From the Riviera to Rivierenbuurt

I have moved from the shores of the Mediterranean to the banks of the Amstel River in Amsterdam. I am now in the land of windmills, canals, clogs, and parakeets.

Parakeets? There are flock of bright green Rose-ringed parakeets (Psittacula krameri) in Amsterdam. They are noisy birds, and the story goes that one owner got so fed up with his pet parakeets that he let them fly off. Since they came from the foothills of the Himalayas, they had no problem surviving and breeding in the Netherlands.

Will the parakeets compete for resources with the local bird populations? Probably not catastrophically. Owls and goshawks now feed on them, keeping their numbers down. But they are probably here to stay.

Top 10 plants for clean indoor air

Indoor air quality is often worse that outdoor air quality. What can you do about it? Grow these plants.

	Common name	Scientific name	Score
1	Areca palm	Chrysalidocarpus lutescens	8.5
2	Lady palm	Rhapis excelsa	8.5
3	Bamboo palm	Chamaedorea seifrizii	8.4
4	Rubber plant	Ficus robusta	8.0
5	Dracaena “Janet Craig”	Dracaena deremensis “Janet Craig”	7.8
6	English ivy	Hedera helix	7.8
7	Dwarf date palm	Phoenix roebelinii	7.8
8	Ficus Alii	Ficus macleilandii “Alii”	7.7
9	Boston fern	Nephrolepis exalta “Bostoniensis”	7.5
10	Peace lily	Spathiphyllum sp.	7.5

These are plants selected for their ability to remove indoor air pollution, based on research carried out for NASA’s Clean Air Study.

The score is based on four factors,

1. Removal of chemical vapours
2. Ease of growth and maintenance
3. Resistance to insect infestation
4. Transpiration rate

The information is from B.C. Wolverhampton. Eco-friendly House Plants: 50 indoor plants the purify the air in homes and offices. London: Seven Dials, 2000. For information about how to take care of the plants etc., see the book. These plants are very easy to take care of.

The Quartenary Conundrum

The Quartenary Conundrum is this: While current empirical and theoretical ecological forecasts suggest that many species could be at risk from global warming, during the recent ice ages surprisingly few species became extinct.

In a recent paper in BioScience, Forecasting the Effects of Global Warming on Biodiversity (pdf), Daniel Botkin et al. state that

Fossil evidence and recent ecological and genetic research, along with specific problems with present forecasting methods, lead us to believe that current projections of extinction rates are overestimates. Previous work has failed to adequately take into account mechanisms of persistence. [...]

Until recently, it was thought that past temperature changes were no more rapid than 1 degree Celsius (°C) per millennium, but recent information from both Greenland and Antarctica, which goes back approximately 400,000 years, indicates that there have been many intervals of very rapid temperature change, as judged by shifts in oxygen isotope ratios. Some of the most dramatic changes (e.g., 7°C to 12°C within approximately 50 years; Macdougall 2006) are actually of greater amplitude than anything projected for the immediate future. [...]

What, then, is the answer to the Quaternary conundrum? The answer appears to lie in part with the ability of species to survive in local “cryptic” refugia, that is, to exist in a patchy, disturbed environment whose complexity allows faster migration than forecast for a continuous landscape, within which species move only at a single rate. The answer also lies in part with greater genetic heterogeneity within species, including local adaptations,which allows rapid evolution. For example, populations close to latitudinal borders are likely to be better adapted to some environmental changes than the average genotype. However, the conundrum is not completely solved, and some important genetic research suggests that species are more vulnerable than the fossil record indicates. A fuller solution to the conundrum will be important for improving forecasts of climate change effects on biodiversity.

HT Carl Zimmer.

Note that this is not a call for complacency, it is a call for better models of climate change effects on extinctions.

Ben-Ami on Sachs

Daniel Ben-Ami reviews Jeffrey Sachs’ first Reith Lecture on Spiked.

Sachs has played a key role in transforming the contemporary mood of pessimism into a coherent intellectual system.

Gardening is good for you

Gardening is good for you; you are physically active without doing strenuous labor, you are outdoors, you work with beautiful plants, and you can clearly see the results of your work.

Here is an additional reason why gardening might be good for you: A bacterium that lives naturally in the soil, Mycobacterium vaccae, might alleviate clinical depression.

Read here.

Cool pool

From Biotop, a company selling swimming pools that are free of chlorine and use vegetation in a water garden to filter and clean the water.

Illustration here.

HT New York Times.

The Privatization of the Oceans

Rögnvaldur Hannesson’s The Privatizations of the Oceans (MIT Press, 2006) is short, clear, and written with a certain wry humor.

It is the best exposition of the development of property rights in the world’s fisheries that I have seen, and it is a real pleasure to read.

Sustainable design

Bruce Nussbaum’s perspective on design (via Endless Innovation),

Let’s take your favorite toy, designed by one of today’s design gods, Jonathan Ive and his team at Apple—the iPod. Apple does fantastic things with materials. Amazing things. And it has recycling programs for its products. But what it doesn’t do is prioritize cradle-to-cradle design. It doesn’t design a long-cycle product that you can open and upgrade over time. It doesn’t design a process that encourages the reuse materials again and again. It doesn’t demand sustainability…

Challenge Your Assumptions. Think about the mink coat. It is beyond cool. It’s sustainable. You feed those little rat-y things with garbage that you throw out or food you grow, you create something that is comfortable, beautiful and gives you warmth for your entire life, you pass it along to another generation or recycle it or simply let it disintegrate. It’s organic, after all.

Why doom and gloom?

Benny Peiser: Britain’s leading cosmologists seem to be particularly gloomy about the future of civilisation and humankind… How do you explain this apocalyptic mood among leading cosmologists in Britain and the almost desperate tone of their pronouncements?

Freeman Dyson: My view of the prevalence of doom-and-gloom in Cambridge is that it is a result of the English class system. In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status. As a child of the academic middle class, I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher and have been gloomy ever since.

From CCNet via FuturePundit and Muck and Mystery.

Biofuel blues

“…In the past year, corn prices have doubled as demand from ethanol producers has surged.

“This ethanol binge is insane,” says Hitch, who’s president-elect of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Assn. (NCBA). “This talk about energy independence and wrapping yourself in the flag and singing God Bless America — all that’s going to come at a severe cost to another part of the economy.”

From Business Week, Ethanol’s Growing List of Enemies.

Peak fish

Source: FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture, 2006.

At the end of the Paleolithic our ancestors encountered “peak hunting and gathering” and started farming. The same is now happening with fisheries.

We are encountering “peak fish” now, and fish farming is taking off. Fish capture is stagnant or declining, but aquaculture is growing rapidly and is already or will soon provide more than half of the tonnage of fish caught in the wild.

Are farmed fish as tasty as wild fish? No, wild salmon is better that farmed salmon, just as wild boar is tastier than farmed pig. There is some decline in quality, but farming guarantees the survival of the farmed species and makes it possible for people who could not previously afford to consume them to do so.

Green is naff

- at least for luxury brands. The Financial Times Business of Fashion supplement reports that luxury brands hide that they are actually acting green so as not to look naff.

After all, “cheesy” doesn’t sell clothes. Sex and glamour do and, like it or not, those are not the first words that come to mind when you hear the words “social responsibility” or “green consumers”.

Surely that will change. Green luxury products may even become, well, another fashion trend.

Too many people on the planet?

Tim Haab on Environmental Economics quotes a strangely retro article from Columbus Dispatch. It is like reading something from the days of the Club of Rome, Limits to Growth, and The Population Bomb,

“Right now, Earth’s carrying capacity is thought to be somewhere in the range of 4 billion to 5 billion people.

There are 6.5 billion of us.”

The Earth’s land surface is 148,939,100 km². If we were all still Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, we would need at least 10 km² per person. So the carrying capacity of Planet Earth was at most 14,893,910 people using hunting and gathering technology.

Technology doesn’t remain constant.

The downside of the boom in China

From Der Spiegel (via inkbluesky),

China’s Poison for the Planet

Can the environment withstand China’s growing economic might? As one of the planet’s worst polluters, Beijing’s ecological sins are creating problems on a global scale. Many countries are now feeling the consequences.

The cloud of dirt was hard to make out from the ground, but at an altitude of 10,000 meters (32,808 feet), the scientists could see the gigantic mass of ozone, dust and soot with the naked eye. In a specially outfitted aircraft taking off from Munich airport, they surveyed a brownish mixture stretching from Germany all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.

These kinds of clouds float above Europe for most of the year and they’ve traveled far to get there. By analyzing the makeup of particles in the cloud, European scientists were able to identify its origin. “There was a whole bunch from China in there,” says Andreas Stohl, a 38-year-old from the Norwegian Institute for Air Research.

Read the story here.

The palm-oil biofuel eco-nightmare

— Just a few years ago, politicians and environmental groups in the Netherlands were thrilled by the early and rapid adoption of “sustainable energy,” achieved in part by coaxing electrical plants to use biofuel — in particular, palm oil from Southeast Asia…

…when scientists studied practices at palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, this green fairy tale began to look more like an environmental nightmare. Rising demand for palm oil in Europe brought about the clearing of huge tracts of Southeast Asian rainforest and the overuse of chemical fertilizer there.

Worse still, the scientists said, space for the expanding palm plantations was often created by draining and burning peatland, which sent huge amounts of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Read the story in the New York Times.

Sahara provides nutrients for the Amazon

Absolutely fascinating paper, but what does it mean?

Abstract. About 40 million tons of dust are transported annually from the Sahara to the Amazon basin. Saharan dust has been proposed to be the main mineral source that fertilizes the Amazon basin, generating a dependence of the health and productivity of the rain forest on dust supply from the Sahara. Here we show that about half of the annual dust supply to the Amazon basin is emitted from a single source: the Bodélé depression located northeast of Lake Chad, approximately 0.5% of the size of the Amazon or 0.2% of the Sahara. Placed in a narrow path between two mountain chains that direct and accelerate the surface winds over the depression, the Bodélé emits dust on 40% of the winter days, averaging more than 0.7 million tons of dust per day…

More on Carbon Offsets

Merrick makes these points in a comment on his post carbon offsets are a fraud,

• Treeplanting for carbon offsets is a complete fraud as it confuses adding fossil carbon to the cycle with temporarily storing it as trees.
• Other projects are not necessarily a complete fraud. They are only primarily a fraud.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse

John Hawks observes that Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto is basically a novelization of the Maya part of Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.

Diamond pushes this simplified version of Maya history as an allegory for U.S. ecological hubris…

…if you’re looking for the social zeitgeist behind this Apocalypto phenomenon, it would seem to derive from these widespread assumptions about Maya ecology and political structures that Diamond has helped to popularize. Collapse itself already simplifies vastly to make his point about ecologies and social regulation. The entire book is a case of “imposing an accessible scheme on a faraway time and place.”

Here is a fair 2005 review of Collapse by Jared Diamond. Partha Dasgupta writes,

…I think he has failed to grasp both the way in which information about particular states of affairs gets transmitted (however imperfectly) in modern decentralised economies – via economic signals such as prices, demand, product quality and migration – and the way increases in the scarcity of resources can itself act to spur innovations that ease those scarcities. Without a sympathetic understanding of economic mechanisms, it isn’t possible to offer advice on the interactions between nature and the human species…

There is no evidence that he even realises he doesn’t have the equipment to hand with which to study our interactions with nature...[emphasis added].

Ouch.

More on Collapse in a review by Ronald Bailey in Reason, here. More on Apocalypto by Tyler Cowen here.

Livestock, cars and greenhouse gasses

From FAO,

Which causes more greenhouse gas emissions, rearing cattle or driving cars?

Surprise!

According to a new report published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2 equivalent – 18 percent – than transport. It is also a major source of land and water degradation…

With increased prosperity, people are consuming more meat and dairy products every year. Global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tonnes in 1999/2001 to 465 million tonnes in 2050, while milk output is set to climb from 580 to 1043 million tonnes…

When emissions from land use and land use change are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9 percent of CO2 deriving from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure.

And it accounts for respectively 37 percent of all human-induced methane (23 times as warming as CO2), which is largely produced by the digestive system of ruminants, and 64 percent of ammonia, which contributes significantly to acid rain…

Fishing and whaling

The BBC has the story about the worldwide decline of fish stock. The story doesn’t say so, but the problem is mainly one of open access and lack of well-defined property rights.

One encouraging trend is the revival of aquaculture. In Europe it was common to breed fish in ponds from the Middle Ages till the 19th century. Faster and cheaper transport made sea fish available even far inland, and this lead to a decline of aquaculture. There is now a rapid growth in fish farming, especially in China. Fortunately, the species mostly farmed by the Chinese are herbivores such as carp. Unlike trout and salmon they don’t need a diet of fishmeal.

Aquaculture is not without problems. But if more fish are available at prices more people can afford, that is good.

Also on BBC,

The UK’s marine affairs minister, Ben Bradshaw, summons Iceland’s ambassador to London, and the US ambassador to Reykjavik protests against Iceland’s resumption of whaling.

“This united action shows the depth of feeling and concern not only in Britain but all over the world about this cruel and abhorrent activity,” said Mr Bradshaw.

“Today’s protest leaves Iceland in no doubt about the strength of feeling against its decision to side-step an international agreement to stop the killing of whales.

“It has done great damage to its reputation and image.”

This protest comes from a minister who has presided over the destruction of UK fish stocks and the UK fishing industry. In contrast to UK, Iceland has some of the best managed marine resources in the world.