Monthly Archives: February 2015

Southwest USA faces long term ‘megadroughts’ this century

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The Central Plains and Southwest region of the US face “unprecedented” droughts later this century, according to new research.

While Midwest states have experienced ever more flooding over the last 50 years, the regions already suffering from extremes of aridity are being warned to expect megadroughts worse than any conditions in the last 1,000 years.

Climate scientist Benjamin Cook, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues report in a new journal, Science Advances, that they looked at historical evidence, climate projections and ways of calculating soil moisture.

They found that the drought conditions of the future American west will be more severe than the hottest, most arid extended droughts of the 12th and 13th centuries – an unusually warm period climatologists call the Medieval Climatic Anomaly – which brought an end to the once-flourishing Ancient Pueblo culture of the American Southwest, forcing the people to migrate to other areas.

They report: “We have demonstrated that the mean state of drought in the late 21st century over the Central Plains and Southwest will likely exceed even the most severe megadrought periods of the Medieval era in both high and moderate future emissions scenarios, representing an unprecedented fundamental climate shift with respect to the last millennium.

“Notably, the drying in our assessment is robust across models and moisture balance metrics. Our analysis thus contrasts sharply with the recent emphasis on uncertainty about drought projections for these regions, including the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report.”

A remarkably drier future far outside the contemporary experience

The growth rings of trees provided the evidence for reconstructions of what climatologists call the warm Medieval period, and the researchers matched the picture from the past with 17 different computer model predictions of the climate later in the 21st century.

The conclusions were ominous: nearly all the models predicted that the Plains and the Southwest would become drier than at any time in the last 1,000 years.

Even though winter rain and snowfall could increase in parts of California – currently in the grip of calamitous drought – in the decades to come, overall there will be lower cold season precipitation and, because of higher temperatures, ever more evaporation and ever more water demand for the surviving vegetation.

The authors conclude: “Ultimately, the consistency of our results suggests an exceptionally high risk of a multidecadal megadrought occurring over the Central Plains and Southwest regions during the late 21st century, a level of aridity exceeding even the persistent megadroughts that characterised the Medieval era.

“Our results point to a remarkably drier future that falls far outside the contemporary experience of natural and human systems in Western North America, conditions that may present a substantial challenge to adaptation.

“Human populations in this region, and their associated water resources demands, have been increasing rapidly in recent decades, and these trends are expected to continue for years to come.

“Future droughts will occur in a significantly warmer world with higher temperatures than recent historical events, conditions that are likely to be a major added stress on both natural ecosystems and agriculture.”

Co-author Toby Ault, head of the Emergent Climate Risk Lab at Cornell University, warned of future megadroughts only last year. He says: “I was honestly surprised at just how dry the future is likely to be.”

And to the north, more frequent severe floods

But to the north, in the American Midwest, conditions have begun to change in a different way. Iman Mallakour and Gabriele Villarini, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa, collected evidence from 774 stream gauges in 14 states from 1962 to 2011.

The region was hit by economically-disastrous, billion-dollar floods in 1993, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2014. The researchers wanted to see whether flooding was really on the increase, or whether perception of greater flooding was what they called “an artefact of our relatively short collective memory.”

They report in Nature Climate Change that a third of them had recorded a greater number of flood events, and only one in 10 recorded a decrease. The pattern of increase extended from North Dakota south to Iowa and Missouri, and east to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

“While observational records from the central United States present limited evidence of significant changes in the magnitude of floodpeaks, strong evidence points to an increasing frequency of flooding”, the paper explains. “These changes in flood hydrology result from changes in both seasonal rainfall and temperature across this region.”

The result is a confirmation of the perceived increase, says Dr Villarini: “It’s not that big floods are getting bigger, but that we have been experiencing a larger number of big floods.”

 

 

The papers:

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

 

 






Don’t ‘abhor’ us – abhor GMO scientists laden with conflicts of interest!

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Speaking at a public meeting organised for farmers in Ghana’s Brong Ahafo Region entitled “GMOs the truth and misconceptions”, Professor Walter Sandow Alhassan advised farmers to avoid being misled by anti-GMO groups, telling them:

“We should get away from this misinformation and try to see how we can revolutionize our agriculture and move with modern trends.”

He is also quoted as calling for groups opposing GMOs and corporate seed-grabbing like Food Sovereignty Ghana (FSG) to be “abhorred”, because, according to him, “those groups do not have any scientific proof or knowledge to offer when it comes to Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) technology.”

We at FSG are shocked by Alhassan’s reported pronouncements urging farmers to reject our warnings and stand by our position that accepting GMOs will result in seed colonisation and seed slavery. In truth, what Ghanaian farmers need to abhor and reject is scientists laden with conflicts of interest.

Because ultimately, genetic engineering is about private corporate control of the food system. Monsanto and Syngenta are particularly greedy to get their hands on Ghana’s agriculture and control the seed market here – and Professor Alhassan is a key servant of the global GMO establishment helping to make this resource grab possible.

The meeting itself also deserves examination. It was organised by the Ghana Chapter of the Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa (OFAB) in collaboration with the GMO-pushing, Gates Foundation-supported African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) which itself created OFAB in 2006.

OFAB’s purpose is to “positively change public perceptions toward modern biotechnology. This will lead to increased adoption of GM products in Africa and the rest of the world.” So it iis hardly an impartial voice of science!

Another co-sponsor of the meeting was CSIR, the South African-based Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, which works in biotech, GMOs and synthetic biology – and which notoriously ‘biopirated’ the Hoodia plant – appropriating and patenting the traditional knowledge of the San people of southern Africa.

Who pays the piper …

Alhassan, now a consultant, is himself a former Director General of CSIR, and much of his career has been funded by the biotech industry – some by Monsanto, particularly his education and early history, and more lately by Syngenta and the Syngenta Foundation.

Naturally he supports GMOs. He has spent his entire life in their service. He is Syngenta’s man in Ghana. And he exemplifies the close links forged by Big Ag with key figures in the academic world. As Kamil Ahsan writes in his article ‘The New Scientism‘:

“Today, large numbers of scientists are in the employ of Big Pharma, Big Ag, and all kinds of corporations with anti-environmental and anti-social justice agendas.”

And while academics are still largely publicly funded, “many receive grants or training fellowships from biotech, pharmaceutical, or agricultural companies; serve on advisory panels and committees; oversee and participate in industry-funded events and colloquiums; and rely on industry links as funnels for outgoing graduate students or postdoctoral candidates. GMOs are a good example of how academics function as cheerleaders for Big Ag.”

Big Ag is not afraid to lie about the GMOs they are pushing. For example Monsanto has just been forced to withdraw advertisements in South Africa because of unsubstantiated information and false claims that GMO crops “enable us to produce more food sustainably whilst using fewer resources; provide a healthier environment by saving on pesticides; decrease greenhouse gas emissions and increase crop yields substantially.”

Yet we hear Professor Alhassan and his network repeating these same untruths over and over again and calling them ‘science’. When he warns that anti GMO groups do not have any scientific proof or knowledge to offer when it comes to GMO technology, he is surely trying to suppress scientific inquiry, knowledge and debate.

More information on the dangers of GMO pesticide plants comes out every day, this despite the fact that the biotechnology industry has done its best to suppress any studies or information that does not support industry claims.

GMO cowpeas a threat to all of Africa

Right now Professor Alhassan and his corporate and academic cronies are trying to get Bt cowpeas into the Ghanaian market. Bt cowpeas are laden with pesticides as are all Bt GMO plants. When Ghanaians eat Bt cowpeas they will be eating pesticides.

In the US Bt plants are registered as pesticides by the USDA. When you eat any part of a Bt plant, you are eating a toxic pesticide – one aimed at insects, but which also impacts on humans. Although Bt does occur in nature, that is quite different than having a plant which contains Bt toxin in every cell of the plant.

With Bt in nature, and when used as a dust or spray in agroecological farming, the active toxin can only be found in the gut of the insect. The plant itself contains no Bt. If there is any residual spray or dust on the surface of the plant it can be washed off.

However, with the Bt in GMO cowpeas and all other Bt GMO plants, as GM Watch points out, “active toxin is in every plant cell and tissue, all the time and cannot be washed off … active toxins are not easily degraded by gut enzymes and, since they are lectins, they all are very likely to bind to the wall of the mammalian / human gut.”

And that means they are likely to be processed into your body creating who knows what short term or long term health risks and dangers.

Those insects that are controlled and killed by the Bt in Bt GMO plants evolve a tolerance for the Bt toxin and come back stronger over time, as recently observed in Brazil where BT corn is actually less resistant to the Fall Armyworm than conventional varieties.

Other opportunistic insects will take advantage of the lack of competition and move in to take the place of the former pests creating new super pests. That is happening in the US where GMOs have been around for 20 years.

And it’s leading to more and stronger pesticides being used every year, endangering the health of humans and livestock, degrading and polluting the soil, water, and air across US farmlands.

It is particularly worrisome to have Bt cowpeas growing in Ghana, a species indigenous to West Africa, as the GMO crops will contaminate neighboring crops with their pollen. If grown in quantity, GMO cowpeas could contaminate the entire region of West Africa. Because of this kind of contamination, Mexico has banned growing Bt corn – a ruling fiercely fought by Monsanto.

Cowpeas are one of the most important food crops in Africa’s drylands: they survive high temperatures with little water, even on very sandy soils, fix nitrogen, and are shade tolerant, allowing them to be used in agroforestry systems.

We must unite to fight this evil law!

If the Ghana Plant Breeders Bill is passed, it would allow the corporate GMO owners to claim all offspring of that contamination as their own property according to their intellectual property rights.

They could force a farmer whose crop is contaminated – against the farmer’s will, and providing no benefit to the farmer – to pay for the contaminated crop, to pay damages to the corporation! They could also force farmers to destroy their crops.

This is happening across the United States and in Canada where GMO corporations are winning huge financial judgements against farmers. It is happening in other countries that have passed UPOV laws such as Ghana’s Plant Breeders Bill. This is what Professor Alhassan intends to bring to Ghana’s farmers, claiming it is ‘progress’ and calling it ‘science’. It is just old fashioned corporate greed.

Contamination of the West African cowpea means the destruction of Ghana’s heritage, destruction of the seed DNA Ghana’s farmers, going back generations and centuries, have laboured to develop and preserve.

This is biopiracy, made legal by the Plant Breeders Bill. Professor Walter Alhassan may believe that this destruction is simply ‘science’, but it is in truth a tool by which foreign corporations aim to profit and re-colonize Ghana, West Africa, and the entire continent of Africa.

Would you trust Professor Walter Alhassan to make decisions about what you eat? Do you trust Professor Alhassan and his recommended scientific cronies to tell you what to plant, or what seeds you are required to use? Whose best interests does Professor Alhassan really represent?

 

 

Edwin Kweku Andoh Baffour is Acting Director of Communications with Food Sovereignty Ghana. The original article has been expanded and edited by The Ecologist.

Twitter: twitter.com/FoodSovereignGH
Facebook: facebook.com/FoodSovereigntyGhana

 






Southwest USA faces long term ‘megadroughts’ this century

Leave a reply




The Central Plains and Southwest region of the US face “unprecedented” droughts later this century, according to new research.

While Midwest states have experienced ever more flooding over the last 50 years, the regions already suffering from extremes of aridity are being warned to expect megadroughts worse than any conditions in the last 1,000 years.

Climate scientist Benjamin Cook, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues report in a new journal, Science Advances, that they looked at historical evidence, climate projections and ways of calculating soil moisture.

They found that the drought conditions of the future American west will be more severe than the hottest, most arid extended droughts of the 12th and 13th centuries – an unusually warm period climatologists call the Medieval Climatic Anomaly – which brought an end to the once-flourishing Ancient Pueblo culture of the American Southwest, forcing the people to migrate to other areas.

They report: “We have demonstrated that the mean state of drought in the late 21st century over the Central Plains and Southwest will likely exceed even the most severe megadrought periods of the Medieval era in both high and moderate future emissions scenarios, representing an unprecedented fundamental climate shift with respect to the last millennium.

“Notably, the drying in our assessment is robust across models and moisture balance metrics. Our analysis thus contrasts sharply with the recent emphasis on uncertainty about drought projections for these regions, including the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report.”

A remarkably drier future far outside the contemporary experience

The growth rings of trees provided the evidence for reconstructions of what climatologists call the warm Medieval period, and the researchers matched the picture from the past with 17 different computer model predictions of the climate later in the 21st century.

The conclusions were ominous: nearly all the models predicted that the Plains and the Southwest would become drier than at any time in the last 1,000 years.

Even though winter rain and snowfall could increase in parts of California – currently in the grip of calamitous drought – in the decades to come, overall there will be lower cold season precipitation and, because of higher temperatures, ever more evaporation and ever more water demand for the surviving vegetation.

The authors conclude: “Ultimately, the consistency of our results suggests an exceptionally high risk of a multidecadal megadrought occurring over the Central Plains and Southwest regions during the late 21st century, a level of aridity exceeding even the persistent megadroughts that characterised the Medieval era.

“Our results point to a remarkably drier future that falls far outside the contemporary experience of natural and human systems in Western North America, conditions that may present a substantial challenge to adaptation.

“Human populations in this region, and their associated water resources demands, have been increasing rapidly in recent decades, and these trends are expected to continue for years to come.

“Future droughts will occur in a significantly warmer world with higher temperatures than recent historical events, conditions that are likely to be a major added stress on both natural ecosystems and agriculture.”

Co-author Toby Ault, head of the Emergent Climate Risk Lab at Cornell University, warned of future megadroughts only last year. He says: “I was honestly surprised at just how dry the future is likely to be.”

And to the north, more frequent severe floods

But to the north, in the American Midwest, conditions have begun to change in a different way. Iman Mallakour and Gabriele Villarini, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa, collected evidence from 774 stream gauges in 14 states from 1962 to 2011.

The region was hit by economically-disastrous, billion-dollar floods in 1993, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2014. The researchers wanted to see whether flooding was really on the increase, or whether perception of greater flooding was what they called “an artefact of our relatively short collective memory.”

They report in Nature Climate Change that a third of them had recorded a greater number of flood events, and only one in 10 recorded a decrease. The pattern of increase extended from North Dakota south to Iowa and Missouri, and east to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

“While observational records from the central United States present limited evidence of significant changes in the magnitude of floodpeaks, strong evidence points to an increasing frequency of flooding”, the paper explains. “These changes in flood hydrology result from changes in both seasonal rainfall and temperature across this region.”

The result is a confirmation of the perceived increase, says Dr Villarini: “It’s not that big floods are getting bigger, but that we have been experiencing a larger number of big floods.”

 

 

The papers:

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

 

 






Don’t ‘abhor’ us – abhor GMO scientists laden with conflicts of interest!

Leave a reply




Speaking at a public meeting organised for farmers in Ghana’s Brong Ahafo Region entitled “GMOs the truth and misconceptions”, Professor Walter Sandow Alhassan advised farmers to avoid being misled by anti-GMO groups, telling them:

“We should get away from this misinformation and try to see how we can revolutionize our agriculture and move with modern trends.”

He is also quoted as calling for groups opposing GMOs and corporate seed-grabbing like Food Sovereignty Ghana (FSG) to be “abhorred”, because, according to him, “those groups do not have any scientific proof or knowledge to offer when it comes to Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) technology.”

We at FSG are shocked by Alhassan’s reported pronouncements urging farmers to reject our warnings and stand by our position that accepting GMOs will result in seed colonisation and seed slavery. In truth, what Ghanaian farmers need to abhor and reject is scientists laden with conflicts of interest.

Because ultimately, genetic engineering is about private corporate control of the food system. Monsanto and Syngenta are particularly greedy to get their hands on Ghana’s agriculture and control the seed market here – and Professor Alhassan is a key servant of the global GMO establishment helping to make this resource grab possible.

The meeting itself also deserves examination. It was organised by the Ghana Chapter of the Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa (OFAB) in collaboration with the GMO-pushing, Gates Foundation-supported African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) which itself created OFAB in 2006.

OFAB’s purpose is to “positively change public perceptions toward modern biotechnology. This will lead to increased adoption of GM products in Africa and the rest of the world.” So it iis hardly an impartial voice of science!

Another co-sponsor of the meeting was CSIR, the South African-based Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, which works in biotech, GMOs and synthetic biology – and which notoriously ‘biopirated’ the Hoodia plant – appropriating and patenting the traditional knowledge of the San people of southern Africa.

Who pays the piper …

Alhassan, now a consultant, is himself a former Director General of CSIR, and much of his career has been funded by the biotech industry – some by Monsanto, particularly his education and early history, and more lately by Syngenta and the Syngenta Foundation.

Naturally he supports GMOs. He has spent his entire life in their service. He is Syngenta’s man in Ghana. And he exemplifies the close links forged by Big Ag with key figures in the academic world. As Kamil Ahsan writes in his article ‘The New Scientism‘:

“Today, large numbers of scientists are in the employ of Big Pharma, Big Ag, and all kinds of corporations with anti-environmental and anti-social justice agendas.”

And while academics are still largely publicly funded, “many receive grants or training fellowships from biotech, pharmaceutical, or agricultural companies; serve on advisory panels and committees; oversee and participate in industry-funded events and colloquiums; and rely on industry links as funnels for outgoing graduate students or postdoctoral candidates. GMOs are a good example of how academics function as cheerleaders for Big Ag.”

Big Ag is not afraid to lie about the GMOs they are pushing. For example Monsanto has just been forced to withdraw advertisements in South Africa because of unsubstantiated information and false claims that GMO crops “enable us to produce more food sustainably whilst using fewer resources; provide a healthier environment by saving on pesticides; decrease greenhouse gas emissions and increase crop yields substantially.”

Yet we hear Professor Alhassan and his network repeating these same untruths over and over again and calling them ‘science’. When he warns that anti GMO groups do not have any scientific proof or knowledge to offer when it comes to GMO technology, he is surely trying to suppress scientific inquiry, knowledge and debate.

More information on the dangers of GMO pesticide plants comes out every day, this despite the fact that the biotechnology industry has done its best to suppress any studies or information that does not support industry claims.

GMO cowpeas a threat to all of Africa

Right now Professor Alhassan and his corporate and academic cronies are trying to get Bt cowpeas into the Ghanaian market. Bt cowpeas are laden with pesticides as are all Bt GMO plants. When Ghanaians eat Bt cowpeas they will be eating pesticides.

In the US Bt plants are registered as pesticides by the USDA. When you eat any part of a Bt plant, you are eating a toxic pesticide – one aimed at insects, but which also impacts on humans. Although Bt does occur in nature, that is quite different than having a plant which contains Bt toxin in every cell of the plant.

With Bt in nature, and when used as a dust or spray in agroecological farming, the active toxin can only be found in the gut of the insect. The plant itself contains no Bt. If there is any residual spray or dust on the surface of the plant it can be washed off.

However, with the Bt in GMO cowpeas and all other Bt GMO plants, as GM Watch points out, “active toxin is in every plant cell and tissue, all the time and cannot be washed off … active toxins are not easily degraded by gut enzymes and, since they are lectins, they all are very likely to bind to the wall of the mammalian / human gut.”

And that means they are likely to be processed into your body creating who knows what short term or long term health risks and dangers.

Those insects that are controlled and killed by the Bt in Bt GMO plants evolve a tolerance for the Bt toxin and come back stronger over time, as recently observed in Brazil where BT corn is actually less resistant to the Fall Armyworm than conventional varieties.

Other opportunistic insects will take advantage of the lack of competition and move in to take the place of the former pests creating new super pests. That is happening in the US where GMOs have been around for 20 years.

And it’s leading to more and stronger pesticides being used every year, endangering the health of humans and livestock, degrading and polluting the soil, water, and air across US farmlands.

It is particularly worrisome to have Bt cowpeas growing in Ghana, a species indigenous to West Africa, as the GMO crops will contaminate neighboring crops with their pollen. If grown in quantity, GMO cowpeas could contaminate the entire region of West Africa. Because of this kind of contamination, Mexico has banned growing Bt corn – a ruling fiercely fought by Monsanto.

Cowpeas are one of the most important food crops in Africa’s drylands: they survive high temperatures with little water, even on very sandy soils, fix nitrogen, and are shade tolerant, allowing them to be used in agroforestry systems.

We must unite to fight this evil law!

If the Ghana Plant Breeders Bill is passed, it would allow the corporate GMO owners to claim all offspring of that contamination as their own property according to their intellectual property rights.

They could force a farmer whose crop is contaminated – against the farmer’s will, and providing no benefit to the farmer – to pay for the contaminated crop, to pay damages to the corporation! They could also force farmers to destroy their crops.

This is happening across the United States and in Canada where GMO corporations are winning huge financial judgements against farmers. It is happening in other countries that have passed UPOV laws such as Ghana’s Plant Breeders Bill. This is what Professor Alhassan intends to bring to Ghana’s farmers, claiming it is ‘progress’ and calling it ‘science’. It is just old fashioned corporate greed.

Contamination of the West African cowpea means the destruction of Ghana’s heritage, destruction of the seed DNA Ghana’s farmers, going back generations and centuries, have laboured to develop and preserve.

This is biopiracy, made legal by the Plant Breeders Bill. Professor Walter Alhassan may believe that this destruction is simply ‘science’, but it is in truth a tool by which foreign corporations aim to profit and re-colonize Ghana, West Africa, and the entire continent of Africa.

Would you trust Professor Walter Alhassan to make decisions about what you eat? Do you trust Professor Alhassan and his recommended scientific cronies to tell you what to plant, or what seeds you are required to use? Whose best interests does Professor Alhassan really represent?

 

 

Edwin Kweku Andoh Baffour is Acting Director of Communications with Food Sovereignty Ghana. The original article has been expanded and edited by The Ecologist.

Twitter: twitter.com/FoodSovereignGH
Facebook: facebook.com/FoodSovereigntyGhana

 






Don’t ‘abhor’ us – abhor GMO scientists laden with conflicts of interest!

Leave a reply




Speaking at a public meeting organised for farmers in Ghana’s Brong Ahafo Region entitled “GMOs the truth and misconceptions”, Professor Walter Sandow Alhassan advised farmers to avoid being misled by anti-GMO groups, telling them:

“We should get away from this misinformation and try to see how we can revolutionize our agriculture and move with modern trends.”

He is also quoted as calling for groups opposing GMOs and corporate seed-grabbing like Food Sovereignty Ghana (FSG) to be “abhorred”, because, according to him, “those groups do not have any scientific proof or knowledge to offer when it comes to Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) technology.”

We at FSG are shocked by Alhassan’s reported pronouncements urging farmers to reject our warnings and stand by our position that accepting GMOs will result in seed colonisation and seed slavery. In truth, what Ghanaian farmers need to abhor and reject is scientists laden with conflicts of interest.

Because ultimately, genetic engineering is about private corporate control of the food system. Monsanto and Syngenta are particularly greedy to get their hands on Ghana’s agriculture and control the seed market here – and Professor Alhassan is a key servant of the global GMO establishment helping to make this resource grab possible.

The meeting itself also deserves examination. It was organised by the Ghana Chapter of the Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa (OFAB) in collaboration with the GMO-pushing, Gates Foundation-supported African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) which itself created OFAB in 2006.

OFAB’s purpose is to “positively change public perceptions toward modern biotechnology. This will lead to increased adoption of GM products in Africa and the rest of the world.” So it iis hardly an impartial voice of science!

Another co-sponsor of the meeting was CSIR, the South African-based Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, which works in biotech, GMOs and synthetic biology – and which notoriously ‘biopirated’ the Hoodia plant – appropriating and patenting the traditional knowledge of the San people of southern Africa.

Who pays the piper …

Alhassan, now a consultant, is himself a former Director General of CSIR, and much of his career has been funded by the biotech industry – some by Monsanto, particularly his education and early history, and more lately by Syngenta and the Syngenta Foundation.

Naturally he supports GMOs. He has spent his entire life in their service. He is Syngenta’s man in Ghana. And he exemplifies the close links forged by Big Ag with key figures in the academic world. As Kamil Ahsan writes in his article ‘The New Scientism‘:

“Today, large numbers of scientists are in the employ of Big Pharma, Big Ag, and all kinds of corporations with anti-environmental and anti-social justice agendas.”

And while academics are still largely publicly funded, “many receive grants or training fellowships from biotech, pharmaceutical, or agricultural companies; serve on advisory panels and committees; oversee and participate in industry-funded events and colloquiums; and rely on industry links as funnels for outgoing graduate students or postdoctoral candidates. GMOs are a good example of how academics function as cheerleaders for Big Ag.”

Big Ag is not afraid to lie about the GMOs they are pushing. For example Monsanto has just been forced to withdraw advertisements in South Africa because of unsubstantiated information and false claims that GMO crops “enable us to produce more food sustainably whilst using fewer resources; provide a healthier environment by saving on pesticides; decrease greenhouse gas emissions and increase crop yields substantially.”

Yet we hear Professor Alhassan and his network repeating these same untruths over and over again and calling them ‘science’. When he warns that anti GMO groups do not have any scientific proof or knowledge to offer when it comes to GMO technology, he is surely trying to suppress scientific inquiry, knowledge and debate.

More information on the dangers of GMO pesticide plants comes out every day, this despite the fact that the biotechnology industry has done its best to suppress any studies or information that does not support industry claims.

GMO cowpeas a threat to all of Africa

Right now Professor Alhassan and his corporate and academic cronies are trying to get Bt cowpeas into the Ghanaian market. Bt cowpeas are laden with pesticides as are all Bt GMO plants. When Ghanaians eat Bt cowpeas they will be eating pesticides.

In the US Bt plants are registered as pesticides by the USDA. When you eat any part of a Bt plant, you are eating a toxic pesticide – one aimed at insects, but which also impacts on humans. Although Bt does occur in nature, that is quite different than having a plant which contains Bt toxin in every cell of the plant.

With Bt in nature, and when used as a dust or spray in agroecological farming, the active toxin can only be found in the gut of the insect. The plant itself contains no Bt. If there is any residual spray or dust on the surface of the plant it can be washed off.

However, with the Bt in GMO cowpeas and all other Bt GMO plants, as GM Watch points out, “active toxin is in every plant cell and tissue, all the time and cannot be washed off … active toxins are not easily degraded by gut enzymes and, since they are lectins, they all are very likely to bind to the wall of the mammalian / human gut.”

And that means they are likely to be processed into your body creating who knows what short term or long term health risks and dangers.

Those insects that are controlled and killed by the Bt in Bt GMO plants evolve a tolerance for the Bt toxin and come back stronger over time, as recently observed in Brazil where BT corn is actually less resistant to the Fall Armyworm than conventional varieties.

Other opportunistic insects will take advantage of the lack of competition and move in to take the place of the former pests creating new super pests. That is happening in the US where GMOs have been around for 20 years.

And it’s leading to more and stronger pesticides being used every year, endangering the health of humans and livestock, degrading and polluting the soil, water, and air across US farmlands.

It is particularly worrisome to have Bt cowpeas growing in Ghana, a species indigenous to West Africa, as the GMO crops will contaminate neighboring crops with their pollen. If grown in quantity, GMO cowpeas could contaminate the entire region of West Africa. Because of this kind of contamination, Mexico has banned growing Bt corn – a ruling fiercely fought by Monsanto.

Cowpeas are one of the most important food crops in Africa’s drylands: they survive high temperatures with little water, even on very sandy soils, fix nitrogen, and are shade tolerant, allowing them to be used in agroforestry systems.

We must unite to fight this evil law!

If the Ghana Plant Breeders Bill is passed, it would allow the corporate GMO owners to claim all offspring of that contamination as their own property according to their intellectual property rights.

They could force a farmer whose crop is contaminated – against the farmer’s will, and providing no benefit to the farmer – to pay for the contaminated crop, to pay damages to the corporation! They could also force farmers to destroy their crops.

This is happening across the United States and in Canada where GMO corporations are winning huge financial judgements against farmers. It is happening in other countries that have passed UPOV laws such as Ghana’s Plant Breeders Bill. This is what Professor Alhassan intends to bring to Ghana’s farmers, claiming it is ‘progress’ and calling it ‘science’. It is just old fashioned corporate greed.

Contamination of the West African cowpea means the destruction of Ghana’s heritage, destruction of the seed DNA Ghana’s farmers, going back generations and centuries, have laboured to develop and preserve.

This is biopiracy, made legal by the Plant Breeders Bill. Professor Walter Alhassan may believe that this destruction is simply ‘science’, but it is in truth a tool by which foreign corporations aim to profit and re-colonize Ghana, West Africa, and the entire continent of Africa.

Would you trust Professor Walter Alhassan to make decisions about what you eat? Do you trust Professor Alhassan and his recommended scientific cronies to tell you what to plant, or what seeds you are required to use? Whose best interests does Professor Alhassan really represent?

 

 

Edwin Kweku Andoh Baffour is Acting Director of Communications with Food Sovereignty Ghana. The original article has been expanded and edited by The Ecologist.

Twitter: twitter.com/FoodSovereignGH
Facebook: facebook.com/FoodSovereigntyGhana

 






Greening transport – we can do it, if we want to!

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Lou Gerstner, when CEO of IBM, famously observed of behaviour in organisations that “you get what you inspect, not what you expect.”

So if we who travel are to expect greener ways of getting from home to work on public transport, for example, why inspect mainly cost and punctuality, as transport regulators and managers do?

A well-functioning transport system should of course run to time and not cost too much, but greener travel will require a lot more than that.

In 2010, 39% of the UK’s use of energy was attributable to travel and transport. Reducing this significantly is a necessary contribution to reducing the UK’s overall carbon emissions by 80% of the 1990 level by the year 2050, as mandated by the Climate Change Act of 2008.

It’s also entirely feasible – and urgent, because the Act is only a reflection of the harsh realities of climate change: even if we make this reduction in time, we stand barely a coin-flip chance of maintaining a reasonably equable global climate.

Where’s the political leadership to drive change?

Although there’s no strong political leadership (except in the Green Party) or policy framework aimed at reducing carbon emissions attributable to travel and transport, some useful changes in behaviour and policy are taking place.

For example the railways are being progressively electrified, people are choosing to switch to smaller, more economical cars, hybrid and electric vehicles are increasingly popular, and some cities are improving their cycling networks. And crucially, video Skypeing is making a lot of journeys unnecessary.

These changes are welcome, but more needs to be done on both national and local scales. And sadly our national and devolved governments are slow to act to make public transport work better, even on those matters where only they can make it happen.

Travel by public transport is significantly greener than simply hopping into the car (think of the pollution and congestion as well as the carbon footprint) – but how can we expect people to change their travel habits and leave the car at home if public transport regulators and managers don’t inspect the right things?

Whether we’re travelling in order to work, socialise or shop, all but the simplest journeys on public transport are multi-modal – that is, they involve several modes of transport. Perhaps we take a bus or cycle to the station, then take a train, and finish our journey by bus, taxi, tube or a short walk.

But then again, perhaps we can’t – because the bus and train timetables are out of kilter, services are unreliable, there’s a dangerous roundabout you don’t dare cycle across, the cost of that taxi ride at the end is prohibitive, and the bus you need to catch only runs on alternate Tuesdays, or the day’s last service leaves at 2.30pm.

In setting overall transport policy for the nation, how much thought is given to improving the cost, time and general convenience of switching between transport modes? Answer: distressingly little. And if regulators fail to inspect these matters, and require public transport operators to coordinate, for example, bus and train timetables, how can people be expected to change their established travel patterns and habits?

Joined up transport policy, joined up transport

Greens would address this by forcing operators to build a coherent and integrated national transport system in which multi-modal journeys are easy to plan, inexpensive to buy and convenient to take, and local authorities would ensure that cycling is safe and pleasant. This is the only way that people can be tempted to leave the car at home more often.

In some cases, this will require taking assets into public ownership. The railway system is a good example, because a joined-up railway system run for the common good (as opposed to private profit) is just common-sense. And though public ownership of the railways enjoys a high level of public support, only the Green Party is committed to this win-win policy.

Re-regulation is also a powerful policy instrument (which should be applied to buses outside as well as inside London), as are direct economic signals such as provided by congestion charging. This is something of a ‘stick’ to discourage city centre motoring – but there are plenty of ‘carrots’ to be had too, for example:

  • Greatly improved information about travel times, interchanges, fares and parking charges for planning a multi-modal journey, as well as real-time information while on a journey
  • Integrated timetabling, as found in Germany, where the departure times of bus, coach and local train services leaving a railway station are co-ordinated with the arrival times of longer-distance trains bringing passengers who want to change modes; and that will require …
  • … a higher priority for interchanges and transport hubs in infrastructure planning; which will require careful attention by town and city planners, and more investment. Busy interchanges like Clapham Junction and Crewe are far more useful to the travelling public than white-elephant ‘showcase’ schemes like HS2.
  • Integrated, contactless payment methods. The growth and development of the Oystercard system, now extended to suburban rail journeys in the London area, and the ability to pay by debit card for all journeys, bring convenience and lower fares to millions of travellers daily. Other conurbations with high travel density would benefit from similar, and ideally compatible, payment systems. As would the counties surrounding London.
  • Cycleways that are segregated from dangerous traffic, don’t come to a sudden halt just when you need them most, and follow travel ‘desire lines’. And no, repeat no, ‘Cyclists Dismount’ signs!


We can do it – but if only we elect politicans who want to

None of these elements of a greener transport system is difficult to bring about and all of them are measurable and inspectable. With the vision and political will, of course we can de-fragment our national travel and transport sector.

In the process we can attract more people onto public transport, improve the quality of the travelling experience, and reduce transport emissions. And curiously enough, by putting all this before the short term profits of public transport operators, we can actually grow the entire sector and so make it more profitable, not less.

If what I’ve said so far sounds on the right track to you, then take a look at the report I recently authored setting out a transport ‘greenprint’ for the greater Cambridge area to deal with the city’s very serious traffic and air-pollution woes.

All the proposals outlined above are contained in that document, showing that Greener travel can be achieved – lower carbon, less expensive, better used, more popular and providing a vastly improved service to travellers – provided we elect politicians committed to make it happen.

 


Rupert Read is transport spokesperson for the Green Party of England and Wales, and prospective Green candidate for Cambridge in the 2015 general election – a seat which registered the 3rd highest Green vote in the UK in 2010.

Web: rupertread.net

Twitter: www.twitter.com/GreenRupertRead

 






Banged up for democracy – the UK kleptocracy cannot tolerate dissent.

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I spent Valentine’s Night in jail in solitary confinement for 16 hours, contemplating the fact that my lawyer said I was facing up to 14 years jail. Why?

In the UK, Boris Johnson owes his political power to and literally gets paid millions of pounds by the tax-dodging extremist right wing media billionaires.

He abuses that power via his private security corporation guards to order the arrests of the Occupy pro-democracy and anti-tax dodging protesters.

I had simply been standing silently and peacefully beside Boris Johnson’s private guard whilst he was handing out arrest warning notices to peaceful protesters on Parliament Green (in ‘Tarpaulin Square’).

I was holding a cardboard coffin placard with the slogan “UK Democracy RIP – killed by corporate billionaires”, made by Nigel Lowell. There is loads of video footage and picture evidence showing me silently peacefully protesting (see below).

This private security guard then told the police that he was “intimidated” by my doing this and that I was seeking to “intimidate him from giving evidence as a court witness” at my trumped up trial for assault in June.

Evidence is so passé …

So without a shred of evidence of any such intimidation, the police a half-hour later in pretty brutal fashion came in force to arrest me, as I was peacefully listening to the democratic discussion being held by the Occupy Democracy General Assembly on the grass.

The police subsequently arrested three more of us on the instructions of the ‘Boris Guards’, including the inspirationally peaceful Nigel Lowell and the legendary live-news journalist Lorenzo Obi Abidanas, for simply being on the Green in Tarpaulin Square.

What I think is really important to know is that it is clear that the London Mayor Boris Johnson has given the orders that anybody who dares to protest about the lack of democracy in Parliament Green are to be arrested.

But meanwhile the real 1% criminals that Johnson serves go un-arrested and indeed they pour money into Johnson’s pockets and are treated to VIP hospitality at our taxpayers’ expense.

Boris Johnson owes his political career (and his power to order peaceful pro-democracy protesters to be arrested) to the extremist right-ring billionaire media-moguls like Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay Brothers and rich Tory donors.

So when Murdoch was vilified for his role overseeing a press empire mired up to its neck in hacking the phones of the relatives of dead British servicemen, Johnson as his key political servant, instead of calling for this man to be banned from owning UK media, shamed London by inviting him instead as a VIP guest to our taxpayer funded Olympics.

And let’s also remember that Johnson rakes in a quarter of a million pounds each year from the tax-dodging owners of The Telegraph, the Barclay Brothers, who avoid UK taxes by living in the notorious tax-havens of Jersey and Monaco.

Boris Johnson is the servant extraordinaire of The Prostitute State. And he abuses his political power to crack down on those who are protesting at the corrupt hijacking of our democracy by these billionaire tax dodgers and media moguls.

We will not be intimidated!

Occupy Democracy and Occupy Rupert Murdoch Week will not be intimidated by the arrests and trumped up charges by his corporate bully-boy hired hands.

We will be back again in Tarpaulin Square with our pro-democracy monthly protest events and talks on March and at Murdoch’s HQ at The Shard from March 23rd-29th.

It is time to say no more to the calamitous destruction of the planet and the hijacking of the wealth of the 99% by the 1%. Be there if you care!

Meanwhile I continue to be on bail now for seven separate charges arising out of my peaceful protesting on Tarpaulin Square, as the police waste time investigating these ‘offences’:

  1. Accused of possessing plastic tarpaulin sheet under my arm in Tarpaulin Square at 10am on a sunny morning at October Occupy Democracy.
  2. Accused of refusing to allow police to confiscate my folded tarpaulin in Tarpaulin Square.
  3. Accused of refusing to obey instruction to leave Tarpaulin Square when instructed to do so by police as I was in possession of a folded tarpaulin.
  4. Accused of not giving my name and address when arrested for being in possession of a folded ground sheet in Tarpaulin Square (there is film footage of my actually giving them my name and address whilst being brutally taken to the ground and handcuffed and physically lifted bodily into the air and escorted in military formation to the police van by a phalanx of 30 officers including TSG at October Occupy Democracy!!
  5. Accusation of “assault” for bumping into Boris’s private security guard when I was trying to protect a peaceful protester from being attacked by the guards who had been throwing peaceful protesters over the iron fence they had erected to implement Boris Johnson’s ban on our protest. (Trial arranged for June 18th) at December Occupy Democracy.
  6. Accusation of “intimidation of a witness in a criminal trial” for standing silently and peacefully with the cardboard coffin stating “Democracy RIP – Killed by Corporate Billionaires” at February Occupy Democracy.
  7. Accused of standing on Parliament Green on Valentine’s Night at February Occupy Democracy.

All charges have been dropped for the arrest they made on me for standing in front of Mandela’s Statue at the November pro-democracy protest with a sign saying “Free Nelson Mandela”.

 

 

Donnachadh McCarthy is author of ‘The Prostitute State’ – how Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought, an Occupy Democracy supporter and former Deputy Chair of the Liberal Democrats. He is currently a member of no political party.

More information:

 






Ethiopia: stealing the Omo Valley, destroying its ancient Peoples

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There is growing international concern for the future of the lower Omo Valley in Ethiopia. A beautiful, biologically diverse land with volcanic outcrops and a pristine riverine forest; it is also a UNESCO world heritage site, yielding significant archaeological finds, including human remains dating back 2.4 million years.

The Valley is one of the most culturally diverse places in the world, with around200,000 indigenous people living there. Yet, in blind attempts to modernise and develop what the government sees as an area of ‘backward’ farmers in need of modernisation, some of Ethiopia’s most valuable landscapes, resources and communities are being destroyed.

A new dam, called Gibe III, on the Omo River is nearing completion and will begin operation in June, 2015, potentially devastating the lives of half a million people. Along with the dam, extensive land grabbing is forcing thousands from their ancestral homes and destroying ecosystems.

Ethiopia’s ‘villagisation’ programme is aiding the land-grab by pushing tribes into purpose built villages where they can no longer access their lands, becoming unable to sustain themselves, and making these previously self-sufficient tribes dependent on government food aid.

A total disregard for the rights of Ethiopia’s Indigenous Peoples

What is happening in the lower Omo Valley, and elsewhere, shows a complete disregard for human rights and a total failure to understand the value these tribes offer Ethiopia in terms of their cultural heritage and their contribution to food security.

There are eight tribes living in the Valley, including the Mursi, famous for wearing large plates in their lower lips. Their agricultural practices have been developed over generations to cope with Ethiopia’s famously dry climate.

Many are herders who keep cattle, sheep and goats and live nomadically. Others practice small-scale shifting cultivation, whilst many depend on the fertile crop and pasture land created by seasonal flooding.

The vital life source of the Omo River is being cut off by Gibe III. An Italian construction company began work in 2006, violating Ethiopian law as there was no competitive bidding for the contract and no meaningful consultation with indigenous people.

The dam has received investment from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the World Bank, and the hydropower is primarily going for export rather than domestic use – despite the fact that 77% of Ethiopia’s population lacks access to electricity.

People in the Omo Valley are politically vulnerable and geographically remote. Many do not speak Amharic, the national language, and have no access to resources or information. Foreign journalists have been denied contact with the tribes, as BBC reporter Matthew Newsome recently discovered when he was prevented from speaking to the Mursi people.

There has been little consideration of potential impacts, including those which may affect other countries, particularly Kenya, as Lake Turkana relies heavily on the Omo River.

At risk: Lake Turkana, ‘Cradle of Mankind’

Lake Turkana, known as the ‘Cradle of Mankind’, is the world’s largest desert lake dating back more than 4 million years. 90% of its inflow comes from the Omo. Filling of the lake behind the dam will take three years and use up to a years’ worth of inflow that would otherwise go into Lake Turkana.

Irrigation projects linked with the dam will then reduce the inflow by 50% and lead to a drop of up to 20 metres in the lake’s depth. These projects may also pollute the water with chemicals and nitrogen run-off. Dr Sean Avery’s report explains how this could devastate the lake’s ancient ecosystems and affect the 300,000 people who depend on it for their livelihoods.

Tribal communities living around the lake rely on it for fish, as well as an emergency source of water. It also attracts other wildlife which some tribes hunt for food, such as the El Molo, who hunt hippo and crocodile. Turkana is home to at least 60 fish species, which have evolved to be perfectly adapted to the lake’s environment.

Breeding activity is highest when the Omo floods, and this seasonal flood also stimulates the migration of spawning fish. Flooding is vital for diluting the salinity of the lake, making it habitable. Livestock around the lake add nutrients to the soil encouraging shoreline vegetation, and this is important for protecting young fish during the floods.

Lake Turkana is a fragile ecosystem, highly dependent on regular seasonal activity, particularly from the Omo. To alter this ancient ebb and flow will throw the environment out of balance and impact all life which relies on the lake.

Severely restricted resources around the lake may also lead to violence amongst those competing for what’s left. Low water levels could see the lake split in two, similar to the Aral Sea. Having acted as a natural boundary between people, there is concern that conflict will be inevitable.

Fear is already spreading amongst the tribes who say they are afraid of those who live on the other side of the lake. One woman said, “They will come and kill us and that will bring about enmity among us as we turn on each other due to hunger.”

Conflict may also come from Ethiopians moving into Kenyan territory in attempts to find new land and resources.

A land grab twice the size of France

The dam is part of a wider attempt to develop the Omo Valley resulting in land grabs and plantations depending on large-scale irrigation. Since 2008 an area the size of France has been given to foreign companies, and there are plans to hand over twice this area of land over the next few years.

Investors can grow what they want and sell where they want. The main crops being brought into cultivation include, sugar, cotton, maize, palm oil and biofuels. These have no benefit to local economies, and rather than using Ethiopia’s fragile fertile lands to support its own people, the crops grown here are exported for foreign markets.

Despite claims that plantations will bring jobs, most of the workers are migrants. Where local people (including children) are employed, they are paid extremely poorly. 750km of internal roads are also being constructed to serve the plantations, and are carving up the landscape, causing further evictions.

In order to prepare the land for plantations, all trees and grassland are cleared, destroying valuable ecosystems and natural resources.

Reports claim the military have been regularly intimidating villages, stealing and killing cattle and destroying grain stores. There have also been reports of beatings, rape and even deaths, whilst those who oppose the developments are put in jail. The Bodi, Kwegi and Mursi people were evicted to make way for the Kuraz Sugar Project which covers 245,000 acres.

The Suri have also been forcibly removed to make way for the Koka palm oil plantation, run by a Malaysian company and covering 76,600 acres. This is also happening elsewhere in Ethiopia, particularly the Gambela region where 73% of the indigenous population are destined for resettlement.

Al-Moudi, a Saudi tycoon, has 10,000 acres in this region to grow rice, which is exported to the Middle East. A recent report from the World Bank’s internal watchdog has accused a UK and World Bank funded development programme of contributing to this violent resettlement.

For many tribes in the Omo Valley, the loss of their land means the loss of their culture. Cattle herding is not just a source of income, it defines people’s lives. There is great cultural value placed on the animals. The Bodi are known to sing poems to their favourite cattle; and there are many rituals involving the livestock, such as the Hamer tribe’s coming of age ceremony whereby young men must jump across a line of 10 to 30 bulls.

Losing their land also means losing the ability to sustain themselves. As Ulijarholi, a member of the Mursi tribe, said, “If our land is taken, it is like taking our lives.”

They will no longer be independent but must rely on government food aid or try to grow food from tiny areas of land with severely reduced resources.

Ethiopia’s food security

Ethiopia is currently experiencing economic growth, yet 30 million people still face chronic food shortages. Some 90% of Ethiopia’s national budget is foreign aid, but instead of taking a grass-roots approach to securing a self-sufficient food supply for its people, it is being pushed aggressively towards industrial development and intensive production for foreign markets.

There is a failure to recognise what these indigenous small-scale farmers and pastoralists offer to Ethiopia’s food security. Survival of the Fittest, a report by Oxfam, argued that pastoralism is one of the best ways to combat climate change because of its flexibility.

During droughts animals can be slaughtered and resources focused on a core breeding stock in order to survive. This provides insurance against crop failure as livestock can be exchanged for grain or sold, but when crops fail there can be nothing left. Tribal people can also live off the meat and milk of their animals.

Those who have long cultivated the land in the Omo Valley are essential to the region’s food security, producing sorghum, maize and beans on the flood plains. This requires long experience of the local climate and the river’s seasonal behaviour, as well as knowledge of which crops grow well under diverse and challenging conditions.

Support for smallholders and pastoralists could improve their efficiency and access to local markets. This would be a sustainable system which preserved soil fertility and the local ecosystem through small-scale mixed rotation cropping, appropriate use of scarce resources (by growing crops which don’t need lots of water, for example) and use of livestock for fertility-building, as well as for producing food on less productive lands.

Instead, over a billion dollars is being spent on hydro-electric power and irrigation projects. This will ultimately prove unsustainable, since large-scale crop irrigation in dry regions causes water depletion and salinisation of the soil, turning the land unproductive within a couple of generations.

Short of an international outcry however, the traditional agricultural practices of the indigenous people will be long gone by the time the disastrous consequences becomes apparent.

 

 

Megan Perry is Personal and Research Assistant to SFT Policy Director, Richard Young.

This article was originally published byt the Sustainable Food Trust.

Also on The Ecologist:

 






Geoengineering – the case is not made

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The publication of a hefty two-volume report on geoengineering by the US National Research Council represents a marked shift in the global debate over how to respond to global warming.

To date, the debate has been about mitigation, with the need for some adaption because of the failure to reduce emissions adequately. The new report, backed by the prestige of the National Academy of Sciences of which the NRC is the working arm, now argues that we should develop a “portfolio of activities” including mitigation, adaptation and climate engineering.

In other words, rather than presenting climate engineering, and especially solar radiation management (rebranded albedo modification), as an extreme response to be avoided if at all possible, the report normalises climate engineering as one approach among others.

To be sure, the committee writing the report points to the serious risks likely in albedo modification, but it recommends the US set in train what would be a major research program into various forms of geoengineering – including field experiments in a technique to cool the planet by spraying sulphate aerosols into the upper atmosphere.

And it endorses the deployment of various carbon dioxide removal methods as relatively benign ways to counter human emissions, arguing that the decision on mitigation versus carbon dioxide removal is largely a question of cost. This approach is riddled with political dangers.

The hole at the heart of the argument

By mainstreaming geoengineering as a response to global warming the committee has left behind the argument put by Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, in his famous 2006 article that opened the floodgates for geoengineering research, that desperate times will require desperate measures.

With no talk of ‘climate emergencies’ in the report, we look in vain for any clear rationale for the possible deployment of albedo modification.

The ‘buying time’ argument – according to which we can temporarily increase the Earth’s albedo (surface reflectivity) while the world decides to put CO2 controls in place – has fallen out of favour because any warming suppressed by a solar shield will just come back to bite us once the shield is removed.

So there is a contradiction buried in the report: it recommends the initiation of a federal research program into albedo modification but does not give a plausible analysis of the circumstances in which the solar shield might be deployed.

The recommendation that “Albedo modification at scales sufficient to alter climate should not be deployed at this time“ (my emphasis) is hardly reassuring.

Scientists call for … more science

In the absence of a rationale, the report reverts to the standard scientists’ trope: we need more information. Deploying a fleet of planes to coat the Earth with a layer of sulfate particles “should only be contemplated” when we have enough data to know what effect it would have, and for this we need a lot of research.

But who should do it? Who should oversee it? Who should own the results? Who would deploy the technologies? How can we ensure research is not misused? These questions, which ought to come before a decision is made to proceed with research, are either not considered or are shunted off to some vague ‘governance’ space.

Research does not take place in a social vacuum. When scientists propose to investigate technologies that would allow someone to take control of the Earth’s climate, and the research is proposed only because powerful interests have prevented a much better solution, then the research is intensely and inevitably political.

So we should not let the genie out of the bottle unless we are pretty sure we can put it back. And that means no research before governance. The committee stresses its desire for public engagement but then undoes it by seeming to endorse a proposal for an “allowed zone” in which scientists alone would decide which experiments could take place.

In this zone, experiments “should not be subject to any formal … vetting and approval”, so the report’s fine words about civil society engagement begin to ring hollow.

Science meets the real world

An essential mistake of the report is the unwillingness to recognise (even though it has been pointed out repeatedly) that field experiments that do not change the physical environment can radically change the social and political environment.

To maintain the physical-social separation the report must play down or dismiss the problem of ‘moral hazard’, that is, the likelihood that a substantial research program, let alone any deployment, would almost certainly reduce the political incentives to rein in carbon emissions.

The committee’s answer is, as always: we need more information to make good decisions. Of course, this does not answer the concern at all but merely asserts that more information will always trump the flaws of politicians – as if the information deficit model has proven itself so effective in the past.

The committee has a touching faith in the power of reason and holds it up as a kind of crucifix, declaring that “it considers it to be irrational and irresponsible to implement sustained albedo modification without also pursuing emissions mitigation, carbon removal, or both.”

And yet this report has been written precisely because we live in an irrational and irresponsible world. And one has to ask how rational and responsible it is to include solar radiation management in a ‘portfolio of responses’ to global warming, as this report does.

Wildly, utterly, howlingly barking mad!

The mandatory declaration that albedo modification “does not constitute a licence for unbounded CO2 emissions” becomes a kind of incantation to ward off the irrationalities of the actual world.

One strategy for creating a rational world where climate engineering would never be misused is canvassed in the report. Social anxieties over deployment of climate engineering could be mitigated by “further research”. Negative perceptions of programs to modify the Earth’s albedo should be “extensively studied” so that they can be countered.

Sadly, the social world does not behave like the Earth system. It cannot be reduced to theorems and principles to be uncovered by further research.

If we knew how to fix society through scientific study we would not be in such a mess that we are now considering an idea that Ray Pierrehumbert, climate science professor and a rogue member of the committee, describes as “wildly, utterly, howlingly barking mad”.

 

 

Clive Hamilton is Professor of Public Ethics, Centre For Applied Philosophy & Public Ethics (CAPPE) at Charles Sturt University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

http://theconversation.com/geoengineering-might-work-in-a-rational-world-sadly-we-dont-live-in-one-37550

The Conversation

 






Fighting the plastic plague in our oceans

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Over five trillion pieces of waste plastic are floating in our oceans, weighing 268,940 tonnes and causing damage throughout the marine food chain, according to data collected by a team of scientists from the United States, France, Chile, Australia and New Zealand.

The team went on 24 expeditions between 2007 and 2013 that surveyed all five sub-tropical gyres: North Pacific, North Atlantic, South Pacific, South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, and extensive coastal regions and enclosed seas including the Bay of Bengal, Australian coasts and the Mediterranean Sea.

Their work included both surface net tows and visual transects for large plastic debris at 1,571 locations in all oceans. This is the most comprehensive survey to-dat – yet it is most likely a gross under-estimate of the scale of oceanic plastic pollution.

In 2012, the world produced 280 tonnes of plastic. Less than half has been consigned to landfill or recycled, and much of the remaining 150 million tonnes not still in use litters continental shelves and oceans.

Global trends suggest that waste plastics are accumulating exponentially in parallel with trends in plastic production – which has increased 560-fold in just over 60 years.

These by-products of the oil industry are icons of the industrial economy built on the over-exploitation of oil and other fossil fuels that’s turning the planet literally into a terminal wasteland (see Redemption from the Plastics Wasteland).

Waste plastic an escalating environmental hazard

The estimate from the global survey of plastic pollution on the sea surface for all fragment size classes combined is only 0.1% of the world annual production.

The estimates are “highly conservative”, the team acknowledged: they do not account for the potentially massive amounts of plastic washed up on shorelines, submerged on the seabed, suspended in the water column, and inside organisms.

Also, the survey only collected particles larger than 0.33 mm, due to the size of the netting used. Sequestration in the sediment is the likely fate of plastic pollutants after perpetrating numerous impacts on organisms along the way.

Waste plastic in the open ocean is degraded into smaller and smaller fragments through UV radiation, mechanical abrasion, biological degradation, and disintegration. The fragments disperse in the ocean, converging in the subtropical gyres. Generation and accumulation of plastic pollution also occur in closed bays, gulfs and seas surrounded by densely populated coastlines and watersheds.

The impacts through ingestion and entanglement of marine organisms ranging from zooplankton to whales, seabirds and reptiles are well documented, and new studies are showing up harmful effects of nano-size plastic particles that have escaped inventories so far (see Plastic Poisons in the Food Chain).

The data from the global survey showed that during fragmentation plastics are lost from the sea surface [2]. There is a 100-fold discrepancy between the expected microplastics (particles < 4.75 mm) weight and abundance and the actual amounts observed, indicating a tremendous loss of microplastics.

This suggests removal processes are operating, including UV degradation, biodegradation (by microorganisms), ingestion / absorption by organisms, decreased buoyancy due to fouling organisms, entrapment in settled detritus, and beaching.

Fragmentation rates of already brittle microplastics may be very high, breaking them down into ever smaller submicron or nanoparticles, and unrecoverable by the nets.

Numerous studies demonstrate that many more organisms ingest small plastic particles than previously thought, either directly or indirectly via their prey organisms. These are then packaged into faecal pellets which sink to the bottom. Further, there is evidence that some microbes can degrade microplastics.

Plastics at sea the cause of ecological havoc

A team of scientists led by Chelsea Rochman at University of California Davis and Mark Anthony Browne at University of California Santa Barbara in the United States wrote a Commentary in the journal Nature in 2013 calling for the need to classify plastics hazardous waste.

They point out that plastic debris can physically harm wildlife. Many plastics may be chemically harmful either because they are themselves potentially toxic or because they absorb other pollutants.

Waste plastics can kill or damage ecologically and commercially important species including mussels, sea-marsh grasses and corals. Mammals, reptiles and birds can be harmed through ingesting plastic or becoming entangled in it.

In 2012, the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal Canada reported that all sea turtle species, 45% of marine mammal species and 21% of seabird species can be harmed in that way.

Yet in the US, Europe, Australia and Japan, plastics are classified as regular ‘solid waste’ and treated like food scraps or grass clippings. Policies for managing plastic debris are outdated and severely threaten the health of wildlife.

As plastic breaks into smaller pieces, it is more likely to infiltrate food webs. In lab and field studies, fish, invertebrates and microorganisms ingest micrometre sized or smaller particles, which also come from synthetic (polyester or acrylic) clothing and cleaning products containing plastics.

Studies in humans and mussels have found that ingested and inhaled microplastics get into cells and tissues where they can cause harm. In patients who have had their knee or hip joints replaced with plastic implants, such particles can disrupt cellular processes and degrade tissues.

Toxicities of plastics

Plastics are made up of repeating units or monomers that join up to form long chains or polymers. These chains are thought to be generally inert – yet unreacted monomers and other harmful ingredients can be found in plastics.

According to United Nations’ Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals, the chemical ingredients of more than 50% of plastics are hazardous. Studies investigating the transfer of additives in polyvinylchloride (PVC) from medical supplies to humans indicate that these chemicals can accumulate in the blood.

In lab tests, monomers and other ingredients of PVC polystyrene, polyurethane and polycarbonate can be carcinogenic and can affect organisms in similar way to the hormone oestrogen.

The monomers making up some plastics such as polyethylene (used for carrier bags) was thought to be more benign. Yet these materials can still become toxic by picking up other pollutants. Pesticides and organic pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls are consistently found on plastic wastes at harmful concentrations 100 times higher than those found in sediments, and 1 million times those occurring in sea water.

Many of these are ‘priority pollutants’ – chemicals regulated by government agencies, including US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) because of their toxicity or persistence in organisms and food webs. These chemicals can disrupt processes such as cell division and immunity, causing disease or reducing the organisms’ ability to escape from predators or reproduce.

In an unpublished analysis, the authors found that at least 78% of priority pollutants listed by the EPA and 61% listed by the EU are associated with plastic debris. Seabirds that have ingested plastic waste have polychlorinated biphenyls in their tissues at 300% greater than those that have not eaten the plastic.

Classify the most harmful plastics as hazardous!

Governments have struggled for decades to reduce plastic debris. The International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) was signed in 1973, although a complete ban on the disposal of plastics at sea was not enacted until the end of 1988.

Despite 134 nations agreeing to eliminate plastics disposal at sea, ocean sampling suggests that the problem has persisted or worsened since MARPOL was signed.

The scientists wrote: “We feel that the physical dangers of plastic debris are well enough established, and the suggestions of the chemical dangers sufficiently worrying, that the biggest producers of plastic waste – the United States, Europe and China – must act now.

“These countries should agree to classify as hazardous the most harmful plastics, including those that cannot be reused or recycled because they lack durability or contain mixtures of materials that cannot be separated.”

Focusing on the most hazardous plastics is a realistic first step. Currently, just four plastics – PVC, polystyrene, polyurethane and polycarbonate – make up roughly 30% of production. These are made of potentially toxic materials and difficult to recycle.

PVC is used in construction, such as pipes that carry drinking water. Polystyrene is used for food packaging; polyurethane in furniture; and polycarbonate in electronics. Health-care and technology industries are already replacing PVC components in intravenous-drip bags and in computers with materials that are safer, more durable and recyclable, such as polypropylene and aluminium.

With the proposed change in plastics classification, many affected habitats could immediately be cleaned up under national legislation with government funds.

In the United States, for instance, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 would enable the EPA to clear the vast accumulations of plastics that litter the terrestrial, freshwater and marine habitats under US jurisdiction.

Ultimately, the scientists want changes in regulation to drive the development of a closed-loop system in which all plastics are reused and recycled, instead of ending up in landfills where chemicals leach from the plastic into surrounding habitats.

“If current consumption rates continue, the planet will hold another 33 billion tonnes of plastic by 2050. This would fill 2.75 billion refuse-collection trucks, which would wrap around the planet roughly 800 times if placed end to end”, the scientists wrote.

“We estimate that this could be reduced to just 4 billion tonnes if the most problematic plastics are classified as hazardous immediately and replaced with safer, reusable materials in the next decade.”

 

 

Dr Mae Wan Ho is the director of the Institute of Science in Society (ISIS), which campaigns against unethical uses of biotechnology.

Action: Beat the Microbead!

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