Posts
The
headline says It all -
Humans:
the real threat to life on Earth
If
population levels continue to rise at the current rate, our
grandchildren will see the Earth plunged into an unprecedented
environmental crisis, argues computational scientist Stephen Emmott
in this extract from his book Ten Billion
30
June, 2013
Earth
is home to millions of species. Just one dominates it. Us. Our
cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities have modified almost
every part of our planet. In fact, we are having a profound impact on
it. Indeed, our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities are
now the drivers of every global problem we face. And every one of
these problems is accelerating as we continue to grow towards a
global population of 10 billion. In fact, I believe we can rightly
call the situation we're in right now an emergency – an
unprecedented planetary emergency.
We
humans emerged as a species about 200,000 years ago. In geological
time, that is really incredibly recent. Just 10,000 years ago, there
were one million of us. By 1800, just over 200 years ago, there were
1 billion of us. By 1960, 50 years ago, there were 3 billion of us.
There are now over 7 billion of us. By 2050, your children, or your
children's children, will be living on a planet with at least 9
billion other people. Some time towards the end of this century,
there will be at least 10 billion of us. Possibly more.
We
got to where we are now through a number of civilisation- and
society-shaping "events", most notably the agricultural
revolution, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution and
– in the West – the public-health revolution. By 1980, there were
4 billion of us on the planet. Just 10 years later, in 1990, there
were 5 billion of us. By this point initial signs of the consequences
of our growth were starting to show. Not the least of these was on
water. Our demand for water – not just the water we drank but the
water we needed for food production and to make all the stuff we were
consuming – was going through the roof. But something was starting
to happen to water.
Back
in 1984, journalists reported from Ethiopia about a famine of
biblical proportions caused by widespread drought. Unusual drought,
and unusual flooding, was increasing everywhere: Australia, Asia, the
US, Europe. Water, a vital resource we had thought of as abundant,
was now suddenly something that had the potential to be scarce.
By
2000 there were 6 billion of us. It was becoming clear to the world's
scientific community that the accumulation of CO2, methane and other
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – as a result of increasing
agriculture, land use and the production, processing and
transportation of everything we were consuming – was changing the
climate. And that, as a result, we had a serious problem on our
hands; 1998 had been the warmest year on record. The 10 warmest years
on record have occurred since 1998.
We
hear the term "climate" every day, so it is worth thinking
about what we actually mean by it. Obviously, "climate" is
not the same as weather. The climate is one of the Earth's
fundamental life support systems, one that determines whether or not
we humans are able to live on this planet. It is generated by four
components: the atmosphere (the air we breathe); the hydrosphere (the
planet's water); the cryosphere (the ice sheets and glaciers); the
biosphere (the planet's plants and animals). By now, our activities
had started to modify every one of these components.
Our
emissions of CO2 modify our atmosphere. Our increasing water use had
started to modify our hydrosphere. Rising atmospheric and sea-surface
temperature had started to modify the cryosphere, most notably in the
unexpected shrinking of the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets. Our
increasing use of land, for agriculture, cities, roads, mining – as
well as all the pollution we were creating – had started to modify
our biosphere. Or, to put it another way: we had started to change
our climate.
There
are now more than 7 billion of us on Earth. As our numbers continue
to grow, we continue to increase our need for far more water, far
more food, far more land, far more transport and far more energy. As
a result, we are accelerating the rate at which we're changing our
climate. In fact, our activities are not only completely
interconnected with but now also interact with, the complex system we
live on: Earth. It is important to understand how all this is
connected.
Let's
take one important, yet little known, aspect of increasing water use:
"hidden water". Hidden water is water used to produce
things we consume but typically do not think of as containing water.
Such things include chicken, beef, cotton, cars, chocolate and mobile
phones. For example: it takes around 3,000 litres of water to produce
a burger. In 2012 around five billion burgers were consumed in the UK
alone. That's 15 trillion litres of water – on burgers. Just in the
UK. Something like 14 billion burgers were consumed in the United
States in 2012. That's around 42 trillion litres of water. To produce
burgers in the US. In one year. It takes around 9,000 litres of water
to produce a chicken. In the UK alone we consumed around one billion
chickens in 2012. It takes around 27,000 litres of water to produce
one kilogram of chocolate. That's roughly 2,700 litres of water per
bar of chocolate. This should surely be something to think about
while you're curled up on the sofa eating it in your pyjamas.
But
I have bad news about pyjamas. Because I'm afraid your cotton pyjamas
take 9,000 litres of water to produce. And it takes 100 litres of
water to produce a cup of coffee. And that's before any water has
actually been added to your coffee. We probably drank about 20
billion cups of coffee last year in the UK. And – irony of ironies
– it takes something like four litres of water to produce a
one-litre plastic bottle of water. Last year, in the UK alone, we
bought, drank and threw away nine billion plastic water bottles.
That is 36 billion litres of water, used completely unnecessarily.
Water wasted to produce bottles – for water. And it takes around
72,000 litres of water to produce one of the 'chips' that typically
powers your laptop, Sat Nav, phone, iPad and your car. There were
over two billion such chips produced in 2012. That is at least 145
trillion litres of water. On semiconductor chips. In short, we're
consuming water, like food, at a rate that is completely
unsustainable.
Demand
for land for food is going to double – at least – by 2050, and
triple – at least – by the end of this century. This means that
pressure to clear many of the world's remaining tropical rainforests
for human use is going to intensify every decade, because this is
predominantly the only available land that is left for expanding
agriculture at scale. Unless Siberia thaws out before we finish
deforestation. By 2050, 1bn hectares of land is likely to be cleared
to meet rising food demands from a growing population. This is an
area greater than the US. And accompanying this will be three
gigatons per year extra CO2 emissions.If Siberia does thaw out before
we finish our deforestation, it would result in a vast amount of new
land being available for agriculture, as well as opening up a very
rich source of minerals, metals, oil and gas. In the process this
would almost certainly completely change global geopolitics. Siberia
thawing would turn Russia into a remarkable economic and political
force this century because of its newly uncovered mineral,
agricultural and energy resources. It would also inevitably be
accompanied by vast stores of methane – currently sealed under the
Siberian permafrost tundra – being released, greatly accelerating
our climate problem even further.
Amazon
rainforest smoulders after being cleared for cattle pasture in
Brazil. Photograph: Michael Nichols/Getty Images
Meanwhile,
another 3 billion people are going to need somewhere to live. By
2050, 70% of us are going to be living in cities. This century will
see the rapid expansion of cities, as well as the emergence of
entirely new cities that do not yet exist. It's worth mentioning that
of the 19 Brazilian cities that have doubled in population in the
past decade, 10 are in the Amazon. All this is going to use yet more
land.
We
currently have no known means of being able to feed 10 billion of us
at our current rate of consumption and with our current agricultural
system. Indeed, simply to feed ourselves in the next 40 years, we
will need to produce more food than the entire agricultural output of
the past 10,000 years combined. Yet food productivity is set to
decline, possibly very sharply, over the coming decades due to:
climate change; soil degradation and desertification – both of
which are increasing rapidly in many parts of the world; and water
stress. By the end of this century, large parts of the planet will
not have any usable water.
At
the same time, the global shipping and airline sectors are projected
to continue to expand rapidly every year, transporting more of us,
and more of the stuff we want to consume, around the planet year on
year. That is going to cause enormous problems for us in terms of
more CO2 emissions, more black carbon, and more pollution from mining
and processing to make all this stuff.
But
think about this. In transporting us and our stuff all over the
planet, we are also creating a highly efficient network for the
global spread of potentially catastrophic diseases. There was a
global pandemic just 95 years ago – the Spanish flu pandemic, which
is now estimated to have killed up to 100 million people. And that's
before one of our more questionable innovations – the budget
airline – was invented. The combination of millions of people
travelling around the world every day, plus millions more people
living in extremely close proximity to pigs and poultry – often in
the same room, making a new virus jumping the species barrier more
likely – means we are increasing, significantly, the probability of
a new global pandemic. So no wonder then that epidemiologists
increasingly agree that a new global pandemic is now a matter of
"when" not "if".
We
are going to have to triple – at least – energy production by the
end of this century to meet expected demand. To meet that demand, we
will need to build, roughly speaking, something like: 1,800 of the
world's largest dams, or 23,000 nuclear power stations, 14m wind
turbines, 36bn solar panels, or just keep going with predominantly
oil, coal and gas – and build the 36,000 new power stations that
means we will need.Our existing oil, coal and gas reserves alone are
worth trillions of dollars. Are governments and the world's major
oil, coal and gas companies – some of the most influential
corporations on Earth – really going to decide to leave the money
in the ground, as demand for energy increases relentlessly? I doubt
it.
Meanwhile
the emerging climate problem is on an entirely different scale. The
problem is that we may well be heading towards a number of critical
"tipping points" in the global climate system. There is a
politically agreed global target – driven by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – to limit the global average
temperature rise to 2C. The rationale for this target is that a rise
above 2C carries a significant risk of catastrophic climate change
that would almost certainly lead to irreversible planetary "tipping
points", caused by events such as the melting of the Greenland
ice shelf, the release of frozen methane deposits from Arctic tundra,
or dieback of the Amazon. In fact, the first two are happening now –
at below the 2C threshold.
As
for the third, we're not waiting for climate change to do this: we're
doing it right now through deforestation. And recent research shows
that we look certain to be heading for a larger rise in global
average temperatures than 2C – a far larger rise. It is now very
likely that we are looking at a future global average rise of 4C –
and we can't rule out a rise of 6C. This will be absolutely
catastrophic. It will lead to runaway climate change, capable of
tipping the planet into an entirely different state, rapidly. Earth
will become a hellhole. In the decades along the way, we will witness
unprecedented extremes in weather, fires, floods, heatwaves, loss of
crops and forests, water stress and catastrophic sea-level rises.
Large parts of Africa will become permanent disaster areas. The
Amazon could be turned into savannah or even desert. And the entire
agricultural system will be faced with an unprecedented threat.
More
"fortunate" countries, such as the UK, the US and most of
Europe, may well look like something approaching militarised
countries, with heavily defended border controls designed to prevent
millions of people from entering, people who are on the move because
their own country is no longer habitable, or has insufficient water
or food, or is experiencing conflict over increasingly scarce
resources. These people will be "climate migrants". The
term "climate migrants" is one we will increasingly have to
get used to. Indeed, anyone who thinks that the emerging global state
of affairs does not have great potential for civil and international
conflict is deluding themselves. It is no coincidence that almost
every scientific conference that I go to about climate change now has
a new type of attendee: the military.
Every
which way you look at it, a planet of 10 billion looks like a
nightmare. What, then, are our options?
The
only solution left to us is to change our behaviour, radically and
globally, on every level. In short, we urgently need to consume less.
A lot less. Radically less. And we need to conserve more. A lot more.
To accomplish such a radical change in behaviour would also need
radical government action. But as far as this kind of change is
concerned, politicians are currently part of the problem, not part of
the solution, because the decisions that need to be taken to
implement significant behaviour change inevitably make politicians
very unpopular – as they are all too aware.
So
what politicians have opted for instead is failed diplomacy. For
example: The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, whose job it
has been for 20 years to ensure the stabilisation of greenhouse gases
in the Earth's atmosphere: Failed. The UN Convention to Combat
Desertification, whose job it's been for 20 years to stop land
degrading and becoming desert: Failed. The Convention on Biological
Diversity, whose job it's been for 20 years to reduce the rate of
biodiversity loss: Failed. Those are only three examples of failed
global initiatives. The list is a depressingly long one. And the way
governments justify this level of inaction is by exploiting public
opinion and scientific uncertainty. It used to be a case of, "We
need to wait for science to prove climate change is happening".
This is now beyond doubt. So now it's, "We need to wait for
scientists to be able to tell us what the impact will be and the
costs". And, "We need to wait for public opinion to get
behind action". But climate models will never be free from
uncertainties. And as for public opinion, politicians feel remarkably
free to ignore it when it suits them – wars, bankers' bonuses and
healthcare reforms, to give just three examples.
What
politicians and governments say about their commitment to tackling
climate change is completely different from what they are doing about
it.
What
about business? In 2008 a group of highly respected economists and
scientists led by Pavan Sukhdev, then a senior Deutsche Bank
economist, conducted an authoritative economic analysis of the value
of biodiversity. Their conclusion? The cost of the business
activities of the world's 3,000 largest corporations in loss or
damage to nature and the environment now stands at $2.2tn per year.
And rising. These costs will have to be paid for in the future. By
your children and your grandchildren. To quote Sukhdev: "The
rules of business urgently need to be changed, so corporations
compete on the basis of innovation, resource conservation and
satisfaction of multiple stakeholder demands, rather than on the
basis of who is most effective in influencing government regulation,
avoiding taxes and obtaining subsidies for harmful activities to
maximise the return for shareholders." Do I think that will
happen? No. What about us?
I
confess I used to find it amusing, but I am now sick of reading in
the weekend papers about some celebrity saying, "I gave up my
4×4 and now I've bought a Prius. Aren't I doing my bit for the
environment?" They are not doing their bit for the environment.
But it's not their fault. The fact is that they – we – are not
being well informed. And that's part of the problem. We're not
getting the information we need. The scale and the nature of the
problem is simply not being communicated to us. And when we are
advised to do something, it barely makes a dent in the problem. Here
are some of the changes we've been asked to make recently, by
celebrities who like to pronounce on this sort of thing, and by
governments, who should know better than to give out this kind of
nonsense as 'solutions': Switch off your mobile phone charger; wee in
the shower (my favourite); buy an electric car (no, don't); use two
sheets of loo roll rather than three. All of these are token gestures
that miss the fundamental fact that the scale and nature of the
problems we face are immense, unprecedented and possibly unsolvable.
The
behavioural changes that are required of us are so fundamental that
no one wants to make them. What are they? We need to consume less. A
lot less. Less food, less energy, less stuff. Fewer cars, electric
cars, cotton T-shirts, laptops, mobile phone upgrades. Far fewer.And
here it is worth pointing out that "we" refers to the
people who live in the west and the north of the globe. There are
currently almost 3 billion people in the world who urgently need to
consume more: more water, more food, more energy. Saying "Don't
have children" is utterly ridiculous. It contradicts every
genetically coded piece of information we contain, and one of the
most important (and fun) impulses we have. That said, the worst thing
we can continue to do – globally – is have children at the
current rate. If the current global rate of reproduction continues,
by the end of this century there will not be 10 billion of us.
According to the United Nations, Zambia's population is projected to
increase by 941% by the end of this century. The population of
Nigeria is projected to grow by 349% – to 730 million people.
Afghanistan
by 242%.
Democratic
Republic of Congo 213%.
Gambia
by 242%.
Guatemala
by 369%.
Iraq
by 344%.
Kenya
by 284%.
Liberia
by 300%.
Malawi
by 741%.
Mali
by 408%.
Niger
by 766%.
Somalia
by 663%.
Uganda
by 396%.
Yemen
by 299%.
Even
the United States' population is projected to grow by 54% by 2100,
from 315 million in 2012 to 478 million. I do just want to point out
that if the current global rate of reproduction continues, by the end
of this century there will not be 10 billion of us – there will be
28 billion of us.
Where
does this leave us? Let's look at it like this. If we discovered
tomorrow that there was an asteroid on a collision course with Earth
and – because physics is a fairly simple science – we were able
to calculate that it was going to hit Earth on 3 June 2072, and we
knew that its impact was going to wipe out 70% of all life on Earth,
governments worldwide would marshal the entire planet into
unprecedented action. Every scientist, engineer, university and
business would be enlisted: half to find a way of stopping it, the
other half to find a way for our species to survive and rebuild if
the first option proved unsuccessful. We are in almost precisely that
situation now, except that there isn't a specific date and there
isn't an asteroid. The problem is us. Why are we not doing more about
the situation we're in – given the scale of the problem and the
urgency needed – I simply cannot understand. We're spending €8bn
at Cern to discover evidence of a particle called the Higgs boson,
which may or may not eventually explain mass and provide a partial
thumbs-up for the standard model of particle physics. And Cern's
physicists are keen to tell us it is the biggest, most important
experiment on Earth. It isn't. The biggest and most important
experiment on Earth is the one we're all conducting, right now, on
Earth itself. Only an idiot would deny that there is a limit to how
many people our Earth can support. The question is, is it seven
billion (our current population), 10 billion or 28 billion? I think
we've already gone past it. Well past it.
Science
is essentially organised scepticism. I spend my life trying to prove
my work wrong or look for alternative explanations for my results.
It's called the Popperian condition of falsifiability. I hope I'm
wrong. But the science points to my not being wrong. We can rightly
call the situation we're in an unprecedented emergency. We urgently
need to do – and I mean actually do – something radical to avert
a global catastrophe. But I don't think we will. I think we're
fucked. I asked one of the most rational, brightest scientists I know
– a scientist working in this area, a young scientist, a scientist
in my lab – if there was just one thing he had to do about the
situation we face, what would it be? His reply? "Teach my son
how to use a gun."
