develop the vast Orinoco tar sands as "the most significant engine for a comprehensive development of the entire territory and Venezuelan population." The Orinoco deposits are larger than Alberta's - taken together, they'd fill up the whole available atmospheric space.

So, the paths we have tried to tackle global warming have so far produced only gradual, halting shifts. A rapid, transformative change would require building a movement, and movements require enemies. As John F. Kennedy put it, "The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln." And enemies are what climate change has lacked.


But what all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy - one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.

"Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business - pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops - and we pressure them to change those practices," says veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate crisis. "But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It's what they do."

According to the Carbon Tracker report, if Exxon burns its current reserves, it would use up more than seven percent of the available atmospheric space between us and the risk of two degrees. BP is just behind, followed by the Russian firm Gazprom, then Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell, each of which would fill between three and four percent. Taken together, just these six firms, of the 200 listed in the Carbon Tracker report, would use up more than a quarter of the remaining two-degree budget.

Severstal, the Russian mining giant, leads the list of coal companies, followed by firms like BHP Billiton and Peabody. The numbers are simply staggering - this industry, and this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they're planning to use it.

They're clearly cognizant of global warming - they employ some of the world's best scientists, after all, and they're bidding on all those oil leases made possible by the staggering melt of Arctic ice. And yet they relentlessly search for more hydrocarbons - in early March, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson told Wall Street analysts that the company plans to spend $37 billion a year through 2016 (about $100 million a day) searching for yet more oil and gas.

There's not a more reckless man on the planet than Tillerson. Late last month, on the same day the Colorado fires reached their height, he told a New York audience that global warming is real, but dismissed it as an "engineering problem" that has "engineering solutions." Such as? "Changes to weather patterns that move crop-production areas around - we'll adapt to that."

This in a week when Kentucky farmers were reporting that corn kernels were "aborting" in record heat, threatening a spike in global food prices. "The fear factor that people want to throw out there to say, 'We just have to stop this,' I do not accept," Tillerson said. Of course not - if he did accept it, he'd have to keep his reserves in the ground. Which would cost him money. It's not an engineering problem, in other words - it's a greed problem.

You could argue that this is simply in the nature of these companies - that having found a profitable vein, they're compelled to keep mining it, more like efficient automatons than people with free will.

But as the Supreme Court has made clear, they are people of a sort. In fact, thanks to the size of its bankroll, the fossil-fuel industry has far more free will than the rest of us. These companies don't simply exist in a world whose hungers they fulfill - they help create the boundaries of that world.

Left to our own devices, citizens might decide to regulate carbon and stop short of the brink; according to a recent poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans would back an international agreement that cut carbon emissions 90 percent by 2050. But we aren't left to our own devices.

The Koch brothers, for instance, have a combined wealth of $50 billion, meaning they trail only Bill Gates on the list of richest Americans. They've made most of their money in hydrocarbons, they know any system to regulate carbon would cut those profits, and they reportedly plan to lavish as much as $200 million on this year's elections.

In 2009, for the first time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce surpassed both the Republican and Democratic National Committees on political spending; the following year, more than 90 percent of the Chamber's cash went to GOP candidates, many of whom deny the existence of global warming.

Not long ago, the Chamber even filed a brief with the EPA urging the agency not to regulate carbon - should the world's scientists turn out to be right and the planet heats up, the Chamber advised, "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations." As radical goes, demanding that we change our physiology seems right up there.

Environmentalists, understandably, have been loath to make the fossil-fuel industry their enemy, respecting its political power and hoping instead to convince these giants that they should turn away from coal, oil and gas and transform themselves more broadly into "energy companies."

Sometimes that strategy appeared to be working - emphasis on appeared. Around the turn of the century, for instance, BP made a brief attempt to restyle itself as "Beyond Petroleum," adapting a logo that looked like the sun and sticking solar panels on some of its gas stations.

But its investments in alternative energy were never more than a tiny fraction of its budget for hydrocarbon exploration, and after a few years, many of those were wound down as new CEOs insisted on returning to the company's "core business."

In December, BP finally closed its solar division. Shell shut down its solar and wind efforts in 2009. The five biggest oil companies have made more than $1 trillion in profits since the millennium - there's simply too much money to be made on oil and gas and coal to go chasing after zephyrs and sunbeams.

Much of that profit stems from a single historical accident: Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free. Nobody else gets that break – if you own a restaurant, you have to pay someone to cart away your trash, since piling it in the street would breed rats.

But the fossil-fuel industry is different, and for sound historical reasons: Until a quarter-century ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was dangerous. But now that we understand that carbon is heating the planet and acidifying the oceans, its price becomes the central issue.

If you put a price on carbon, through a direct tax or other methods, it would enlist markets in the fight against global warming. Once Exxon has to pay for the damage its carbon is doing to the atmosphere, the price of its products would rise. Consumers would get a strong signal to use less fossil fuel - every time they stopped at the pump, they'd be reminded that you don't need a semimilitary vehicle to go to the grocery store.

The economic playing field would now be a level one for nonpolluting energy sources. And you could do it all without bankrupting citizens - a so-called "fee-and-dividend" scheme would put a hefty tax on coal and gas and oil, then simply divide up the proceeds, sending everyone in the country a check each month for their share of the added costs of carbon. By switching to cleaner energy sources, most people would actually come out ahead.

There's only one problem: Putting a price on carbon would reduce the profitability of the fossil-fuel industry. After all, the answer to the question "How high should the price of carbon be?" is "High enough to keep those carbon reserves that would take us past two degrees safely in the ground." The higher the price on carbon, the more of those reserves would be worthless.

The fight, in the end, is about whether the industry will succeed in its fight to keep its special pollution break alive past the point of climate catastrophe, or whether, in the economists' parlance, we'll make them internalize those externalities.

It's not clear, of course, that the power of the fossil-fuel industry can be broken. The U.K. analysts who wrote the Carbon Tracker report and drew attention to these numbers had a relatively modest goal - they simply wanted to remind investors that climate change poses a very real risk to the stock prices of energy companies.

Say something so big finally happens (a giant hurricane swamps Manhattan, a megadrought wipes out Midwest agriculture) that even the political power of the industry is inadequate to restrain legislators, who manage to regulate carbon. Suddenly those Chevron reserves would be a lot less valuable, and the stock would tank. Given that risk, the Carbon Tracker report warned investors to lessen their exposure, hedge it with some big plays in alternative energy.

"The regular process of economic evolution is that businesses are left with stranded assets all the time," says Nick Robins, who runs HSBC's Climate Change Centre. "Think of film cameras, or typewriters. The question is not whether this will happen. It will. Pension systems have been hit by the dot-com and credit crunch. They'll be hit by this."

Still, it hasn't been easy to convince investors, who have shared in the oil industry's record profits. "The reason you get bubbles," sighs Leaton, "is that everyone thinks they're the best analyst - that they'll go to the edge of the cliff and then jump back when everyone else goes over."

So pure self-interest probably won't spark a transformative challenge to fossil fuel. But moral outrage just might - and that's the real meaning of this new math. It could, plausibly, give rise to a real movement.

Once, in recent corporate history, anger forced an industry to make basic changes. That was the campaign in the 1980s demanding divestment from companies doing business in South Africa.

It rose first on college campuses and then spread to municipal and state governments; 155 campuses eventually divested, and by the end of the decade, more than 80 cities, 25 states and 19 counties had taken some form of binding economic action against companies connected to the apartheid regime.

"The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century," as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, "but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure," especially from "the divestment movement of the 1980s."

The fossil-fuel industry is obviously a tougher opponent, and even if you could force the hand of particular companies, you'd still have to figure out a strategy for dealing with all the sovereign nations that, in effect, act as fossil-fuel companies.

But the link for college students is even more obvious in this case. If their college's endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won't have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree (the same logic applies to the world's largest investors, pension funds, which are also theoretically interested in the future - that's when their members will "enjoy their retirement").

"Given the severity of the climate crisis, a comparable demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying the planet would not only be appropriate but effective," says Bob Massie, a former anti-apartheid activist who helped found the Investor Network on Climate Risk. "The message is simple: We have had enough. We must sever the ties with those who profit from climate change - now."

Movements rarely have predictable outcomes. But any campaign that weakens the fossil-fuel industry's political standing clearly increases the chances of retiring its special breaks.

Consider President Obama's signal achievement in the climate fight, the large increase he won in mileage requirements for cars. Scientists, environmentalists and engineers had advocated such policies for decades, but until Detroit came under severe financial pressure, it was politically powerful enough to fend them off.

If people come to understand the cold, mathematical truth - that the fossil-fuel industry is systematically undermining the planet's physical systems - it might weaken it enough to matter politically. Exxon and their ilk might drop their opposition to a fee-and-dividend solution; they might even decide to become true energy companies, this time for real.

Even if such a campaign is possible, however, we may have waited too long to start it. To make a real difference - to keep us under a temperature increase of two degrees - you'd need to change carbon pricing in Washington, and then use that victory to leverage similar shifts around the world.

At this point, what happens in the U.S. is most important for how it will influence China and India, where emissions are growing fastest (in early June, researchers concluded that China has probably under-reported its emissions by up to 20 percent).

The three numbers I've described are daunting - they may define an essentially impossible future. But at least they provide intellectual clarity about the greatest challenge humans have ever faced. We know how much we can burn, and we know who's planning to burn more.

Climate change operates on a geological scale and time frame, but it's not an impersonal force of nature; the more carefully you do the math, the more thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a moral issue; we have met the enemy and they is Shell.

Meanwhile the tide of numbers continues. The week after the Rio conference limped to its conclusion, Arctic sea ice hit the lowest level ever recorded for that date. Last month, on a single weekend, Tropical Storm Debby dumped more than 20 inches of rain on Florida - the earliest the season's fourth-named cyclone has ever arrived.

At the same time, the largest fire in New Mexico history burned on, and the most destructive fire in Colorado's annals claimed 346 homes in Colorado Springs - breaking a record set the week before in Fort Collins.

This month, scientists issued a new study concluding that global warming has dramatically increased the likelihood of severe heat and drought - days after a heat wave across the Plains and Midwest broke records that had stood since the Dust Bowl, threatening this year's harvest.

You want a big number? In the course of this month, a quadrillion kernels of corn need to pollinate across the grain belt, something they can't do if temperatures remain off the charts. Just like us, our crops are adapted to the Holocene, the 11,000-year period of climatic stability we're now leaving ... in the dust.

This story is from the August 2nd, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.

Millions of Unknown Species Likely in Danger of Extinction

Cone Snail (Flickr/Phil Camill)

by Justin Norrie, Editor, The Conversation: http://theconversation.edu.au

The planet is home to anywhere between two million and 50 million undiscovered species, many of which are at threat from rampant habitat destruction, according to a report by an international team of researchers.

Bill Laurance, Distinguished Research Professor of Marine and Tropical Biology at James Cook University and co-author of the report, said that although species for some groups of living things - such as plants and birds - are well-known, “it is almost impossible to guess how many unknown of species of insects and fungi there are.”

Biologists are thought to have catalogued about 97% of species for mammals, between 80% and 90% for flowering plants, 79% for fish, 67% for amphibians, about 30% for arthropods and less than 4% for nematodes, the authors say in their report, published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

They say unknown species could be crucial for developing new pharmaceuticals and products, providing disease-resistant germplasm for crops, and yielding insights into the way nature functions.

Venom from the Magician’s Cone, a type of cone snail which is especially abundant on the Great Barrier Reef, can be used to develop a pain reliever 1,000 times more powerful than morphine, whereas compounds from other Conus species are being used to treat many neurological diseases.

“Many species of these snails are newly discovered and many more await discovery,” Professor Laurance said. A conference last week heard that the Great Barrier Reef, like other vast coral systems of the world, is at threat from local pollution, overfishing, rising temperatures and ocean acidification.

“We simply can’t afford to lose these species because of neglect and short-sided economic gains,” Professor Laurance said.

To read further, go to: http://theconversation.edu.au/millions-of-unknown-species-likely-in-danger-of-extinction-8356?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest+from+The+Conversation+for+23+July+2012&utm_content=Latest+from+The+Conversation+for+23+July+2012+CID_ff7c1e98d0ded8abffc9c64ef439c50d&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=Millions+of+unknown+species+likely+in+danger+of+extinction

Further Clampdown on Illegal Logging in the Philippines

Logging Operations in the Philippines (Photo credit: A. Davey)

By Ian R Harlock

The last week has seen the authorities place further focus on the importance of clamping down on the illegal logging activities, suggested to be taking place in the Caraga region of the Philippines.

Following the confiscation of 16 million cut logs in Butuan City earlier this month, Department of Interior and Local Government Secretary (DILG), Jesse Robredo, has again reinforced the government's determination to stamp out illegal activity in the region which has had such a significant impact on the sustainable development of genuine logging activities in the country.

Though the logs in question were thought to be owned by Roger Edma, this was denied by the businessman and no charges were brought. In his statement, Robredo confirmed that the DILG had no power to bring a case against Edma and it was discovered that the logs had in fact passed through five Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) checkpoints during transportation, without issue. This was in direct violation of the blanket log ban that is currently in effect on all commercial logs throughout the country.

As a result of this discovery, "show cause orders" have been issued against a number of key personnel inside the DENR as well as the Mayors of Agusan del Sur and Agusan del Norte for their apparent disregard of the activity being undertaken. But the ties between illegal logging and corruption seem to be as strong as ever.

Robredo went on to confirm that the government had been working with national security forces including the Philippine National Police to eliminate illegal activity and enforce existing forestry laws. However, the authorities still seem to be having significant difficulties in curtailing the problem.

In fact, the issues are becoming so engrained that even those reporting on the corruption within the region are now facing death threats for exposing the problems, and national reporters fear for their safety in the Caraga and Northern Mindanao area after recent headline stories were released relating to the Edma case.

As the pressure for further reduction of emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) are put on the country, it is more important than ever for the Philippines to be able to effectively control the logging processes in the country and eradicate unlawful logging that invalidates the efforts being made to conform with national and international expectations.

Though historically those identified as being involved in such activity in the region have been arrested and charged whenever possible, the recent reports stating that corruption within the government and the police force remains a major factor shows that the problem is still very much present.

While in his statement Robredo confirmed that he intends to use a 'one strike' policy when it comes to any government official or member of the police who has any involvement in such activity and would be personally recommending to President Benigno Aquino III that all participating individuals be instantly dismissed from duty, the progress required to get the Philippines logging industry on track still has a long way to go.

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Argentina's Iguazu National Park

by Julie R Butler, Expat Daily News Latin America: http://www.expatdailynewslatinamerica.com

Located at the edge of the farthest reaches of northeastern Argentina, they are called Cataratas do Iguaçu in Portuguese, Cataratas del Iguazú in Spanish, and Iguazu Falls in English. In the indigenous Tupí-Guaraní language, the name Yguasu means “big water.” 

Whatever you call them, they are magnificent, worthy of being named one of the “New Seven Wonders of Nature” on 11/11/2011 as well as being a double UNESCO World Heritage Site, due to the existence of the two national parks on the Brazilian and the Argentinean sides of the river.

The Iguazu River begins far to the east of the falls, near the city of Curitiba on the western slope of the coastal mountains called Serra do Mar. It makes its way over 800 miles through dense semitropical forest across the basalt plateau that was formed by a lava flow, over the edge of which the falls cascade so dramatically.

Rather than spanning straight across the river, this ledge stretches for 1.4 miles, bending and curving across a river that, helped by the numerous islands just above the drop-off, spreads itself out in a wide bend, providing for many waterfalls and cascades, all to spectacular effect.

Devil’s Throat, so-named because it is in the form of a narrow chasm that channels an astounding half of the river’s flow, is the highlight for anyone who comes to experience this wonder of the natural world. 

Visitors to Argentina’s Iguazu National Park can ride the tourist train to the farthest station and then follow the catwalk that crosses the placid upper waters from island to island to reach the viewing platform at the very edge of the chasm. As one draws near, the sight of spray rising in a beckoning fog quickens the heart with anticipation. 

Upon arrival, the initial up-close encounter with the power of so much water plummeting at the chokepoint is, indeed, breathtaking. Not only is the cascading water mesmerizing, but the misty spray, the tenacity of the tufts of green clinging to life on the precipices, and grandeur of it all cause the visitor to linger, basking in the amazing energy of this inimitable setting.

The other train stop, named the “Catarata Station,” is the access point for viewing more of the falls via two walking circuits: the Upper Trail and the Lower Trail. If time or ailing knees are a concern, the upper path is the one to go with. 

It offers many views of the long line of cascades from the tops of waterfalls such as Adam and Eve that reveal its vast scope - complete with stunning rainbows, recreating the Garden of Eden (but without any tempting apples, as it’s too hot here).

For the good-of-knee, the lower of the two is well worth the effort, bringing the visitor to the base of several cascades to experience the thrill of the water’s pounding arrival at the termination of its fall. 

This more extensive circuit also leads to a different part of the river, affording unforgettable panoramic viewpoints. Those who have scheduled plenty of time at the park can hop on a launch and head over to explore the wonders San Martin Island for a couple of hours.

To read further, go to: http://www.expatdailynewslatinamerica.com/2012/07/argentinas-iguazu-national-park.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ExpatDailyNewsLatinAmerica+%28Expat+Daily+News+Latin+America%29