What is it about a bunch of high-ranking people getting together at a Conference of the Parties (COP) at some major metropolitan center with plenty of 4-star and 5-star hotels in order to figure out how to save the planet, but it never works!
For example, the tenth (10th) meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity was held in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan from October 18-29, 2010. More than 13,000 delegates from around the world. The Aichi targets were designed to help, or in the best of cases, save or revive biodiversity.
Zoom forward twelve years to November 11th 2022: A news release by Climate Change News announces the upcoming COP15 biodiversity conference scheduled for Montreal December 7-19, 2022: “In the past decade, countries agreed to a ten-year plan called the Aichi targets, aimed at halting biodiversity loss. A UN summary report shows countries failed to meet a single one of those targets.” (Source: UN Nature Pact Nears Its ‘Copenhagen or Paris’ Moment, Climate Change News Nov. 11, 2022)
Thirteen thousand (13,000) delegates specially selected by countries of the world to save biodiversity agreed to save nature. Utter failure ensued.
There’s something happening in the world that’s very strange maybe a curse or something “in the air” that hexes these get-togethers. The truth is: Get-togethers by thousands of well-intentioned people to save the planet time and again fail, not just a little bit, but total utter failure. For example, for more than 30 years climate conferences, COPs, e.g., Paris ’15, have miserably failed. Greenhouse gas emissions set new records by the year, which is going backwards, downhill into a deep climate change abyss. Eventually, the abyss will be so deep, if not already, that it’s impossible to climb back out.
More to the point, at some point in time, likely once biodiversity loss turns horrendous, much worse, maybe when humans start killing 200,000,000 million sharks for fin soup per year rather than the current 100,000,000 or as for climate change/global warming, when the Doomsday Glacier, Thwaites, the world’s widest glacier in West Antarctica crashes, leads to Miami Beach flooding, maybe that’s when the various Conference of the Parties, COPs, will turn dead serious and take drastic measures, which, by then, will be too late but maybe, hopefully, only hopefully, take some the edge off these ongoing disasters, even though the marine ecosystem crashes because of loss of its top predator, and desperately the Army Corp of Engineers scrambles to try to save Miami.
Montreal COP15 December 2022
Climate Change News’ intro to COP15 clearly states: “After a two-year delay and a change of location, the UN biodiversity summit aims to halt nature loss by 2030 and restore ecosystems. It could either be a success like the signing of the Paris Agreement or a dramatic failure like the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen,” Ibid.
Hmm, well the “signing of Paris” was a success; it’s the follow through, emission reduction targets, that miserably failed.
At COP15 more than 100 nations are expected to meet to agree to “protect 30% of all land and ocean ecosystems by 2030.” So far, the “big-forested countries” China, Brazil, and Indonesia have not accepted invitations to attend.
According to Brian O’Donnell of the advocacy group Campaign for Nature, following two years of online negotiations: “What started as a very good framework has ended up almost all in square brackets… indicating a lack of consensus,” Ibid.
Of concern, even though the original meeting was to be held in China, which is still designated as “presidency of the talks,” China has not officially invited world leaders to the talks, which commence shortly. That very important task has fallen to Elizabeth Maruma Mreman, urging world leaders to attend rather than going to the World Cup. Tough choice to make!
Unfortunately, cynicism, anger, and fatigue are the byproducts of reporting on the various international Conference of the Parties (COPs) to save Planet A. Across the board, the failures of COPs add tons of credibility to the film Don’t Look Up (Netflix, December 2021) winner of the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Don’t Look Up is an apocalyptic political satire about two astronomers played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence that spot an incoming asteroid and try to warn a largely numbed body politic, as party leaders urge their dumbed-down adherents not to look up, a campaign motto. Meanwhile, one of the president’s top funders, who was appointed to head NASA, has no background in astronomy, and stupidly assures, not to worry. The film not only points to the dangers of ignoring science but also targets how badly America has been dumbed down into submissive easy prey for bellicose politicians that care less about social welfare.
The Montreal COP15 most assuredly will be held, speakers will drone on about the necessity of saving Planet A’s basic life-supporting ecosystems, agreements will be touted, hands joined, thumbs up, but when 2030 arrives, well, who knows how bad it’ll be?
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
Fossil fuel interests have taken over climate talks. The acronym COP for “Conference of the Parties” should be changed to “Continue Oil Production.” Eighteen of the twenty companies that sponsored UN climate talks at the make-believe Egyptian resort Sharm El-Sheikh either directly support or partner with oil and gas companies. Global Witness/London identified at least 636 fossil lobbyists at COP27. What are fossil fuel lobbyists doing at a climate conference?
According to Pascoe Sabido of Corporate Europe Observatory/Brussels: “These findings underline the extent to which this COP has never been about the climate. It’s been about rehabilitating the gas industry and making sure that fossil fuels are on the agenda. This is part of the bigger problem which is linked to the overall corporate capture of the U.N. climate talks… We need to kick the big polluters out.” (Source: Fossil Fuel-Linked Companies Dominate Sponsorship of COP27, DeSomg, Nov. 16, 2022)
Of course, fossil fuel interests sponsor big pavilions, like showtime at Las Vegas conventions. Dubai’s racy, futuristic colorful pavilion was a standout as an effective ploy to convince the world of their serious intentions for net zero. Oh, please! Hopefully, a massive worldwide movement to Stop COP28 Dubai can effectively reverse the embarrassment of holding next year’s COP in the kingdom of oil. It’s an insult to climate scientists. Is Saudi Arabia next?
Adding insult to even the remotest idea of holding further COPs, COP 27 was a virtual disaster. “Indeed, the real legacy of COP27 could well be exposing the climate summit for what it has become, a bloated travelling circus that sets up once a year, and from which little but words ever emerge… in the course of 27 COPs, there has never been a formal agreement to reduce the world’s fossil fuel use.” (Source: Bill McGuire, professor emeritus, Geophysical & Climate Hazards, UCL, The Big Takeaway From COP27? These Climate Conference Just Aren’t Working, The Guardian, Nov. 20, 2022).
Hopefully, a movement to stop COPs altogether will emerge from the shadows of backroom and boardroom negotiations resembling fraternity initiations of naive pledges turned into nincompoops. COP is that ridiculous and overly expensive as well as duping the public into thinking something constructive is happening. Stop COP!
According to Bill McGuire: “Some old hands have labelled it (COP27) the worst COP ever, and I doubt many would argue… it is becoming increasingly difficult to view these events as anything other than photo opportunities for presidents and prime ministers who turn up simply to make the world think they care… hijacking by the fossil fuel sector, and failure, year on year, to do the job they were set up to do, surely means that COP is no longer fit for purpose.”
Rampant Climate Disinformation
Meanwhile climate disinformation campaigns around the world are experiencing a strong revival after a short spell of relative pause.
Interestingly, as actual climate crises spread across the land, so does denialism and disinformation. Climate Action Against Disinformation, a global coalition of over 50 leading climate and anti-disinformation organizations recently released results of a new study. According to Jacob Dubbins, a coauthor, while at COP27: “The rise of climate misinformation is undermining climate action here at COP27.” (Source: November 15, 2022 Climate Disinformation Campaigns Threaten COP27 Progress, a New Report Concludes, Inside Climate News)
Fox News is spotlighted in the new study as a powerful force of false and misleading information fueling unfounded public skepticism and going so far as to “inspire violence against policymakers who advocate strong climate action,” Ibid. Exactly how fascists earn their stripes.
“The report included a scientific survey on the media consumption habits of thousands of people in six different countries: Brazil, Australia, India, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. It found that Americans, especially those who regularly watch Fox News, are the most likely among the study’s participants in all six countries to hold false beliefs about global warming,” Ibid.
Common misrepresentations and outright lying includes statements that renewable energy is more expensive than fossil fuels and that the world’s scientific community is still not sure about the real cause of global warming. Worldwide right-wing media pokes fun at global warming as if it’s child’s play.
Twenty-five (25%) of Americans think climate change is a “hoax,” a consistent talking point of Donald Trump and the GOP. To the contrary: “A staggering 99.9 percent of peer-reviewed studies on global warming conclude that climate change is real and that humans are causing it by burning fossil fuels and clearing land for agriculture.” (Source: More Than 99.9% of Studies Agree: Humans Caused Climate Change, Cornell Chronicle, October 19, 2021)
According to Harriet KIngaby, co-chair of Conscious Advertising Network in a letter submitted to COP27 presidency and country delegations: “Climate disinformation is a global problem, and it is a huge problem… We are on track for 2.8°C of global warming while emissions continue to rise, humanity faces climate catastrophe, yet vested economic and political interests continue to organize and finance climate misinformation and disinformation to hold back action.”
In a twisted perverted manner, COP events feed into the disinform agenda by falsely leading the public into believing something is being done when nothing at all is accomplished. The majority of people do buy into COPs as somehow constructive because of mainstream media coverage that highlights minor accomplishments, like tossing a monetary bone to lesser-developed countries.
STOP COP
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) issued a new Living Amazon Report, 2022 at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. The eye-opening report defines a horror story of human destruction of the world’s largest rainforest. There’s no other way to look at it.
Commercialization of the Amazon Rainforest is rampant in a pattern of ignorance amidst reckless abandon with a level of stupidity that’s nearly beyond comprehension, as the iconic nature reserve has been pushed to the edge of ruin. It is hard to believe that pure ignorance and greed could wreck the world’s most critical asset, but it is happening, way too rapidly.
According to the WWF report, 35% of the Amazon rainforest is either totally lost or highly degraded. (Source: Living Amazon Report 2022, World Wildlife Fund publication, November 8, 2022)
“The situation has begun to show signs of nearing a point of no return: seasons are changing, surface water is being lost, rivers are becoming increasingly disconnected and polluted, and forests are under immense pressure from increasingly devastating waves of deforestation and fire. This could lead to irreversible change in the near future,” Ibid.
As it happens: “The tipping point, according to studies by Thomas E. Lovejoy, 1941-2021, former president of the Amazon Biodiversity Center, and Carlos Nobre, Nobel Laureate and Brazil’s top climate scientist is said to occur when deforestation and degradation combined exceed the threshold of between 20% and 25%, a figure that refers to the eastern, southern and central Amazon.” (Source: The Amazon Will Reach Tipping Point if Current Trend of Deforestation Continues, Mongabay, October 3, 2022)
As stated in the report presented at COP27, there is no scientific consensus on the exact probability of a point of no return because of the massive complexity of the ecosystem; however, it is known that probability increases with deforestation, degradation, and the impact of climate change.
It’s only too obvious that the Amazon Crisis essentially calls for the world to collectively pull together and take whatever actions are necessary to hopefully (underlining hopefully) preserve natural resources that are essential for life or face societal chaos. That’s what COP27 is supposed to be all about, but based upon prior COPs dating back to 1992, the cumulative impact of 30 years of bombastic hot air has been just that, hot air, as nonstop destruction of the environment and poisoning of the atmosphere, continue apace, actually intensifying by the year.
According to the WWF report: There are (1) six-hundred (600) infrastructure projects in operation along Amazon rivers (2) twenty planned road projects, (3) four hundred operating, or planned, dams; meanwhile, numerous mining operations continue to dump chemicals such as mercury into rivers. According to PRODES, a satellite monitoring system, the pace of commercialization of the Amazon trudges ahead as 4.2 million square miles of the rainforest was cleared for commercial development last year alone.
The upshot of this hellbent commercialization is already apparent in another recent report from Amazon Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information (RAISG) claiming that 26% of the forests have already “irreversibly transformed.” “The savannization of the Amazon is already visible in Brazil and Bolivia while Ecuador, Columbia and Peru seem to be heading in the same direction.” (Mongabay)
The WWF calls for “urgent action,” requiring massive collaboration worldwide. The WWF advocates following the principles of the COICA-led “Amazon for Life” initiative organized for conservation of >80% of Amazon forests by 2025. COICA – Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indigenas de la Cuenca Amazónica founded in 1984 in Lima.
In a hopeful message within the clutches of an impending disaster scenario, the WWF says of its own report: “The report collects successful experiences implemented by WWF and partners throughout the biome that can be replicated and scaled. A different future is possible for the Amazon, if we collectively act now.”
The delegates (30,000) to COP27 carry an enormous burden not only for the Amazon Rainforest but also for all of the major ecosystems of the planet that are showing rapid deterioration and threatening to fail to support life on Earth.
In particular, the ocean is literally under a wartime attack by human-influenced overfishing and out of control global warming, as the ocean absorbs 90%+ of planetary heat. It’s not only enormously destructive to ocean life; it is heating up the world’s largest ice sheets way-way too fast, e.g., Greenland’s massive ice sheet may already be a goner.
What will COP27 accomplish?
Postscript: Nature, the illustrious British scientific journal, conducted an anonymous survey of IPCC authors in November 2021: Most of the respondents (climate change scientists), in fact 88%, said global warming constitutes a “crisis,” and nearly as many said they expect to see “catastrophic impact during their lifetimes.” Few of IPCC scientists believe the world will limit warming.
Conclusion: The real truth hurts!
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
The hyperthreat is a combination of impending ecological carnage influenced in large measure by hidden behind-the-scenes human forces that drain the vigor and lifeblood of reasonable solutions.
A major exposé of the hyperthreat is the essence of a recently released book by E.G. Boulton, PhD: Cancelled Woman, Destination Safe Earth Publishing, 2022.
Dr. Boulton introduces the concept of hyperthreat by reflecting on how “people in the past responded when their worlds started to descend.” Now society once again is at a crucial crossroads like what brought on The Ballarat Reform League Charter of 1854 and The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Both documents “rejected unfairness and brutality and set a new ethical baseline for human society.”
The sinister nature that’s found within hyperthreat is at the core of the message in Cancelled Woman: “This is because a type of tyranny has arisen that operates behind the scenes. One of its tactics is to cancel people who challenge its authority, power, or worldview.”
Liz Boulton’s doctoral research led to the profound fact that “taken together, global warming and all array of ecological destruction and degradation constituted a new form of threat, for which she coined hyperthreat.” In time, hyperthreat has taken on new meaning beyond ecological collapse. Accordingly, it also refers to “hidden forces which enable and turbo-charge the hyperthreat.”
Indeed, Dr. Boulton herself has become a threat to the hyperthreat’s subtle mechanisms and hidden voices of control. Her curse was to boldly identify a hyper-response to hyperthreat, which she code-named PLAN E. Paradoxically, her research exposed her as a threat to the same hyperthreat that she revealed. Consequences have been daunting.
After all, PLAN E proclaims: The world’s militaries, intelligence agencies, foreign affairs strategies, and think tanks are unwittingly advancing the hyperthreat, which is an acceleration of climate and environmental change leading to Hothouse Earth, as detailed in Boulton’s publication: Plan E: A Grand Strategy for the Twenty-first Century Era of Entangled Security and Hyperthreats by Elizabeth G. Boulton, PhD, Journal of Advanced Military Studies, Vol. 13 No. 1 2022.
PLAN E was published in two parts in the Journal of Advanced Military Studies and by the US Marine Corps University Press, a professional university of the US Marine Corps located in Quantico, Virginia, which listed her thesis as: An Introduction to PLAN E.
Elizabeth G. Boulton, PhD, Australian National University and MA/Climate Policy, University of Melbourne is a former army major in the Australian Defence Force, having served in East Timor (1999) and Iraq (2004) and logistics work in Ghana, Nigeria, and Sudan. She was a lead research officer at army headquarters.
Over time, someone somewhere decided Boulton went too far. Thereafter, her tome has been the subject of cold shoulder treatment amongst sources and venues that usually post or publish such work.
As a result, Cancelled Woman has risen from the ashes of rejection into a book of challenging personal reflections and tense explosive poems. It is an important commentary on the shamelessness of the forces behind the scenes of the ominous hyperthreat. Cancelled Woman elaborates: “As the world hurtles along a trajectory towards WW3; dangerous climate; ecological collapse and other calamities, the hyperthreat has taken societies voice and its capacity to conduct effective sense-making just when we need it most.”
Accordingly, hyperthreat has infiltrated every megaphone in society inclusive of news outlets, social media, universities, think tanks, and publishing houses. The infiltration process focuses on “creation of confusion.” Such mindset ricochets by ending badly within the world: “We face a looming crisis, yet not only does ‘power’ or the ‘establishment’ not initiate crisis or contingency planning, but they also suppress alternative narratives, ideas, and concepts for crisis response.”
Therefore, “overcoming the hyperthreat requires a new way of being; a more ethical way of living across the board.” Part of this is the importance of people speaking up about issues or policies or threads of ideas that harm the greater good, calling-out the perpetrators.
Liz Boulton’s book was written to convey the ‘feeling’ of being in battle with the hyperthreat. This she has accomplished by revealing its “strange tactics; the subtle way voice is lost, truth buried, and democracy stolen.”
It’s an important book for people to read and keep for further reference to gain an understanding of the clandestine forces shaping society in objectional unwelcomed ways. Whether fully realized or not, we are living under the influence of the hyperthreat. It’s very important to know what to look for. Cancelled Woman helps to understand what’s at stake, and most importantly, that it’s really truly happening.
Indeed, within the confines of a remarkable transformation into feudalism redux, we, all of us, are subjects of the hyperthreat! Yes, subjects, believe it or not, it’s true. The hyperthreat is as real, and as threatening, as described in Cancelled Woman.
The truth is brandished for all to see: “Let me be clear about one specific message I wish to convey in this book: To Australians and global citizens, I feel it is my duty to inform you that a concept for an emergency or ‘hyper-response’ to the hyperthreat of climate and ecological crisis (called ‘PLAN E’), has been deliberately side-lined and suppressed by those entrusted to address such problems. Research is being censored.”
Finally, the strongest statement by Elizabeth Boulton: “In my view, ‘power’ is consciously abrogating their responsibilities to protect the public.”
Liz Boulton can take some comfort knowing that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) was on the American Library Association (ALA) list of top 100 banned and challenged books. Subsequently the Modern Library ranked Brave New World #5 on its list of 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. She’s in good company.
Postscript: Salutations: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924)
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
Worldwide, eleven thousand (11,000) sharks will be killed within the next 60 minutes. That’s 180 sharks per minute; it’s a bloody affair.
One hundred million (100,000,000) are killed per year, mostly for shark fin soup. In fact, the shark-fin trade is responsible for 75% of sharks killed each year even though more than 50 countries have some kind of shark finning ban in effect.
Nevertheless, stealthy fishing techniques are used to clandestinely hook and de-fin sharks. This illicit practice of Chinese trawlers has been exposed by two separate investigations of massive illegal shark-finning operations, which are discussed in more detail herein.
According to the IUU (Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated) Fishing Index, China is ranked as the world’s worst abuser of sea laws, especially shark finning, a bloody mutilation for a delicacy in China.
China’s fleet of 17,000 fishing vessels is the largest in the world. This compares to 250-to-300 total vessels for both the United States and the EU. China’s distant-water fleet numbers 3,000 ships. Enormous refrigerated vessels referred to as “Motherships” upload the catch of the Chinese fleet, thus allowing an entire fleet of trawlers to fish 24/7 without returning to port for weeks or even months.
Sharks are central to maintaining healthy ocean ecosystems. Without sharks, lower prey spiral out of control, leading to collapse of marine ecosystems. Sorrowfully, based upon rate of kill, collapse of the ecosystem is on the horizon. Shark finning is out of control, mostly illegal, inhumane, and disgustingly immoral, actually worse than disgusting, whatever that is?
So, who cares? After all, Jaws (1975) put on a pretty good display of the dangers of a very, very big threatening shark with fierce jagged teeth. It instilled fear that lingers to this day. However, that 25-foot mechanical shark named “Bruce” has a docile ring to it. Aside from Bruce’s reign of celluloid terror, the odds of getting chomped to pieces by a shark are extremely low at 1-in-3,734,067 or much less than getting hit by lightning.
On the other hand, the odds of a human killing a shark are extremely high. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (Switz.), overfishing has led to a 71% decline in shark species since the 1970s.
Sharks, a permanent feature of the planet, have lived on Earth for 450 million years. Now 70% have been wiped-out in only 50 years, as 450 million years of heritage is gone in a hundred-millionth fraction of 450M/yrs. Poof!
According to a prominent article in Nature: “Oceanic shark catch rates have increased threefold since 1970… We document an alarming, ongoing, worldwide decline in oceanic shark populations across the world’s largest ecosystem over the past half-century, resulting in an unprecedented increase in the risk of extinction of these species.” (Source: N. Pacoureau, et al, Half a Century of Global Decline in Oceanic Sharks and Rays, Nature, Jan. 27, 2022)
Moreover, according to the article: “The low reproductive output of these slow-growing species is clearly no match for the intense fishing pressure that they are currently under.”
Demand for Shark Fins
According to the World Wildlife Foundation: “The growing trade in shark fins – often used to make an expensive Asian soup – has become a serious threat to many shark species. The latest research suggests that around 100 million sharks may be killed annually, often targeted for fins. This practice affects many different shark species, including whale sharks (40,000 lbs. and 20-40 feet long)… Overfishing happens because of huge demand, mainly for shark fins, but also some species such as spiny dogfish and porbeagle are targeted for meat.”
Mongabay, which is one of the world’s premier conservation web portals, recently published an exposé on shark finning, to wit: Exclusive: Shark Finning Rampant Across Chinese Tuna Firm’s Fleet, Mongabay, Nov. 1, 2022.
The article is a stomach-churning story that deserves worldwide exposure. Mongabay conducted extensive investigations via interviews of dozens of crewmembers of Dalian Ocean Fishing (DOF), which is partially state-owned and known as China’s biggest supplier of sashimi-grade tuna to Japan.
“But DOF’s boats have also been the nexus of a massive illegal shark finning operation, an investigation by Mongabay has found, based on interviews with dozens of men who worked as deckhands throughout its fleet of some 35 longline vessels.” (Source: Philip Jacobson and Basten Gokkon, Exclusive: Shark Finning Rampant Across Chinese Firm’s Fleet, Mongabay, Nov, 1, 2022)
“Sharks are terrifying in their power,” according to an eye-witness crewmember, “Sometimes we needed three or four people, one with a spear, one with a hand-hook, and one with a stunner.”
The Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF)/London, which also investigates the fishing industry, provided Mongabay with additional excerpts of interviews separately conducted with 11 crewmembers of six of DOFs boats, exposing the highly secretive shark finning operations.
“I was quite dumbstruck by the level of abuse that we found,” EJF CEO Steve Trent told Mongabay. Shark finning and other illegal fishing practices, he said, appear to be “running throughout and across the Chinese distant-water fleet. It’s not just a rogue element within it… DOF uses banned gear to deliberately catch and cut the fins off huge numbers of sharks in international waters, Mongabay has found,” Ibid.
Longliner commercial fishing techniques involve thousands of baited hooks dragged through the sea to capture tuna and other fish. As reported by crewmembers, DOF utilized shark lines and extra-strong wire leaders, which are banned in the western Pacific, alongside regular longlines. In other words, regular longliners added illegal shark fishing gear with much stronger leaders/hooks at a different depth on the same network. This is blatantly illegal.
On a normal longliner the hooks hang several dozen meters below the surface, where tuna tend to swim. In contrast, shark lines run directly from the buoys and floatlines, ensuring the hooks dangle just a few meters deep. “It’s all about where the baited hooks are located in terms of the depth, because sharks tend to be found in higher concentrations in the upper part of the water column,’ said Chapman, the shark expert.” (Mongabay)
According to Mongabay: “DOF’s captains presided over the finning of all manner of shark species in disregard of rules set by treaty organizations governing high-seas tuna fisheries and international wildlife trade… Photos smuggled off one vessel, the Long Xing 629, show large quantities of detached shark fins strewn across the deck.”
Officialdom of China’s agricultural ministry refused to comment on Mongabay’s article. Paradoxically, China explicitly banned shark finning as well as deliberate catching of sharks on the open seas in January 2019. However, there is no enforcement to speak of as partially state-owned vessels continue to run rampant with finning operations in clear violation of their own laws. Astonishingly, DOF is the recipient of millions of government annual subsidies for fishing operations. This entire enterprise is rotten-to-the-core.
“Almost every DOF deckhand interviewed by Mongabay and the EJF said their boat had transshipped shark fin with other boats in violation of rules adopted by the WCPFC (Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission) and the equivalent organization in the Atlantic, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas.” (Mongabay)
Transshipping avoids risks of inspectors finding contraband. It’s typically done under cover of darkness. For example, based upon testimony by deckhands, along the Shandong coast (an eastern coastal province of China), two DOF boats transferred 30-50 sacks of dried fin onto a third smaller vessel, which looked like a local fishing boat. The tell-all witnesses reported being awakened after midnight and ordered to carry the sacks to the moonlit boat. The two DOF captains boarded the third boat for delivery of fins, returning a day later. The approximate two metric tons of dried fin carries a black market value of $300,000-$400,000.
Shark-less Ecosystem Stress
Sharks are crucial to maintaining a healthy marine ecosystem. The marine food chain will collapse without sharks at the pinnacle. “Fish-hunting sharks weed out weak and sick individuals, ensuring that the fish population remains healthy and at a size that the habitat’s resources can support… If the sharks disappear, the smaller fish explode in population because nothing’s eating them,’ Daly-Engel told Live Science. ‘Soon, their food — plankton, microorganisms, shrimp — all of that is gone… fish ultimately starve.” (Source: Want if There Were No Sharks? LiveScience, Sept. 9, 2020)
Deep-sea sharks regulate the amount of carbon that drifts up to the atmosphere by eating/scavenging dead animals on the bottom of the ocean. It’s estimated they remove up to ½ of manufactured carbon to the atmosphere. (Source: Why do We Need Sharks for Our Ecosystem? Oceans-Research, September 20, 2021)
Medicinal research is being conducted on sharks as shark tissue is a strong anticoagulant and antibacterial that may become a key to new medicines.
One of the main problems with overfishing is that sharks grow slowly, taking years to fully mature, and they reproduce few young. Females reproduce once in two-to-three years. Reproduction can’t come close to keeping up with overfishing, especially illegal finning, which decimates regional populations.
Illegal shark fishing, especially finning, is threatening collapse of marine ecosystems. Of special concern, it is already happening much faster than authorities can keep up or regulate. And, regulation is tacky and thin and practically nonexistent as Official China hides behind the dirty work of shady ship captains.
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
Dateline: November 7-18, 2022, Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. Dignitaries from every country will be meeting to discuss climate change at COP27. Based upon early confirmations, 90 heads of state will attend, lending an aura of importance.
“Climate change is the crisis of our lifetime. If we are not able to reverse the present trend that is leading to a catastrophe in the world, we will be doomed.” (António Guterres UN Secretary-General, BBC interview leading to COP27)
The Secretary-General has been beating that same drum for some time now, which prompts a thought: Should the UN stop holding annual COP “Conference of the Parties” climate change meetings? For 30 years straight, following each COP meeting, CO2 emissions have climbed higher than the year before. That’s thirty years, or an entire generation, of failure to slow emissions by even a teeny bit. It’s starting to get embarrassing.
For historical perspective, Global CO2 emissions in 1992, when COPs started, were just over 22 billion metric tons. In 2021 CO2 emissions were a record high 36 billion tons or an increase of 65% since nations signed up to protect the planet from excessive greenhouse gases. This equates to thirty-years of blabbering and more blabbering with nothing to show for it, except big increases in greenhouse gases, an amazing anti-achievement!
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) formed at the Earth Summit in May 1992 with 178 member nations unanimously agreeing to bring CO2 emissions down to 1990 levels of 354 ppm by the year 2000.
May 1992 CO2 @ 359.99 ppm – UNFCCC formed
May 2000 CO2 @ 371.82 ppm – missed the 354 target
October 2022 CO2 @ 427.01 ppm – Oh, well!
COP meetings are the Super Bowl of climate change but not quite as extravagant but still pretty darn plush. And, millions are expended to house (multi-star hotels) and feed (30,000 registered delegates for COP27) to annual COP two-week get-togethers, not including airfare expenses as well as CO2 exhaust fumes.
So far, taxpayers or grants or private funding or institutional funds that support attendees have witnessed CO2 emissions increase every year ever since UNFCCC formed, never a down year. It’s been a bad investment, but offsetting that misfortune is effective PR. “Climate Change” is universally recognized.
Meantime – The All-time Worldwide Killer is Fossil Fuels
One seldom-noticed world statistic stands out like a sore thumb: “There are almost 10,000,000 (ten million) fossil fuel specific air pollution deaths per year.” (Source: Dr. Peter Carter – UN June Climate Meeting Bonn: Bad Beyond Belief – more on Carter to follow)
That puts fossil fuels in the all-time standings list with World War I and World War II, actually in first place. Wars end. Fossil fuel emissions do not. Why not use that statistic for more effective (compelling) PR?
According to a 2018 study by Harvard University, University of Leicester and University College London: “More than 8 million people died in 2018 from fossil fuel pollution, significantly higher than previous research suggested.” (Source: Global Mortality From Outdoor Fine Particle Pollution Generated by Fossil Fuel Combination, Environmental Research posted at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 02/09/2021)
Unfortunately, any prospects for a letup in fossil fuel-related deaths does not appear to be on the horizon, in fact, quite the opposite based upon the UN Emissions Gap Report2022 d/d October 27, 2022, to wit: “As growing climate change impacts are experienced across the globe, the message that greenhouse gas emissions must fall is unambiguous. Yet the Emissions Gap Report2022: The Closing Window – Climate crisis calls for rapid transformation of societies finds that the international community is failing far short of the Paris goals, with no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place. Only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid climate disaster.”
Alas, there is no known “urgent system-wide transformation” that “can avoid climate disaster” on the drawing boards even as the United Nations insists it’s the only way to avoid climate disaster.
But, of course, the IPCC does not control fossil fuels, which, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), plan nearly $1 trillion of new fossil fuel projects, oil & gas, by 2030, and the IPCC does not control coal emissions.
According to Bloomberg, US Edition, Sept. 21, 2022: “A year after President Xi Jinping promised China would stop building coal power plants overseas, the country has completed 14 such facilities beyond its borders and will finish another 27 soon.” The soon-to-be completed plants will emit more emissions than the Philippines or 140 million tons of CO2/yr.
Additionally, India May Boost Coal Power Fleet By 25% By 2030 Amid Rising Demand, Bloomberg, US Edition, Sept. 22, 2022. India’s PM claims reliable electricity supply is the nation’s priority, and thus, according to Bloomberg and COP26: He aims for net zero by 2070, not 2050. Why not make it 2170? That’s likely what’ll happen over time, assuming an excruciating pounding summer heat, like the summer of 2022, doesn’t bring on mass protests or more likely mass deaths well ahead of net zero by 2070.
And, just for good measure: “The US government has funneled more than $9bn (£7.7bn) into oil and gas projects in Africa since it signed up to restrain global heating in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a tally of official data shows, committing just $682m (£587m) to clean energy developments such as wind and solar over the same period.” (Source; Two-thirds of US Money for Fossil Fuel Pours Into Africa Despite Climate Goals, The Guardian, October 31, 2022)
In the face of all of that, expectations are high for COP27 in Egypt, but they’re always high before every COP. In all honesty, maybe COP meetings should be stopped in favor of an altogether different approach because whatever they are doing is clearly not working. As a practical matter, maybe scale down the meetings to much smaller delegations and omit the edit of policy measures by individual country bureaucrats or economists or fossil fuel reps and leave the fixit policy measures to scientists/engineers and establish strict enforcement by monitoring country promises of CO2 reductions, abandon voluntary country emission reductions. That has never worked!
Of more than passing interest, people have already expressed trepidation about holding COP27 in Egypt with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisis’s massive crackdown on dissent. It’s over-the-top excessive and whether intentional or unintentional, may serve to diminish street protests at COP27. According to the Arabic Network for Human Rights, at least 60,000 political prisoners are held behind bars for expressing political beliefs. Amnesty International ranks Egypt as the 3rd worst country by numbers of executions. Highlighting Egypt’s troubling repressiveness, Naomi Klein referred to COP 27 as the “Carceral Climate Summit.”
In order to better understand what to expect at COP27, Dr. Peter D. Carter, director, Climate Emergency Institute and IPCC expert reviewer analyzed a major preliminary meeting to COP27 at the Bonn UN Climate Change Convention of June 2022 with insight to COP27, which Dr. Carter boldly labels: “Bad Beyond Belief”
Following the Bonn meetings on June 16th, according to Dr. Carter: “It is my unpleasant duty and with profound sadness that I’m going to report on what happened… I’ve called it an unbelievably abysmally bad Bonn United Nations Climate Change Convention meeting.” (Source: UN June Climate Meeting Bonn: Bad Beyond Belief, link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTfs4kKpFEQ)
Carter: Bonn demonstrated a level of “incredible climate change denial throughout the conference.” Yet, Bonn paves the way for COP27, which brings to mind: Who listens to the Secretary-General?
It’s even worse than the Secretary-General realizes, according to Dr. Carter: “Today there is no agreement, not even a plan, to put emissions into decline… Bonn this June 2022 was yet another international meeting that refused to stop the rapid, rampant wanton destruction of the sacred earth.”
Accordingly, the most amazing media report by BBC that came out of Bonn: “To Bridge the 1.5C Degree Gap.” Countries agreed to a new “work stream” for this current decade. But that is one more decade following one more decade “work stream” or work program, a-work-in-progress. At the Bonn meeting, both the EU and the US said the “work stream should continue until 2030.” According to Carter: Effectively, they’ve advocated keeping on blah blah blah until 2030: “Which is definitely a delayed death sentence.”
Rather than discussing emissions decline, Bonn has reinforced the 1.5C climate catastrophe by more climate action delay. In contrast, the world’s most eminent climate scientist James Hansen said it is scientifically impossible to limit to 1.5 degrees. Evidently, nobody at Bonn was focused on that and what to do, if anything, about it.
Much more disturbing yet: “There are scientists supporting the 1.5C falsehood, wrongfully proclaiming there is no climate emergency. Instead they claim we can still limit to 1.5C.” (Carter)
According to Carter, Bonn has written the future off once again. The truth: “We face global climate hell at 1.5 degree C.” This fact was made obvious in the 6th Assessment by the IPCC itself. Hmm.
Meanwhile according to Carter: “We are getting severe extreme weather events at an increasing rate affecting all habitable regions on the planet. These will increase over time, heat waves, droughts, forest fires, superstorms, hurricanes and cyclones, torrential rains, floods. And the heat waves, unprecedented heat waves across the Northern Hemisphere.” For example, practically all of India was only recently under an unprecedented pounding heat wave. People died.
In spite of everything mentioned above, at the Bonn climate talks, no one could agree on what a work stream should look like. Thirty years of negotiations, and nobody knows what their recommendations for a work stream on climate action will look like. Amazingly disturbing.
However, Bonn did discuss carbon markets under the 2015 Paris agreement Article 6, which are really only mechanism for emissions trading or what many refer to as “junk or zombie credits,” worthless credits but now approved and used for greenwashing. In total 320 million of the credits equivalent to the annual emissions of 86 coal-fired power plants have been made available for countries to count towards climate emission reduction commitments. Hmm.
Bottom line: “There was not a hint of putting emissions into decline at the two-week Bonn meetings. All agreements result in continued emissions.” (Carter) The inertia is shameful.
Adding insult to injury, as part of COP negotiations, way back in 2009, rich countries agreed to provide 200 billion dollars a year to underdeveloped countries by 2020. As of today, they have failed to pay the first 200 billion. Bonn meetings ended with nothing more done about this 200B failure. Ever since 1992, major countries have stalled. This is a recurring source of distrust in the process by underdeveloped countries. A BBC headline regarding Bonn’s two-week meetings stated: “Climate Change: Bonn Talks End In Acrimony Over Compensation,” BBC News Science.
Additionally, it’s hard to accept, but Bonn caved in to major emitters. China rejected any references to being labeled a “major emitter.” However, they are a major emitter. In fact, China’s emissions are double the next largest emitter, which is the US. India, China, and Middle East all objected to any language about “major emitters,” which, in fact, was deleted.
They also agreed to omit any emissions accounting by the UN climate secretariat for NDC or voluntary national emissions targets, even though these are, in fact, “paltry targets” which will not even come close to limiting global warming to 2C. And, what they did agree to will not even be new national emissions accounting until 2023. Only Australia promised deeper cuts.
Alas, it’s hard to believe, but there is no plan for how countries will work out and submit their emission targets. Different countries are using different methodologies. “This is a basket case. It’s chaotic how national emissions targets are being accounted and registered with the UN.” (Carter)
Dr. Carter: “This is absolute madness. You read thru the accounts of these meetings and you cannot believe it is true… we will not survive if these unbelievably sky-high greenhouse gases, particularly CO2 are allowed to continue to increase at the accelerating rate. We’re on a global suicide proposal.”
Postscript: COP26/Glasgow/2021 news not covered by mainstream media: Commentary of Dr. James Hansen (Ex-NASA Climate Chief) re COP26/Glasgow: “In a memo published last December – unreported until now – Prof Hansen warned that world governments and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are severely under-estimating the speed and impact of global warming this century.” (Source: COP26 Pledges Will Have Catastrophic Consequences Says Ex-NASA Climate Chief, Byline Times, February 16, 2022)
“Conventional climate models, he said, do not sufficiently account for the Earth’s paleoclimate history or ongoing observations of the climate system… Prof Hansen criticized Boris Johnson’s ‘claim that COP26 salvaged the chance to keep global warming below 1.5°C’ and that ‘we’ll look back at COP26 as the moment humanity finally got real about climate change. Describing the UK Government’s claims about the success of the COP26 as ‘unadulterated bulls**t’, his memo warned that ‘the 1.5°C global warming ceiling will be breached this decade’ and that pledges made by Johnson’s administration at COP26 will do nothing to stop the world hitting dangerous climate change.”
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
A fresh approach to fixing climate change/global warming is outlined in a new book: Climate Restoration, which focuses on how the climate can be restored. Indeed, the book is full of fascinating details, meriting a closer look and critique (Peter Fiekowsky and Carole Douglis, Climate Restoration, Rivertowns Books, 2022).
But first: The words climate change and global warming have become imbedded in the fabric of society so much so that the attendant dangers become a nonevent in people’s minds. Over time, they become comfortable with their own personal knowledge of what it means. That’s a problem because studies suggest that only a tiny fraction of people truly understand the real science and inherent dangers.
Meanwhile, in touch with reality, the risks associated with climate change/global warming keeps climate scientists wide-eyed in the middle of the night staring at the ceiling, unblinking, in a cold sweat.
For example, one well-known scientist claims: “At just 1.2°C of global average warming, tipping points (ed. meaning the point of no return) have been passed for several large Earth systems. These include Arctic sea ice, the Greenland Ice Sheet, The Amundsen Sea glaciers in West Antarctica, the eastern Amazonian rainforest, and the world’s coral systems… The meme that ‘we have eight years to avoid 1.5°C and tipping points’ should be deleted from the climate advocacy vocabulary. It is simply wrong.”
Moreover: “Certainly, in the case of West Antarctica, the evidence continues to pile… Thwaites ‘doomsday’ glacier could begin rapid melt with ‘just a small kick’, researchers say… Similarly, scientists now report that Greenland ice sheet has passed a point of system stability and is now “irreversibly committed” to a significant sea-level rise regardless of twenty-first-century climate pathways.” (Source: Climate Dominoes, National Centre for Climate Restoration, Melbourne, May 2022 by David Spratt, Climate Code Red, September 28, 2022).
On the other hand, from a positive viewpoint, is it possible to roll back time and restore the climate to its former self? Climate Restoration makes that claim and offers supporting evidence.
But first, Climate Restoration tells the ugly truth about the popular rallying cry “Net Zero by 2050.” This idiom is widely accepted as the solution to the global warming monster, but that assumption is simply wrong.
In point of fact, if the world follows through on Net Zero by 2050, by the year 2050 CO2 will be at 460ppm, or higher, and according to Fiekowsky/Douglis, the world will have changed: “The great coral reefs are gone… the oceans are largely devoid… gone, too, are most of the old-growth forest and rainforests… average sea level rise of about two feet. The path of humankind in this scenario is a risky one from which there may be no turning back.” pgs. 7-9
Therefore, assuming the nations of the world continue on the pathway of Net Zero by 2050. Fiekowsky-Douglis make a case for a planet that nobody will want to live on. And, maybe they should’ve even gone further in the analysis by stating major portions of the planet will basically be unlivable. There are scientists who believe that’ll be the consequences of Net Zero by 2050, which the world at large has already embraced as the magical solution: “No worries, we’re gonna hit Net Zero by 2050!”
Thus and therefore, it’s vitally important to be brutally honest about whether one book can change the world, re-educate enough people to see the scientific truth and find a better pathway? Hopefully, Climate Restoration can turn enough heads to make a difference. Moreover, double-hopefully, will it truly work?
Fiekowsky-Douglis, echoing Al Gore, state: “It’s time to acknowledge the inconvenient truth that climate scientists and activists have failed to confront, which is: Meeting the goal of Net Zero by 2050 in no way guarantees the survival of human society as we know it or even that of homo sapiens as a species.” pg. 22.
That paragraph is a shot across the bow for today’s world leaders as the Net Zero by 2050 ship logs into Titanic’s route, Southampton to New York. According to the authors: “The ecosystems we depend on will still continue to collapse” even as society achieves Net Zero by 2050 with universal renewable energy, electric vehicles, and total elimination of fossil fuels.
The hard truth: A monster hangs over, and in fact deflates, Net Zero by 2050: “There will still be a trillion tons (ed. 1,000,000,000,000) of excess CO2 lingering in the atmosphere for a millennium or longer.” pg. 23
Under that scenario with a trillion tons of CO2 still hanging around like a big blanket in the atmosphere continuing to heat up the planet (1) ice caps will continue melting (2) sea levels will keep going up and (3) ecosystems will continue collapsing all whilst the world community pops champagne corks on January 1, 2051 to celebrate Net Zero!
Net Zero does not remove the big blanket. Get over it!
Furthermore, according to the book: “No scientist I know will defend the claim that humankind is likely to survive if we limit our climate efforts to meeting the Paris goals… I sometimes refer to the Paris Accords as ‘the Paris Suicide Pact.” pg. 27
The authors initially discuss the goals of climate restoration on page 28: “Achieving the net zero goal set by the Paris Accords is not enough to guarantee a healthy, sustainable future… We need to go further by reducing the level of atmospheric CO2 to below 300 ppm level to which our species originally evolved and has historically flourished.”
Significantly, the climate restoration plan supplements and completes the work that Paris has started with its target of Net Zero by 2050. Keep in mind, it’s not all bad, as Paris ’15 has inspired the world to work towards a common goal of a cleaner, healthier, sustainable planet as well as motivating nations to work to reduce emissions. In spite of general neglect by nations to abide by IPCC commitments to reduce emissions, Paris ‘15 is still a positive event in many respects, specifically by bringing the issue onto the world stage.
Beyond the work to be (hopefully) accomplished by Net Zero by 2050, the good news is that climate restoration is already fairly well advanced. It involves technological processes not anticipated by Paris ’15. Many have already been tested and successfully developed.
Climate Restoration
“Restoring the climate means reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide from today’s 420 ppm to below 300 ppm by 2050. This will require removing roughly a trillion tons of carbon dioxide that we’ve already pumped into the air that would otherwise remain in the atmosphere far beyond our lifetimes, as well as removing any continuing emissions while we head to zero emissions.” pg. 30
Removing a trillion tons of CO2 is the same as removing seven tons of CO2 per year for every person on the planet. Try that one on for size!
All of which prompts a burning question for many people: Where is all of the CO2 located? According to MIT: “Carbon dioxide mixes evenly through the atmosphere. But the atmosphere as a whole is densest near the ground, so a cubic foot of air at ground level will contain more carbon dioxide molecules than a cubic foot of air high up in the sky.” (Source: Is There a Place in the Atmosphere Where Carbon Dioxide is Concentrated, and if so, Can we Remove it? MIT Climate Portal)
The restoration schedule: The decade of the 2020s is projected for scaling up the removal technologies. Thereafter, removal technologies work full tilt from 2030-2050, thus removing a minimum of 50 gigatons of CO2 each year, which in effect removes legacy CO2 by 2050.
Significantly, the technologies all have one thing in common. Each is an adaptation of natural processes that have actually occurred in former geological eras, hands free, no humans involved.
Climate restoration is not based upon fancy new technology breakthroughs. Rather, it’s as 0ld as nature itself. The planet on its own merits has encountered and resolved the same exact global warming problems over the eons but much, much, much more slowly. As explained by the authors: “Nature was not in a hurry to remove geologically relevant amounts of CO2.” However in contrasts to good ole slow Mother Nature: “Using modern technological tools, we can do the same as nature but on an accelerated timetable. For our survival, we now need to do so roughly a thousand times faster.” Hmm.
Accordingly, “scientists and engineers have developed and demonstrated four major technology processes for reducing greenhouse gas levels that reproduces large-scale natural processes.” pg. 33
Four Major Technologies
The technologies for climate restoration are classified as biomimicry and geomimicry, as follows:
1. Synthetic Limestone Manufacture – capturing CO2 and converting it to synthetic limestone producing a commercial product, which when scaled-up could pull 50 Gt of CO2 per year from the atmosphere.
2. Seaweed Permaculture – the construction of arrays of light-latticed structures constructed of tubes to which seaweed can attach in mid-ocean. At scale it could capture enough CO2 to reduce excess CO2 by 20% over 20 years.
3. Ocean Iron Fertilization – adding trace amounts of iron-ore dust to iron-poor ocean areas, in turn, photosynthesis increases rapidly with expansion of phytoplankton which in turn pulls CO2 from the atmosphere. “If just one or two percent of the ocean bloomed with phytoplankton thanks to ocean pasture restoration, the trillion tons of excess carbon could be drawn… within 20-30 years.” Pgs. 40-41
4. Acceleration of Natural Methane Oxidation – by adding iron chloride to the atmosphere to oxidize methane and thus restore pre-industrial methane levels by 2028.
Each of the four strategies is discussed at length in four separate chapters, pgs. 83-162.
Climate Restoration is a bold idea; it is a fresh idea; it is new to the scene as an adjunct to Net Zero by 2050, which by itself can make a huge difference, but it cannot and will not stop the legacy of 1,000,000,000,000 tons of CO2 hanging-out in the atmosphere. That massive blanket will continue to heat up the planet post 2050. It must be removed… period!
In Conclusion, once you’ve read this article, you have some choices to make. One obvious choice is to think about it for a moment but move on with life, biz as usual.
Or, think about what you can personally do to help restore the climate. Here are a couple of suggestions:
Forward this article to everybody you know with a personal message that you intend to get involved and want friends to help, asking them to also spread the word. It’s that important. After all, “restore the climate” is not exactly well known, but the more word gets around, the better chances it can happen. Word of mouth is a powerful tool for making things happen. Your forwarding message could be: “I am sending an article about climate restoration. It’s fascinating stuff! Let me know what you think.”
Or, write to every local, state, and federal government representative asking them to look into climate restoration.
Or, maybe forward William Shatner’s message, which is found in the postscript to this article.
It’s important to be realistic when it comes to fixes for climate change. For decades now, nations have dragged their feet, not keeping commitments and breaking promises to cut emissions. And, the climate change issue has acquired a considerable amount of cynicism, which is fed by various sources like Fox News, politicians of note like Trump and Bolsonaro, and a general public belief that it’s old news, heard over and over again, that somebody somewhere will handle it if it gets bad enough. In other words, the general public is not well-educated about the reality.
In that regard, it’s much worse than people realize and happening so much faster than scientists ever expected. Ecosystems are stressed to breaking points from the far northern latitudes to the far southern and everywhere in between.
Harmful climate change is happening everywhere where nobody lives. For example, while blindfolded throw a dart at a globe; it’ll probably hit close to a stressed ecosystem, for example, Thwaites “Doomsday” Glacier in West Antarctica (tipsy) or Greenland (massive ice loss) or Siberian permafrost (methane bubbling lakes) or Lake Mead (close to dead pool status) or the Po River/Italy (a trickle this past summer) or the Amazon rainforest (30,000+ human-fires/August) or melting Andes’ glaciers (water wars in So. America) or tanker trucks supplying drinking water to 400,000 families outside of Santiago, all signs of stressed ecosystems threatening to shut down nature’s climate system of life support.
Thus and therefore, whether Climate Restoration can gain enough traction to get the job done is a major concern, and it’s why every person who can help, must help. Our home, our planet is at stake, and right now it does not look good. Time is of the essence.
It is imperative that Climate Restoration gets a chance to prove itself because, frankly, it is the only known technological process for naturally reviving our spectacular blue planet.
Postscript: Dateline, October 13, 2021: Capital Kirk, aka: William Shatner’s feet touched ground after a 10-minute 66-mile trip four miles beyond the edge of space on Blue Origin. Shatner wept, but he wasn’t sure why, until he reflected for a spell: “I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.”
Upon more reflection: “My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”
At a later date, upon more reflection: We must have “a clarion call to stop climate change… a Manhattan Project of scientists charged with removing carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.”
Climate Restoration, Rivertowns Books, 2022
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
Photograph Source: Andrewglaser at English Wikipedia is licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0
Virtual Power Brightens the Future
By Robert Hunziker
Imagine the impact of a United States white-glove clean power system with costs benefits to individual homeowners in a Virtual Power Plant network (VPP) extending coast-to-coast with every household, en mass, involved in electrical power generation for the entire nation.
It’s coming. It’s a future where everybody benefits as greenhouse gas emissions such as CO2 dissipate as homeowner electric bills shrink and utility grid brownouts and blackouts cease. It’s a sun-worshipping wonderland of clean energy that works without intermittency 24/7. And, it’s coming, quietly but surely.
A prototype in New England has already proven hugely successful. Sunrun, a global leader in solar power, established the first-of-a-kind Virtual Power Plant this past summer by interconnecting 5,000 small-scale home solar energy systems in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont to create a Virtual Power Plant. The 5,000 homes utilize home solar and home battery storage units to provide power to the grid when energy demand is high in addition to providing additional home electricity.
The Sunrun program clearly demonstrates that VPPs can deliver electricity to multistate power markets. This is the first successful major Virtual Power Plant operation on a multistate level and a peek into the future of electrical power generation via cooperation amongst consumers and utility grid operators; it’s semi-cooperative with the grid operator is still in control.
“This is the energy system of the future and the future is not very far away,” according to Todd Olinsky-Paul, Senior Project Director/Clean Energy States Alliance and Clean Energy Group. (Source: Miranda Wilson, Northeast Embraces First-of-A-Kind Virtual Power Plant, E&E News, EnergyWire, October 12, 2022)
Already, Virtual Power Plants are starting to spread across the country. In certain respects, it is a grassroots movement as householders with solar and backup battery storage of solar energy come together. For example, in California, when Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) put out notices for customers to conserve energy during the 2022 hot summer, 2,500 PG&E customers with Tesla Powerwall battery systems came together to add up to 16.5MWof solar power delivered to the grid.
According to PG&E CEO Patti Poppe, when the Tesla/PG&E Virtual Power Plant activated for the first time August 17th: “The world’s largest distributed battery sure did put on a show.” (Source: Kavya Balaraman, PG&E, Tesla Virtual Power Plant Delivers 16.5 MW to California Grid Amid Calls for Energy Conservation, Utility Dive, August 23, 2022)
There are approximately 50,000 Tesla storage systems in PG&Es service area. When the grid is stressed, customers who chose to participate are paid $2/kWh of electricity exported to the grid. This is a prime example of a very powerful movement spreading across the country to combat the challenges of an increasingly dangerous cycle of excessive fossil fuel-derived CO2 emissions causing global heating that’s threatening the entire American West by turbo-charging a vicious endless drought of the past two decades.
Last Bulb is an org that tracks the growth of the Tesla Virtual Power Plant in California. Tesla Powerwall owners have now been conjoined to Southern California Edison as well as PG&E with a virtual network of 3,500 homes having power capacity of 50MW. This is a powerful fallback safety valve as well as enhancement to the power grid.
The Virtual Power Plant movement bringing utilities and consumers together is also bringing together a relationship between a nonprofit that builds affordable housing in partnership with a local utility, joining forces in a Virtual Power Plant to benefit low-income homeowners who will be compensated by providing power to the grid.
According to an article in Grist entitled: The Plan to Turn Blighted Houses Into a New Source of Green Power for the Grid, August 3, 2022 by Emily Pontecorvo: CEO James Becker of the nonprofit RCF Connects restores abandoned homes and facilitates first-time home ownership in dilapidated/blighted areas of Richmond, California.
The rejuvenated homes are outfitted with energy-efficient lighting, an electric vehicle charger, electric stove, electric heat pumps for heating, air conditioning, and an internet-connected “smart thermostat. Rooftop solar panels and a backup battery system allow homeowners to self-power their homes during a power shortage, and they become part of California’s power grid and earn money doing so as part of a Virtual Power Plant.
As such, low-income homeowners will not only be self-reliant as well as experience lower power bills and generate income from the grid, but they will also help cut greenhouse gas emissions and local pollution, especially significant, as Richmond’s California Air Quality Index at 39.4 is a lowly ranking of #1,354 in the state. “Richmond has long been known for the three Cs: crime, corruption, and Chevron.” (Source: Richmond v Chevron: The California City Taking on its Most Powerful Polluter, The Guardian, October 9, 2019)
According to the Grist article, since starting the program in 2015, RCF has completed 20 renovations in blighted areas of Richmond. RCF prevents gentrification of the blighted zones by working with the California Housing Finance Agency and other sources giving priority access to participants via a financial counseling service and a first-time buyer program that RCF administers, including a down payment assistance program of up to $20K for low-income buyers.
Meanwhile, the world beyond America is starting to build-out Virtual Power Plants. For example, AGL/Australia is the world’s largest retail led Virtual Power Plant. In Australia 2.5 million households have rooftop solar power and can elect to join AGL Virtual Power Plant/Adelaide, which uses cloud-based operation systems to interconnect solar batteries installed in homes and businesses in the city.
And, in Japan on the island of Miyako-jima, since 2021, Tesla has installed a Virtual Power Plant with Powerwalls in over 300 homes. It’s the largest commercial Virtual Power Plant in Japan. Tesla expects to have over 600 Powerwalls installed on the island within the next 12 months.
People living on Miyako-jima experience regular power outages during typhoons, and Powerwalls keep the lights on in individual homes. “During typhoons, lights are available, refrigerators are usable as usual,’ claims a Powerwall customer.” (Source: Tesla Quietly Built a Virtual Power Plant in Japan, The Verge, August 29, 2022)
Virtual Power Plants are the most opportunistic way to connect consumers to the reality of tackling a nearly out of control global warming conundrum that the nations of the world have not properly tackled.
Rather, avoidance of IPCC Paris ’15 commitments to reduce emissions has been the low road traveled by nearly all of the 190-nation attendees to Paris ‘15. It’s outrageously scandalous. But, setting the tone, the Trump administration deniers withdrew from the Paris ‘15 accords! That major setback still reverberates among other nations that followed suit by not cutting emissions, as promised, proclaiming: If America doesn’t commit then why should we!
The interconnectivity of householders to vast grids statewide or nationwide brings forth the stark realization that something about the climate change issue has been amiss, mishandled, or askew. After all, if individual consumers can make a difference in combating global warming, why shouldn’t major governments be onboard as well?
And, yes something has been amiss for decades now. In America, until only recently, it has been, and remains, abject political failure sparked by Republican deniers failing to come to grips with the dangers of greenhouse gases like fossil fuel-derived CO2 blanketing the atmosphere, heating up the planet, which has gotten out of hand and everybody knows it, but nobody does anything about it because they have tirelessly blocked opportunities.
However, Biden’s shabbily named Inflation Reduction Act has become a much-needed breath of fresh air green catalyst, of sorts.
Meanwhile, in more than a subtle fashion Virtual Power Plants send a signal to the public that mean-spirited politics in the face of dire circumstances should suffer consequences: How dire? While blindfolded throw a dart at a world map. Bulls-eye, you’ll hit one of the worst drought areas of the past 500-to-1200 years!
Oh, by the way, don’t forget to vote. It counts!
Postscript: Speaking of voting and its impact, Sweden’s new far-right PM Ulf Kristersson freshly installed on October 18th, celebrated victory by dismantling the Ministry of Environment on October 19th.
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
A mysterious uptick in atmospheric methane (CH4) was first detected 15 years ago. Of major concern, CH4 is a potent greenhouse gas that’s ~80 times greater than CO2. It’s like a turbo-charged booster heating up the planet. It is a climate change event that keeps scientist up at night, sleepless bouts of tossing, turning, sitting up, screaming on occasion.
“In the past few years, however, that uptick has accelerated into a surge. The implications for global warming are immense.” (Source: L. Hook and C. Campbell, Methane Hunters: What Explains the Surge in the Potent Greenhouse Gas? Financial Times, August 22, 2022)
Every year chemists at the Global Monitoring Laboratory of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Boulder, Colorado receive roughly 6,000 flasks from 50 worldwide atmosphere-monitoring stations. The lab measures levels of gases inside the samples, e.g., carbon dioxide (CO2) nitrous oxide (N2O), methane (CH4).
Since 15 years ago, the lab’s results have shown methane acceleration increasing year-over-year. As a result, since 2007 the scientific community has become increasingly concerned about levels of CH4 in the atmosphere. Its danger is triggering an unstoppable self-fulfilling cycle that ratchets up global warming way too fast too quickly.
That threat is already starting to bubble to the surface in thousands of thermokarst lakes or melted permafrost lakes that are rapidly spreading all across the high latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere. According to an article in Nature Communications by Katey Walter Anthony, Professor of Ecology and Biogeochemistry at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, current climate models greatly underestimate the methane released by these lakes that are popping up like spring flowers all across the interior of Alaska. She believes that methane could become the dominant source of atmospheric warming. It’s on a fast track guided by nature’s own course as it reacts to global warming. A plane flight across Alaska finds mile after mile after mile of newly formed thermokarst lakes bubbling up methane. Anthony claims the lakes emit methane 10 times more than a normal lake. In her words: “They are hotspots.”
According to Sir David King, former chief scientific advisor for the UK and founder of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group: “With the Arctic having warmed 3C, well above the global average… risks are also growing that large amounts of methane trapped in thawing permafrost could be released… If all of that is released, we’ll see temperatures rise 5-8C (8-14F) over 20 years… extraordinarily destructive to the future of humanity.”
It is only too obvious that surging methane is a major risk to society at large. It is widely acknowledged that a rise of 5-8C global warming most likely spells “death warrant.”
A potential solution to excessive levels of methane is discussed in more detail at the end of this article, which is a group of scientists and engineers under the banner Atmospheric Methane Removal AG, Switzerland, link: https://amr.earth
“Atmospheric methane had its highest growth rate ever recorded by modern instruments in 2020, and then that record was broken again in 2021. Nobody knows exactly why.” (Source: L. Hook and C. Campbell, Methane Hunters: What Explains the Surge in the Potent Greenhouse Gas? Financial Times, August 22, 2022)
However, after years of research, scientists have identified the distinguishing fact that fossil sources of CH4 contain more carbon-13 isotope than do microbial sources like wetlands, cattle, and landfills. As such, that evidence has exposed a major concern for the scientific community, to wit: Since 2007, it has become quite obvious that the worst possible case may be underway: “The planet itself could be emitting more methane, and it is not slowing down,” Ibid.
According to Ed Dlugokencky, a chemist at the NOAA lab: “After 200 years of increasing… all of a sudden we start to see a decrease in delta carbon-13. That means something significant has happened,” Ibid.
As such, horror of horrors, if Dlugokencky’s significant change proves to be the “methane bomb,” meaning the planet warming itself thereby causing more methane released into the atmosphere in a terrifying feedback loop sans human influence, then how to stop it? In the vernacular, it leads to the ultimate threat called runaway global warming.
“If you think of fossil fuel emissions as putting the world on a slow boil, methane is a blow torch that is cooking us today,” according to Durwood Zaelke, Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, Ibid.
There are plenty of professionals, like Zaelke, that are extremely concerned about the prospects of the methane bomb, which could wipe out civilization, unless it can be stopped. In that regard, the UN Environment Programme claims that existing technologies (not yet proven as operational) could cut methane emissions by 45% by 2030. In turn, this would avoid 0.3C of additional warming.
Atmospheric Methane Removal Ag is one strong prospective source for cutting methane emissions. AMR is an engineering company that is science driven. Its technology is designed to help “Cool Planet Earth.”
According to AMR: “The problem of atmospheric methane is that it has an initial global warming potential (GWP) 120 times worse than CO2 (2). 40% of all current global warming (GW) is caused by methane, and the problem / the proportion of methane is growing… Unlike atmospheric CO2, which enables photosynthesis, atmospheric methane has no beneficial effect – life on earth could happen with zero methane in the air.”
AMR utilizes Enhanced Atmospheric Methane Oxidation (EAMO) via Iron Salt Aerosol, a natural chemical reaction in order to deplete methane from the atmosphere. This process is similar to the same chemical reaction accomplished by the sun interacting with natural iron salt aerosols emitted by the planet, except EAMO accelerates the process fast enough to make a big difference in methane’s impact, quickly. The sun takes much, much longer, maybe a decade or more, for the same impact of nature taking its own course.
According to ARM, by utilizing EAMO, within approximately 20 years atmospheric methane would decrease to pre-industrial levels. Thereby, average global temperature would cool by ~0.5 degrees, compared to conditions without EAMO in combination with emission reductions as scheduled by nation/states to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
AMR’s Enhanced Atmospheric Methane Oxidation process sends iron-salt aerosols into the atmosphere. It’s significant that implementation of AMR’s technology in terms of costs, effectiveness, and build-out is “the lowest hanging fruit of all GHG removal technologies.” The first prototype has already undergone tests in a laboratory environment. The initial field test is scheduled for 2023.
AMR’s development to date should attract a significant level of interests by nation/states as well as individual parties that are interested in funding a well-conceived plan.
It should be stated that the alternative to initiating technologies to helping solve the global warming threat, which may already be so far along that only an all-world effort suffices, is unspeakable, but nobody wants to believe it.
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
This article addresses the most current research on sea level rise, as well as adaptation measures being taken around the world. Of special interest, brilliant adaptation measures are taking place in the face of higher seas.
“Sea level has been fairly stable for 6,000 years, which is most of human civilization… but its risen eight (8) inches or twenty (20) centimeters in the last century, and the rate is tripling right now.” (Source: John Englander, Expert on Sea Level Rise, Talks with US Harbors About Changing Coastal Waters, July 5, 2022).
According to knowledgeable sources, regardless of mitigation efforts, sea levels are destined to rise by approximately one foot by 2050. Thereafter, fairly high probabilities indicate up to 5 feet-to-10 feet by the end of the century, which is considerably more than “up to 3 feet in a high-GHG emissions scenario” forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The oceans have absorbed 93% of the planet’s heat, and there’s no off switch to stop warming ocean waters from melting the world’s two largest ice structures Greenland and Antarctica. What if the oceans did not absorb 93% of the planet’s heat? According to scientists’ calculations in the multi-award-winning documentary Chasing Coral (2017) if oceans stopped absorbing heat, land temps would average 122°F.
During the 1990s Greenland and Antarctica combined lost 81 billion tons of ice mass per year on average. A decade later, during the decade of the 2010s, the ice mass loss increased 6-fold to 475 billion tons per year on average. (Source: Greenland, Antarctica Melting Six Times Faster Than in the 1990s, NASA, March 16, 2020)
NASA’s findings, published online in the journal Nature from an international team of 89 polar scientists from 50 organizations, are the most comprehensive assessment to date of the changing ice sheets. It is startling information that seems to predestine higher sea levels. The question of the decade, therefore: How to stop the runaway-freight-train loss of ice by Greenland and Antarctica? Is it even possible to control a warming ocean as the root cause?
Speaking of which, on August 30, 2022 the Journal of Geophysical Research published the following paper by A. T. Bradley, et al: The Influence of Pine Island Ice Shelf Calving on Basal Melting. (Basal melting occurs from heat delivered by the ocean beneath ice shelves.)
Synopsis of the Bradley paper: “Pine Island Ice Shelf in West Antarctica, which holds back enough ice to raise sea levels by 0.5 meters (1.5 feet), could be more vulnerable to complete disintegration than previously thought. A new study led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) scientists shows two processes whose recent enhancement already threatens the stability of the shelf can interact to increase the likelihood of collapse.” (Source: British Antarctic Survey, Scientists Expose Vulnerabilities of Critical Antarctic Ice Shelf, Phys.org, September 21, 2022)
Pine Island ice shelf, which serves to buttress Pine Island Glacier, is but one of a few hundred ice shelves surrounding Antarctica that hold back the potential of rapid flow of glacial ice to the sea. A collapsing ice shelf is equivalent to taking the goalie out of a hockey game; the net is wide open for rapid flow of the glacier to the sea. As it happens, an ice shelf collapse increases the rate of glacial flow by up to eight (8) times.
It goes without saying that collapsing ice sheets that buttress glacial ice flow are not a welcomed event for the world’s 136 port cities, each with more than one million inhabitants.
Scientists are still shaking in their boots over the shocking disintegration/collapse of Conger Ice Shelf six months ago. It’s the first-ever ice shelf collapse on East Antarctica, which is the coldest and driest location on the planet. On March 14-16 Conger ice shelf suddenly disappeared from satellite photos. It had been there for over a thousand years. All it took was an unusual warm spell and more than a thousand years of solid ice collapsed within only a few days! It’s little wonder scientists are still shaken. East Antarctica has always been considered invincible… until the recent past.
US Harbors of Rockland, ME recently interviewed John Englander, an oceanographer and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz and one of the world’s foremost speakers on sea level rise. (Source: John Englander, Expert on Sea Level Rise, Talks with US Harbors About Changing Coastal Waters, July 5, 2022).
According to Englander: “By midcentury, it’s going to be at least a foot higher and by the end of the century, perhaps 5-to-10 feet higher. We need to wake up to a new reality about sea level because sea level determines the shoreline… We need to start now re-designing harbors for the future… Adaptation to higher sea levels is the future.”
Of major concern, “The rate of global sea level rise has tripled in 30 years. It’s gone from an average of a millimeter and a half up to five millimeters in 30 years… if we only melt 5% of global glacial ice, it’s 10 feet of sea level rise.”
Yet, Englander says: “The good news is that we have time to adapt. The bad news is it’s going to change harbors; it’s going to change every coastline from big cities like Jakarta and New York to rural fishing villages in Thailand and Africa.”
A leading institution for ocean studies is NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which will increasingly be an important resource for civil engineers around the world. A recent NASA JPL seminar provides perspective: (1) sea level change (2) how fast it is rising (3) contributing factors, and (4) the influence of land hydrology and melting ice. Josh Willis an oceanographer at NASA JPL recently conducted the following seminar: Rising Tide: Tackling Sea Level Rise from Above and Below, California Institute of Technology, 2022.
The ocean’s cover more than 2/3rds of the planet’s surface, and they are rising. In Willis’s view, “it’s a bit of a startling idea that 2/3rds of the planet is rising.” The rising sea level is a well-documented event since the early nineties by a series of satellites that have been launched to give a record of how sea levels change all across the planet. The satellites with launch dates: Sentinel 6 (2020) Jason 3 (2016) OSTM/Jason 2 (2008) Jason 1 (2001) and TOPEX/Poseidon (1992).
Thereby, NASA has tools to measure sea level rise as well as its causes. In precise fashion, satellite measurements of the ocean repeatedly occur every second of the hour. This produces an entire map of the ocean once every ten days, providing a global picture of the ocean, similar to tidal gauges of the world.
According to Willis: The planet has been warming pretty rapidly for the past 100 years. And on an historic basis, it’s happening very quickly. What’s different today is that over the last 150 years we’ve changed the composition of the atmosphere radically and increased CO2 by almost a factor of two, meaning we’re running at double the rate of CO2 of the past one-half million years. This is a major global change that will not go away for a long time.
As such, we are changing how the climate works as most of the excessive energy or heat that’s trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the ocean; it’s actually 93%. Thus the oceans get warmer as well as bigger as heated water expands, which accounts for 1/3rd of modern day sea level rise. In total (1) melting inland glaciers and (2) melting ice sheets and (3) warming of the water account for sea level rise.
Significantly, the past 150 years of sea level rise is unprecedented in human history. A graph of the last 30 years of satellite recordings demonstrates the rate of rise increasing during the first 10 years at 2mm per year followed by 3mm in the middle 10 years and 4.5mm per year over the past 10 years. That rate of rise has more than doubled in only 30 years. NASA views this as one of the most comprehensive indicators of how much human influence has changed the climate.
Additionally, Grace satellite missions are another source that actually weigh the land. For example, since the early 2000s, Greenland (20+ feet of water trapped in ice) has lost 5,000,000,000 (five trillion) tons of ice. The heated oceans are responsible for melting Greenland around the edges of the island, which is the major contributor to sea level rise.
New research by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland claims that anthropogenic-influenced climate change has set in motion irreversible Greenland ice loses amounting to 110 trillion tons, which would trigger nearly a one-foot global sea level rise this century on its own. (Source: Jason E. Box, et al, Greenland Ice Sheet Climate Disequilibrium and Committee Sea-Level Rise, Nature Climate Change, August 29, 2022).
Moreover, the National Ocean Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 2022 Sea Level Rise Report technical analysis provides an updated projection for U.S. coastal waters thru the year 2150. Accordingly, the next 30 years or today’s generation will see sea level rise of 10-12 inches or one solid foot along U.S. coastlines. This projection is equivalent to the sea level rise of the past 100 years, 1920-2020 happening in only 30 years. This is one more example of acceleration.
Making matters much more tenuous, NOAA warns: “Failing to curb future emissions (ed.- which is about where mitigation efforts stand today) could cause an additional 1.5-5.0 feet of rise for a total of 3.5-7.0 feet by the end of this century.” (Source: 2022 Sea Level Rise Technical Report, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).
Adaptation to Higher Sea Levels
According to John Englander, society needs a new vision of the planet. It needs to learn to “build higher and smarter.”
For example, Korea is building the first floating community for thousands of homes. Busan Metropolitan City, Korea, the second-largest city in South Korea and home to the country’s largest port is home to Oceanix Busan, a floating city prototype to house 12,000 people. The floating city will be dependent upon its own energy, water, and food without relying upon city resources. Completion date is set for 2025. The design will help regenerate marine ecosystems by promoting coral reef growth underneath the complex.
In the Netherlands, floating homes of Schoonschip in Amsterdam rise up during flood periods with utilities attached via an umbilical that absorbs movement. During flooding episodes, homes float and then settle back down to the ground able to handle 6-8 feet of sea level rise.
Finest Bay Area Development (Finnish/Estonian), Shimizu Corporation (Japanese), and Blue21 (Dutch) have plans to build Green Float Tallinn, a floating island city for 40,000 inhabitants on the Baltic Sea. The floating island will not generate waste. Resources will either be reused, recycled, or upcycled. The objective is to achieve food self-sufficiency, energy autarky, circular water systems, and carbon positivity within a closed loop system.
The Dutch floating home model is now a project under construction in the Maldives. The first block of floating homes for the Maldives Floating City development of 5,000 homes are tethered to a lagoon floor and linked together.
Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK are all strengthening design standards for building and coastal infrastructure to protect against sea level rise according to the OECD Responding to Rising Seas report, utilizing sea walls, surge barriers, water pumps, and overflow chambers.
China is building sponge cities. The underlying principle of sponge cities is to give water enough room and enough time to drain into the soil where it falls instead of channeling it away and sequestering it in dams. Sponge cities require large green spaces. An example is the coastal city Ninbgo, where an eco-corridor on an uninhabitable post-industrial site turned the channelized river into a meandering waterway surrounded by native plants that filter water. It has become a habitat for native flora and fauna and improved water quality as well as control over flooding.
British architecture studio Grimshaw and Dutch manufacturer Concrete Valley are developing Modular Water Dwellings, floating concrete and glass houses for areas subject to flooding. The dwellings will be prefabricated in factories and used to turn waterfronts into new city neighborhoods. Solar panels will allow each dwelling to self-generate power. Prototypes are under construction.
San Francisco Bay, which has lost 90% of its wetlands, still has some of the most important coastal wetlands in the Western Hemisphere. It is working to expand and protect its wetlands, which are key to a functioning hydrology system: “Wetlands not only provide valuable habitat for fish and birds, acting as the base of the marine ecosystem, but wetlands have also been shown to be one of nature’s most efficient plant communities for capturing carbon from the atmosphere, trapping organic carbon quicker and better than forests, thus reducing carbon in the atmosphere. Coastal wetlands also help to buffer our communities from sea level rise, acting as a sponge to capture floodwaters before they reach our homes and businesses. In short, wetlands, if protected, expanded and restored, are one of the most valuable ecosystem tools for reducing the impact of climate change.” (Source: Expand & Restore Bay Wetlands to Fight Climate Change, April 30, 2022)
Adaptation planning has never been more important. Mauna Loa, Hawaii measurements of CO2 continue a relentless upwards trajectory, causing more global warming, which nowadays should be labeled “global heating,” as sea level goes ever higher, and higher, at ever faster rates.
Mauna Loa CO2 measurements:
August 2022 @ 417.19 ppm
August 2021 @ 414.47 ppm
August 2020 @ 412.78 ppm
During the 1960s the global growth rate of CO2 averaged +0.8 ppm. Today it’s nearly three times that rate. Correspondingly, the rate of sea level rising of the past 30 years has more than doubled.
Since the beginnings of humanity when rubbing two sticks together was an eye-opening moment nothing compares to today’s rate of CO2 and sea level rise. Could it be that a few thousand years of the wonderful Goldilocks era not too hot, not to cold fostered complacency? Which, in turn, propagates the brand-new Age of Adaptation.
Post Script
Adaptation takes on new significance when consideration is given to the following update from a highly respected source. The following statement comes from Climate Dominoes, Publisher: Breakthrough – National Centre for Climate Restoration, Melbourne, May 2022 by David Spratt, Climate Code Red, September 28, 2022:
“At just 1.2°C of global average warming, tipping points have been passed for several large Earth systems. These include Arctic sea ice, the Greenland Ice Sheet, The Amundsen Sea glaciers in West Antarctica, the eastern Amazonian rainforest, and the world’s coral systems. The world will warm to 1.5°C by around 2030, with additional warming well beyond 1.5°C in the system after that. Yet even at the current level of warming, these systems will continue to move to qualitatively different states. In most cases, strong positive feedbacks are driving abrupt change. At higher levels of warming, the rate of change will quicken. The meme that “we have eight years to avoid 1.5°C and tipping points” should be deleted from the climate advocacy vocabulary. It is simply wrong.”
“Certainly, in the case of West Antarctica, the evidence continues to pile in that the Thwaites glacier is primed to trigger a much wider loss of ice mass across the Amundsen sea glacial system, for example: Thwaites ‘doomsday’ glacier could begin rapid melt with ‘just a small kick’, researchers say.”
“Similarly, scientists now report that Greenland ice sheet has passed a point of system stability and is now “irreversibly committed” to a significant sea-level rise regardless of twenty-first-century climate pathways.”
Robert Hunziker is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and published in over 50 journals, magazines and sites worldwide.
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