Snippets from the Interwebs 3

China is installing the world's largest system (click link for Technology Review article) for generating electricity by collecting methane gas emitted by fermenting cow manure. Anaerobic digestion systems are very highly favoured in future to digest not only manure, which is what everyone is familiar with but also green and food waste – even special energy crops. It’s true that capturing methane and burning it produces CO2 but the carbon is from the planet’s “currrent account”, not the fossil fuel “deposit account” that contributes to altering the climate. Methane is also 23 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2 so it makes sense to collect and burn it anyway, particularly if by doing so, the obtained energy substitutes for and displaces the use of fossil fuel carbon.
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If all the toilet roll inner tubes produced every year in the United States were placed end to end they would stretch for a million miles, or 4 times further than the Moon
Scott paper have announced a new “tube free” toilet roll – click link to see original story
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Ocean acidification
This article from the geological society (yes, the original British, established in 1807, one) has more on ocean acidification. Scientists, from the University of Plymouth and the University of Santa Catarina, Brazil have studied the effect, on foraminifera (a species of plankton with a calcium carbonate shell) of increased levels of CO2 in the ocean. They state that at a mean pH of 7.8, the pH level predicted for the end of the century, calcified organisms begin to disappear, and non-calcifying ones take over. The current level is about 8.07. The pre-industrial level was about 8.18, thus ocean acidification is actually a reduction in alkalinity. Sea water des not need to actually become acidic before very serious effects happen.
Unless we curb CO2 emissions (forget climate change for the time being) we risk mass extinctions, degrading coastal waters and encouraging outbreaks of toxic jellyfish and algae. Similar lowering of ocean pH levels were closely associated with massive extinctions in the past.  Plankton are right at the bottom of the ocean food chain and they also sequester colossal quantities of CO2 in their shells, not to mention replenishing the oxygen supply of the atmoshere. We shouldn’t do anything to change them - but we sure as h*ll are doing.
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Peak Everything
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development reported, back at the end of last year, that an expert group had been set up by the European Commission  to screen a list of forty-nine "potentially critical" raw materials whose availability to industry could come under threat as global competition for natural resources intensifies. Of particular worry to Europeans are rare earths, collections of metals and elements found in a wide range of gadgets and consumer goods, including batteries used in electric cars. The Chinese are developing a stranglehold on supplies of many of the most important ones. Recycling will never mean as much as it will do when we can’t get enough stuff to make our stuff.
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Blade Runner meets Babylon

Text and picture adapted from from the New York Times 29/10/2010 (click picture for link to original story)
One family are going to live in this 27 story house in Mumbai. All five of them.
The tower, known as Antilia, is the new home of India’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, whose $27 billion fortune also ranks him among the richest people in the world. And even here in the country’s financial capital, where residents bear daily witness to the stark extremes of Indian wealth and poverty, Mr. Ambani’s building is so spectacularly over the top that the city’s already elastic boundaries of excess and disparity are being stretched to new dimensions.
Here’s the understatement of the year:
“A gawking city has greeted the new tower with a mixture of moralizing and astonishment, envy and condemnation, all sprinkled with Freudian analysis of the most basic question: Why did he do it?
“We are all sort of perplexed,” said Alyque Padamsee, a long-time advertising executive and actor in the city. “I think people see it as a bit show-offy.”
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One way to do “food security”
Land grabbing… or at least buying up land.  South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, India, Saudi Arabia, China, Qatar, Kuwait. are buying up large areas in Africa to supply themselves with food and other agricultural products. Also leading the rush are international agribusinesses, investment banks, hedge funds, commodity traders, sovereign wealth funds as well as UK pension funds, foundations and individuals attracted by some of the world's cheapest land.  Here’s a link to an Observer investigation of this trend.
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LONDON, Sept 28 (Reuters) - Scotland should produce enough renewable electricity to meet all its power demand by 2025, First Minister Alex Salmond said. "I'm confident that by 2025 we will produce at least 100 percent of our electricity needs from renewables alone, and together with other sources it will enable us to become a net exporter of clean, green energy”

More vinegar on your fish, sir?

Rising greenhouse gas levels are not “just” a threat to the climate, food supplies, habitats etc. Elevated levels of CO2 are dissolving in the oceans and are acidifying them. Normally, the ocean is slightly alkaline but it is getting less so due to our excess emissions. Some might argue that if the seas are absorbing CO2 then  we don’t have to reduce fossil fuel use. The problem is that even with this effect, we are still “gaining” – the Earth’s systems can absorb a certain amount of emissions of CO2 per year but, on top of the natural emissions, we are adding sufficient extra CO2 to overwhelm the Earth’s ability to absorb it – that is why CO2 levels in the atmosphere are steadily rising.

The oceans currently are acting as a partial buffer to our emissions but buffering solutions (seawater in this case) only work for a while before approaching saturation. As this starts to happen, the oceans will slow in their ability to absorb CO2 and, at that point, if we have not reduced our emissions, there will be a steepening rise in the amount of CO2 building up in the atmosphere, leading to an increasing boost (a positive feedback) to the greenhouse effect boost. This won’t be a runaway feedback, because the greenhouse potential of CO2 reduces logarithmically as the concentration increases, but it still won’t be a good thing.

Ocean acidication is an astonishing long term threat that has been getting very little publicity. The professional video at the end of this blog is an attempt to rectify that.  Here’s an article about acidification which paints a worrying picture. Here’s a link to a scientific paper in Nature. Here’s the Wikipedia article about it.

If we continue on our current emissions path without drastically reducing our use of fossil fuels, the oceans will steadily get more acidic over the next couple of hundred years.The problem with this is that many of the smallest organisms in the sea, such as plankton, which form the basis of the oceanic food chain, have shells or other structures that are vulnerable to increased acid in sea water. There are few tipping points known for certain in climate/Earth science.  One of them in prehistory is when CO2 reached about 1000 ppm leading to an “anoxic event”. In the Permian-Triassic era (250 million years ago) mass die off of species, up to 96 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrate species became extinct; it was the only known mass extinction of insects. Fifty-seven percent of all families and 83% of all genera were killed. There are various reasons posited for this event but a strong contender is hypercapnia (too much CO2) which causes anoxic events.

Methane release, from when permafrost melts and releases its stored CO2 and methane, gives a large boost to the greenhouse effect. Methane however is a relatively short lived gas in the atmosphere – it ends up being oxidised to CO2. A worse situation would be the release of methane clathrates from under the sea bed – a so-called “clathrate gun”. Clathrates are “condensed” methane held in a sort of waxy ice which is stable  only because it is cold and under great pressure at the bottom of the sea. Warm it up or remove the pressure and it bubbles up as the powerful greenhouse gas methane. Gas releases from undersea methane clathrate deposits have caused a sudden powerful excess greenhouse effect which was thought to be responsible for mass species extinctions in the past, like those referenced above

Here’s a 21 minute video from the NRDC, narrated by Sigourney Weaver, about the increasing acidification of the oceans - which is happening right now. As I said at the beginning, it’s an under-reported consequence of increasing carbon dioxide levels specifically, as opposed to general greenhouse gases.

It’s worth double clicking on the headline link to go directly to Youtube rather than watching it on the embedded player because the film is quite beautiful too and worth watching large.

Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification