Better lives

In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby writes about Indur Goklany’s The Improving State of the World,

Take food. Since 1950, the world’s population has soared by more than 150 percent. Yet food has become so abundant that global food prices (in real terms) have plunged 75 percent. Over the past generation, chronic undernourishment in poor countries has been slashed from 37 percent to 17 percent, while in the United States, staples such as potatoes and flour have dropped in price (relative to income) by more than 80 percent.

Or take infant mortality. Before industrialization, children died before reaching their first birthday at a rate exceeding 200 per 1,000 live births, or more than one in five. “In the United States as late as 1900,” Goklany writes, “infant mortality was about 160; but by 2004 it had declined to 6.6.” In developing countries, the fall in mortality rates began later, but is occurring more quickly. In China, infant mortality has plunged from 195 to below 30 in the past 50 years.

Life expectancy? From 31 years in 1900, it was up to 66.8 worldwide in 2003.

Health? We are more likely to be disease-free today than our forebears were a century ago. And the onset of chronic illness has been significantly delayed — by nearly eight years for cancer, nine years for heart diseases, and 11 years for respiratory diseases.

Education, child labor, clean air, freedom, famine, leisure time, global poverty — Goklany shows that by almost any yardstick you choose, humanity thrives as never before. Living standards do not fall as population rises. On the contrary: Where there are free markets and free minds — economic growth and technology — human progress and hope are all but guaranteed.

“Humanity, though more populous and still imperfect, has never been in better condition,” he writes.

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.

Mass urbanization

On Economist’s View Mark Thoma writes about the millions of people moving from the countryside to the cities in poor countries, quoting an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times,

Mega-cities, mega-problems

Billions in the developing world are shifting from rural to urban areas, bringing poverty to dangerous new levels…

Their misery will spill beyond their borders, and if that happens, our urban age risks becoming a global nightmare.

The writer has got it wrong. It is not migration to cities that bring poverty to dangerous levels. People move from country to city because they are less poor in the city. Poverty is more visible in cities, but is is extremely rare to see starving people in cities even in very poor countries. When you see starving people, it’s in the countryside.

One reason that the urban poor are better off than the rural poor is that ruling elites are afraid of angry urban slum dwellers “spilling beyond their borders”. Rural slums are no threat.

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 last stand of the orangutan

The distribution of the orangutan on Borneo.

From The Last Stand of the Orangutan - State of emergency: illegal logging, fire and palm oil in Indonesia’s national parks (pdf).

A UNEP rapid response assessment prepared for the 2007 UNEP Governing Council. The survival of orangutans and other rain forest wildlife in Indonesia is seriously endangered by illegal logging, forest fires including those associated with the rapid spread of oil palm plantations, illegal hunting and trade.

Forest fire and deforestation in Indonesia are also resulting in substantial emissions of carbon dioxide, in addition to the decrease in habitat for Orangutan and other keystone species of the rain forests of Borneo and Sumatra. The smoke from the burning forests are spreading over Southeast Asia in the summers. As burnt forest areas are left open, they are commonly claimed for rubber and palm oil plantations, thus permanently reducing the available habitat…

More here. Maps and graphics from the report here.

The global warming debate

“All I would say about the main argument is that the attempt to ignore or silence dissenters is more reminiscent of the Catholic Church’s crusade against the Albigensian heresy in the Middle Ages than of the free inquiry of the Enlightenment.” - Samuel Brittan, here.

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.

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…

Sustainable alternative energy - biofuels in Indonesia

From Financial Times (registration necessary),

Indonesia’s Sinar Mas Agro Resources and Technology signed a deal yesterday with China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and Hong Kong Energy Holdings to develop biofuel projects worth $5.5bn in two remote provinces.

The three companies intend to plant 1m hectares of oil palm, sugar cane and cassava over the next eight years in Kalimantan and Papua to generate bioethanol from the latter two crops and palm oil, according to a Sinar Mas statement…

Susili Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesias president, has said he want to prioritise alternative energy development to reduce dependence on oil and gas, in spite of objections from environmentalists. This includes targeting $22bn in investment to develop 6m hectares of plantations for biofuels…

The Sinar Mas Group is controlled by Indonesia’s Widjaja family whose Asia Pulp & Paper in 2001 defaulted in $14bn in debt in the biggest corporate default in emerging markets history. Kalimantan is the Indonesian portion of Borneo, while Papua is the country’s easternmost province on New Guinea island.

The Papua development will involve clearing vast swathes of virgin rainforest, including additional areas for support facilities. Many communities will almost certainly be uprooted, according to Palm Oil Watch, a non-governmental organisation monitoring the sector…

“We are also worried about the impact these vast monoculture plantations will have on the environment, particularly as the Chinese don’t have much experience in this sector.”…

Is clearing the rainforest in order to produce biofuels a good idea? Obviously, “sustainable” and “alternative” does not necessarily mean “good”.

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.

Johnny Appleseed’s business model

The popular image of Johnny Appleseed has him spreading apple seeds everywhere he went, a humble man who wandered the West of the Unites States distributing free apple seeds to settlers.

In fact, John Chapman (1774-1845) was an eccentric, a Swedenborgian missionary, and an astute businessman.

The great revival of wildife in Europe

Trends in French forest area and population

The Times has a gloom and doom story about wildlife taking over depopulated fringes of Europe (hat tip Demography Matters). Actually, the story could just as well have been written as a success story about conservation and the great reversal of wildlife depopulation and deforestation. As can be seen on the graph above, this is not a recent trend e.g. in France. The same process is documented across countries in Returning forests analyzed with the forest identity, see yesterday’s post.

Bears at the dustbins, wolves in main street as Europe goes wild

WOLVES, wild boar and brown bears are moving west in Europe as nature takes hold of rural regions abandoned by people seeking work in the cities.Wildlife migration is shadowing human migration and, according to population experts, is set to transform the way we look at the Continent. Wild boar are already ransacking dustbins on the outskirts of Berlin and bears are startling schoolgirls in Austria.

World approaching deforestation turning point

From BBC,

Study hopeful for world’s forests

A new technique for measuring the state of the world’s forests shows the future may not be as bad as previously feared.

An international team of researchers say its Forest Identity study suggests the world could be approaching a “turning point” from deforestation.

The study measures timber volumes, biomass and captured carbon - not just land areas covered by trees.

The findings are being published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The trend is better than previously thought,” said Pekka Kauppi, one of the paper’s co-authors.

“We see prospects for an end to deforestation; we do not make a forecast but it is possible.”

The BBC story is here, map at the end of the article, previous post on forests in the European Union, the original article by Kauppi et al., Returning forests analyzed with the forest identity, University of Helsinki Forest Identity website, press release here.

Food aid and famine

It is a well-known fact that food aid can destroy agriculture in poor countries. But food aid not only removes incentives for farming, it also destroys the distribution system. The small trader with a pickup truck buying and selling grain can’t compete with food delivered and dumped free of charge on the market. Most famines are local shortages that become famines because of distribution problems. Once the local traders have been forced out of business, chances are that the next local shortage will become a famine.

BBC has this story (via Mahalanobis),

Ethiopia is locked into a vicious downward spiral of food aid dependency, a crop monitoring agency has warned.

The Famine Early Warning System says 10.4 million people are dependent on aid and Ethiopia has a chronically high level of food insecurity.

Its report says government measures to reduce this number are failing and the number of people unable to feed themselves will go on rising.

Imported food aid is running at more than 700,000 tonnes a year.

This aid is successful at helping people overcome their immediate needs, Fews says, but it undermines local markets.

Imported food, donated mainly by the United States, depresses the price paid to local farmers, reducing their incentives to invest in better agriculture.

Even in years of good harvests the outlook is bleak, with Ethiopia’s food production stagnant, and the country’s birth-rate pushing up the current population of 77 million by two million a year.

It says the current harvest outlook is good, but comes on the back of recent poor harvests.

How to Grow a Silicon Valley

Paul Graham observes

I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. They’re the limiting reagents in the reaction that produces startups, because they’re the only ones present when startups get started. Everyone else will move.

Observation bears this out: within the US, towns have become startup hubs if and only if they have both rich people and nerds. Few startups happen in Miami, for example, because although it’s full of rich people, it has few nerds. It’s not the kind of place nerds like.

Whereas Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but no rich people.

Paul Graham is right, but we can be a bit more specific. You need not just rich people, but smart money, and not just nerds, but academic superstars.

The case for academic superstars may be disturbing to egalitarian sensibilities, but the evidence is good. A recent paper, Movement of Star Scientists and Engineers and High-Tech Firm Entry by Lynne G. Zucker and Michael R. Darby of UCLA finds no evidence that ideas, patents, or highly cited science papers has any influence on the creation of new high-tech firms. The New York Times reports on the paper,

The one thing the study does find to be consistently associated with high-tech start-ups is the presence of star scientists — not the ideas, which can be copied, but the scientists themselves. This seems to be the one way in which a university can be used as an engine of business growth. Landing the best scientists in the world can start a place on the way to economic superstardom. The catch is, there are not many superstars and they mainly want to be near one another. The study covered 1981-2004 but identified only 1,838 scientific superstars. That is about the same number of people who played in Major League Baseball over that period.

Many countries want to create high-tech clusters. How should they do it?

The recipe is not complicated. Academic superstars tend to concentrate. You need a first class university where they can congregate. You need quality academics, not quantity. Much like starting a Premier League football club, you will have to pay the market rate for the talent. Get the superstars, and the lesser nerds will follow.

You need not just rich people, but smart money. Smart money is money that is invested by people who really understand the industry and business they are investing in. They have usually made their money in the industry, so they have industry experience, knowledge, and contacts. More value than mere money is therefore added to new enterprises. You need a location that is attractive to these people, and it usually works best if they live not more that one hour’s drive from the firms they are investing in.

So here is the formula,

Academic Superstars + Rich People with Smart Money = High Tech Cluster

Links: foreign aid, global warming, greenhouse gasses

In Prospect magazine (UK), a debate between William Easterly and Hilary Benn, UK Secretary of State for International development, Is Foreign Aid Working?

Graphs illustrating global warming data in EcoWorld article.

The Economist writes about carbon emissions (subscription necessary),

AMERICA’S greenest governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, announced on October 16th that he was planning to set up an emissions-trading scheme between California and other states to try to curb the output of greenhouse gases. Given the complexity of designing and operating such schemes, it is fortunate for Mr Schwarzenegger that Europe already has one up and running; for it offers valuable lessons in what not to do. …

Europe’s Emissions-Trading Scheme (ETS) was one of the few substantial developments to emerge from the wreckage of the Kyoto Protocol. Its purpose was threefold: to cut emissions; the get polluters to pay for the damage they cause; and to get industry to invest in cleaner technology…

Unfortunately, the ETS has failed in all its three aims…

Emissions are flat…

Nor are polluters paying - rather the reverse. In order to get industry to swallow this scheme, allowances were handed out free to companies, rather than being (as economists wanted) auctioned… Britain’s power-generators alone made a profit of around £800m ($1.5 billion) from the scheme in its first year.

Lastly, the ETS is not leading companies to invest in greener technology. In power, for instance, there has been a boom in coal-fired generation - the dirtiest sort.

…the scheme needs to be redesigned.

Ten facts about carbon sinks

From SinksWatch, a criticism of tree plantation carbon sequestration projects,

1. Carbon in trees is not equivalent to carbon in fossil fuels: Tree-stored carbon is easily released into the atmosphere through fire, natural decay and timber harvesting. Carbon in fossil fuels is locked away and only released through human intervention. Carbon credits that equate the two are based on a false premise.

2. One-way road: Trees provide temporary carbon storage as part of the normal cycle of carbon exchange between forests and the atmosphere. The release of carbon from fossil fuels is permanent and, over relevant timescales, will accelerate climate change by increasing the active carbon pool and destabilising carbon flows.

3. Fake credit: Carbon sink credits in the Kyoto Protocol use temporary tree plantations to justify permanent releases of fossil-stored carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon sink credits are fake credits for the climate.

4. Footprint chaos: Carbon sink credits increase the ecological debt of the North. The more fossil fuel a Northern country uses, the more land it is entitled to use to ‘offset’ its emissions. This is unfair and undermines global efforts towards sustainable development.

5. Subsidies for mega-plantations: The Kyoto Protocol stands to provide a new subsidy for the plantations industry. Documented evidence shows how large-scale plantations have negative impacts on forests and forest peoples. Kyoto includes no meaningful safeguards to rule out large-scale monoculture tree plantations from receiving carbon credits.

6. Communities suffer twice: First, climate change affects the livelihoods of forest peoples and rural communities through increased droughts, floods, forest fires and deforestation. Second, carbon sink credits promote the expansion of large-scale tree plantations, which indigenous peoples and forest dependent communities are opposing in many parts of the world.

7. Arming a time bomb: Avoiding climate change requires drastic reductions of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, but carbon sink projects do nothing to help solve this problem; in fact they mask the real crisis. This is sentencing future generations to live with fewer choices and worse conditions.

8. Forest fraud: Forests play a vital role in storing carbon and buffering extreme weather events. But linking forest restoration with carbon credits is a dead-end for forest peoples as well as for the climate. Halting the forest crisis requires action against the underlying causes of deforestation, not a bigger active carbon pool and more monoculture tree plantations.

9. Blind guess: Measuring carbon pools is fraught with uncertainties. Scientists have found that estimates of the carbon balance in Canadian forests could vary by 1000 per cent if seemingly small factors, such as increased levels of atmospheric CO2, are taken into account.

10. Phony climate fix: Real and lasting solutions to the forest crisis and the climate crisis lie in providing incentives for forest-dependent communities and indigenous peoples to restore their forests and practice sustainable forest management. Small-scale pilot projects are already showing positive results, while large-scale carbon sink projects are attracting criticism and protest.

The document is here (pdf). “Small-scale pilot projects are already showing positive results.” Hm. I have heard that one before.

Notice how SinksWatch’s Ten Facts talks about “peoples” and “communities”, never about “people” or “individuals”. This is a deeply reactionary regression to pre-Enlightenment ideas, where groups had rights and privileges that were more important than individual, universal human rights.

Population Aging and Carbon Emissions

As populations age, lifestyles and consumption patterns change. Here is an interesting paper (hat tip Tim Worstall), Population aging and future carbon emissions in the United States. The paper shows that under reasonable assumptions (e.g. population living in elderly households increase from 10% to 20-40% in the long term), aging effects on emissions can be as large, or larger, than technology effects, leading to dramatic reductions in CO2 emissions.

Abstract

Changes in the age composition of U.S. households over the next several decades could affect energy use and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, the most important greenhouse gas. This article incorporates population age structure into an energy–economic growth model with multiple dynasties of heterogeneous households. The model is used to estimate and compare effects of population aging and technical change on baseline paths of U.S. energy use, and CO₂ emissions. Results show that population aging reduces long-term emissions, by almost 40% in a low population scenario, and effects of aging on emissions can be as large, or larger than, effects of technical change in some cases…

Hot Air and Climate Change

The UN is to hold a two-week summit (!) next month in Nairobi on climate adaptation in poor countries with ministers from 189 (!) countries. Ian Pearson, UK Climate Change Minister, says

“I would love to say that I feel confident that everyone is going to Nairobi with the expectation that there is going to be a long-term international agreement, but I do not think that is going to be the case,” Mr Pearson conceded.

“What we can realistically expect… is to hopefully agree an adaptation work programme and an adaptation fund which will be important issues for developing countries.”

Aren’t these guys worried about global warming? Think of how much hot air a large, two-week UN summit will generate.

Ecotourism: First, Do No Harm

“I think there’s been a glib … championing of ecotourism, that it’s a win-win situation,” says Martha Honey, executive director of the Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development in Washington, D.C. in an article in Science News,

When ecotourism in an area grows, the site becomes vulnerable to the same problems, such as sewage maintenance, that come with mass tourism, says John Davenport of University College Cork in Ireland.

Even for activities that aren’t usually destructive, a high volume of tourists can create a problem, he says. Such is the case with scuba diving—traditionally a well-managed, environmentally friendly sport. Throughout the world, researchers have seen a link between dive traffic and coral damage, Davenport says. Divers knock into corals or stir up silt that suffocates the reefs, which regenerate slowly.

When divers add an underwater camera to already cumbersome scuba gear—a juggling act that Davenport compares with “driving while having a shave and a smoke”—the damage becomes worse. In Sodwana Bay in South Africa, divers who took underwater photographs damaged reefs by bumping into them in on average, 9 out of 10 dives, whereas divers who didn’t take pictures caused such damage in just 1 out of every 6 dives, he reports.

“Since you’ve got a million new scuba divers [around the world] each year, it’s going to be an uphill battle,” Davenport says…

Currently, good research on ecotourism is difficult to find, says Davenport. Most destinations weren’t studied before ecotourism began, making before-and-after comparisons difficult. Moreover, many governments are reluctant to provide funding for investigations because they profit from ecotourism.

Perhaps the major barrier is the working assumption that ecotourism, with the conservation funds it raises, must be better than typical mass tourism. Says Hueter, “My concern is, that’s where the analysis ends, and only in rare cases do [researchers] look deeper.”

Read the article here.

Where, oh where, are the studies we need?