Prince Charles tells it like it is

Here is the whole of Prince Charles’ recent address to the Chartered Institution of Water and Environment Management (CIWEM). He mainly focuses on water, but brings in ecological economics and the necessity of putting a real value on the “services” which the ecosystem provides for us for free so that the market would work in favour of sustainable approaches in future as opposed to today where  the market mostly discriminates against sensible ways because ecosystem services do not appear on the accountant’s “bottom line”. _____________________________________________________

 

ROYAL REFLECTIONS

Marking the 25^th anniversary of becoming an Honorary Fellow of CIWEM, HRH the Prince of Wales considers the changes that have taken place in the environment sector and the challenges ahead

It hardly seems possible that I have been an Honorary Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environment Management (CIWEM) for 25 years.  I remember accepting the invitation because I wanted to encourage the wider world to see the crucial importance of environmental management as a profession.  Believe it or not, environmental management was then still seen by many as something to be added to the job description of health and safety managers.   At about the same time I found myself in distinctly hot water for venturing to suggest that we should no longer use the North Sea as 'a bottomless pit for our waste,' so an alternative view is that I was looking for safety in numbers.  Either way, those days are long gone.  The Institution has played a remarkable leadership role in establishing and guiding the profession, and long may that continue.

The problem, of course, is that over the same period the range and severity of the environmental problems we face has grown exponentially.  The challenges are no longer just about 'cleaning up after ourselves;' they are about taking action to ensure the survival of our own species, against the clock of climate change and natural resource depletion. 

Water is at the heart of many environmental challenges, as it is of life itself.  The availability of water has shaped both human existence and geography, defining where and how we live, and constraining our ambitions.  It remains the essential natural resource, on which all else depends.  Yet, perhaps because wherever there is life there is water, we take it for granted.  As Rachel Carson, author of  Silent Spring, put it:  'In an age when Man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference.'

That indifference, coupled with a view that we can engineer our way out of any conceivable difficulty, may yet be our undoing.  Sometimes achieving sustainability may require what appear to be backward steps.  I remember seeing a vivid example of this in Rajasthan.  Traditional, village-based systems of harvesting the monsoon rains, developed over thousands of years, fell into disrepair in the 1950s when powerful pumps allowed groundwater to be extracted instead.  But this turned out to be an unsustainable, short-term solution because the groundwater was not being replenished.  Levels eventually dropped below the reach of the pumps, irrigation became impossible and the villages began to decline as people drifted away to look for work in the cities.  The breakthrough came from a remarkable man called Rajendra Singh.  He encouraged a local self-help approach to rebuilding the ancient system of dams and ponds and started harvesting the monsoon once again.  Groundwater levels crept back up, previously dried-up rivers started flowing again and, 20 years later, more than half a million people in Rajasthan are feeling the benefit.

Closer to home, water harvesting is just as important.  Yet we still need to identify the best strategies and it is clear that there are no easy answers, especially when energy use and ensuring public health are added to the equation.  With the wisdom of hindsight it would, of course, have been better if our domestic water supply systems had been developed with separate potable and non-potable networks.  That may be one way ahead but, in the meantime, we need to identify the best strategies for the systems we have.  Building large scale reservoirs and filling them at times of peak river flow is one approach to rainwater harvesting.  At the other end of the scale it is clear that much more can be done to harvest rainwater and grey water for non-potable uses, though I note some important caveats in the Institution's position paper on that subject.  Equally, it seems there may be a role for greater reuse of sewage effluent, at least for non-potable uses.

Similarly, there have been problems ever since urban man first began to requisition rivers and streams to take away his wastes.  As early as 1388, it became illegal to dump animal waste, dung or litter into England's rivers.  Environment Agency employees might like to note that the penalties for offenders then included hanging!  As with clean water, managing wastewater brings network issues.  In particular, the legacy of combined sewers taking both human waste and surface water run-off causes capacity problems, leading to damaging overflows to rivers, which have in all other respects been cleaned up.  Once again there are no easy answers, especially in large conurbations where space is at a premium.

I know that these are the issues with which many members of the Institution will be grappling on a daily basis, so the last thing I am going to do is offer any advice.  What I would like to encourage is closer involvement by water and environmental management professionals in what, to me, seems to be the most important development in a wider field of interest.

As the economist Herman Daly pointed out, the environment is, 'the envelope that contains, sustains and provisions the economy,' - not the other way round.  Yet in a world where economics has, rightly or wrongly, the greatest possible influence on decision-making, the environment is always in danger of being discounted.  The answer, surely, is to find ways of measuring the economic benefits provided to mankind by the environment - in the form of biodiversity and ecosystems. 

The concept of 'ecosystem services' has been discussed for a number of years, but the debate has moved on considerably with an initiative known as The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, or TEEB for short.  There is now a series of  TEEB reports setting out not only the benefits of taking into account the value of ecosystem services and biodiversity in making decisions and choices, but also explaining how this can be done, with some excellent case studies.  There are reports addressed to policy-makers, to business, to regional and local government and to citizens. 

TEEB's reports also reiterate something I have long tried to encourage businesses to recognise - that we should not regard this type of valuation and pricing as a tax. We should see it as an incentive for powerful investment for the future; something to be achieved not through imposition and dictum, but through reassessment and realignment of thinking and exchange and discussion.

In this regard, it is perhaps worth noting that looking forward to 2030, research by McKinsey & Co. for the Water Resources Group indicates that global water requirements will be 40 per cent greater than the current sustainable supply, assuming current rates of economic growth.  This is because agricultural demand is expected to grow substantially, while urban and industrial use will also grow strongly.  At the same time the need to maintain environmental flow requirements to prevent the collapse of important riparian ecosystems will place additional limits on water availability. 

Most of our natural capital has not been properly valued and charged for, because assets like fish in the oceans, water in rivers, rainfall, a clean and temperate atmosphere and communities, have always been thought of as limitless and freely available. It is also, of course, because valuing these things and charging for natural capital can be difficult when the assets do not necessarily belong to a particular individual, organisation or country. In short, providing quantitative figures for qualitative values has proved a somewhat elusive science.

Measuring the contribution to the economy made by ecosystems and biodiversity could be an important step towards maintaining the productivity of the natural resource base on which we all depend.  It could also help to quantify the risks of both action and inaction, thereby helping to drive good decision-making. 

This is not just a job for economists, or for policy-makers, or even for scientists and practitioners.  It is a role for the whole of society and I do hope that the Institution will build on its commendably concise and readable position papers by identifying the distinctive contribution it could make to the discussion on valuing ecosystem services.  There is no time to lose.

The profession of environmental management has come a long way in 25 years, but the decisions you take, encourage and inform in the next few years will have a cumulative effect upon humanity's ability to survive in the long-term.  So I will continue to watch your progress with the greatest of interest.

Saturn im Morgenlicht – being there

The title to this post is a reference to an Arthur C Clarke story from the March 1961 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which I used to devour. Saturn im Morgenlicht (Saturn in the morning light) always seemed more romantic than the English version - Saturn Rising. Now we can actually see it.

 

Along the same lines as a previous astronomical video post I did (Feb 2011) – If Jupiter was the same distance as the moon – comes this one following. It’s rather majestic.

Explanation: What would it look like to approach Saturn in a spaceship? One doesn't have to just imagine -- the Cassini spacecraft did just this in 2004, recording thousands of images along the way, and thousands more since entering orbit. Recently, some of these images have been digitally tweaked, cropped, and compiled into the following inspiring video which is part of a larger developing IMAX movie project named Outside In. In the last sequence, Saturn looms increasingly large on approach as cloudy Titan swoops below. With Saturn whirling around in the background, Cassini is next depicted flying over Mimas, with large Herschel Crater clearly visible. Saturn's majestic rings then take over the show as Cassini crosses Saturn's thin ring plane. Dark shadows of the ring appear on Saturn itself. Finally, the enigmatic ice-geyser moon Enceladus appears in the distance and then is approached just as the video clip ends.

5.6k Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation from stephen v2 on Vimeo.

Joined up thinking! – watch the dots being joined up - must see video

Divide and conquer is a time honoured strategy. Manmade climate change deniers often cherry pick isolated facts or pieces of evidence to create or bolster their deceptions. They rely upon the short attention span/sound-bite media world we live in to make their case. They shamelessly re-use demolished arguments and misrepresented research because they know that the general public has a short memory and if they just repackage the same ideas in different wording, to put a different spin it, they will get away with it with a large number of casual observers.

Illustrative of this is the “weather versus climate” meme whereby for example the delusionists will shout out that Smalltown, Pennsylvania has the coldest/deepest temperatures/snow since the oldest resident can remember and therefore how can the Earth be warming up? Clearly all those thousands of scientists must be wrong! This meme relies upon the short memories or insular focus of too many who are just not that aware of, or care, what is happening elsewhere apart from in their own backyards.

We had an unusual pretty cold snowy patch before Christmas in Jersey but that didn’t mean that the Earth was cooling, did it? It meant only that the UK was having a cold snap. Now, we in Jersey are having a prolonged period of high temperatures and virtually non-existent rainfall. That does not mean that the Earth is warming up.  No one event, no matter how dramatic, can prove a statistical trend. However, if one adds up all the unusual events like this across the whole world and starts to see a trend of unusual events happening – like two once-in-a-hundred-years floods/droughts/tornadoes etc. happening within five years -  then the truly intelligent should start to question whether there is something globally unusual going on.

The video below -

“A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never.”

- is a stunning narration-with-pictures of a recent Washington Post op-ed by Bill McKibben, author and founder of 350.org. Bill’s organisation campaigns that the most sensible thing to do is to reduce current atmospheric CO2 levels (390'ish ppm) to 350 or below in order to give us the best chance of avoiding the worst that could happen. The video below is narrated and illustrated by Stephen Thomson of Plomomedia.com

Caution: for those who have irony/intelligence bypasses (far too many people in Jersey...) the style of narration is IRONIC. He is PARODYING the deniers and showing just how blisteringly stupid, ignorant and destructive they are. He constantly tells you not to make connections between the frequency of extreme weather events happening now and climate change predictions. He tells you not to notice any patterns and not to connect each separate event. In short he suggests that burying your ostrich heads in the sand is the most comforting way to react.

 

In addition to the events mentioned by Bill, here’s a few more from a comment on “Climate Crock of the Week” Peter Sinclair’s blog. Peter was generally praising the video and started out by saying “damn, I wish I’d done this”.

Comment by otter17: “Also, there is no need to worry about the Larsen B ice shelf collapse, the Manhattan-sized iceberg falling off of Greenland, the near-unanimous melting of glaciers worldwide, the coastal flooding in Brazil in 2010, the increased frequency of European heatwaves this past decade, the changing growing seasons, the coral bleaching events, the Yangtze River basin drought in China, the prolonged low water levels in Hoover Dam’s reservoir Lake Mead, the Missouri River flooding this year, the recent decade’s spike in Atlantic tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes, the increase in El Niño events over the past several decades, the sinkholes and ponds developing from melting permafrost in the Arctic and Subarctic, the methane bubbling up above the vast methane clathrate reservoirs north of Siberia, etc.

Yeah, don’t bother with those events either. And certainly don’t connect the dots with the rapid rise in greenhouse gas emissions or the hockey stick temperature graph”

 

 

Climate Crock versus Gerard B.

Sorry to keep harping on about local matters but it looks like Gerard Baudains will be standing for Deputy of St Clement again. Notwithstanding that he has got some good ideas in other areas, he unfortunately cannot see past his misguided views on climate change. Casting an eye over three of his recent letters to the JEP, he warmly promotes the hackneyed old denialist argument that, in the ice core records of past atmospheric concentrations, CO2 is clearly seen to increase only (I’m simplifying reality a bit here) after the temperature goes up which he, and legions of others who think too simplistically, claim is evidence that CO2 cannot therefore cause warming.

Over to the latest Climate Crock of the Week from Peter Sinclair. I like the fact that Peter is using the analogy of magic tricks to illustrate how the deniers use simple trickery and fallacious logic to fool people.

My favourite lines are in the bit where Peter ruthlessly and sardonically destroys the “Temperature leads CO2” meme which featured in “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. That execrable piece of deceit used a graph showing the 800 year lag of CO2 behind historical temperature rises:

“those who’ve watched this series for a while know that I always like to go to the source of any claim that climate deniers make – in this case a study by Nicolas Caillon, published in Science… which, of course, we’ll actually read.”

The "Temp Leads Carbon" Crock: Updated

 

Snippets from the Interwebs 6

 

 

 

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Australia has some prominent AGW deniers such as Bob Carter and Ian Plimer. They also have genuine working climate scientists (a few of the younger ones were featured in the rap video I blogged about recently) and the Australian Climate Commission who have just published a report entitled The Critical Decade. This is how they introduce it:

“Over many decades thousands of scientists have painted an unambiguous picture: the global climate is changing and humanity is almost surely the primary cause. The risks have never been clearer and the case for action has never been more urgent.

Our Earth’s surface is warming rapidly and we can already see social, economic and environmental impacts in Australia.

Failing to take sufficient action today entails potentially huge risks to our economy, society and way of life into the future.

This is the critical decade for action”

Take that, deniers (particularly Baudains and Fergusson)!

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In 2008 Ecuador recognized the legal rights of Mother Earth in its new constitution. Article 1 of the new “Rights for Nature” chapter of the Ecuador constitution reads:  “Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.  Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public bodies.”

Also group of countries led by Bolivia have recently brought the issue to the agenda of the UN General Assembly as they ask for a UN treaty that would grant the same rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to Mother Nature so there will be legal systems to maintain balance between human rights and what they say are the rights of other members of the Earth, such as plants, animals and terrain.

Taken from businessethicsnetwork.org

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The Thoughtful Bread Company claims to be England's first fully sustainable bakery.

click link for article The old school bread of the future

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One-third of the world's food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted each year, according to a study (pdf) released on Wednesday by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

source: Guardian – news - global development

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Bankers aren’t always evil…  On May 18th the global finance giant Bank of America announced that it has set a goal of reducing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 15 per cent by 2015 based on the company’s 2010 baseline. It’s not enough but it’s not bad for a start

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In a speech in early May Levi Strauss & Co. CEO and President John Anderson urged the clothing industry to adopt a new level of social, economic and environmental sustainability, moving beyond compliance with site-specific regulations to encompass improvements in the daily lives of workers in the global supply chain.

Puma is the first company in the world to put a value on the ecosystem services it uses to produce its sports shoes and clothes. In a huge leap for CSR, the company has published an economic valuation of the environmental impacts caused by greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and water consumption along its entire supply chain. It plans to become even more ambitious by integrating both its  social and economic impacts.

 Taken from triplepundit.com

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Taken from the New York Times May 3rd 2011 (click for original article).

The population of the world, long expected to stabilize just above 9 billion in the middle of the century, will instead keep growing and may hit 10.1 billion by the year 2100, the United Nations projected in a report released Tuesday.

“Growth in Africa remains so high that the population there could more than triple in this century, rising from today’s one billion to 3.6 billion, the report said”

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We’re already using up Earth’s resources 1.5 times as fast as Earth can regenerate them. Dickens’ Mr Micawber summed up the inevitable result:

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”

source:Global Footprint network.  http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/

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Even Kentucky Fried Chicken is getting in on sustainability and CSR as far as one of their latest restaurants is concerned. KFC’s newest restaurant in Indianapolis is designed to use 25 percent less energy and water. The Indianapolis restaurant is part of KFC’s E3 initiative “which looks at Economically responsible ways of saving energy and being environmentally aware. Many corporations are now far in front of where government is in pro-active action. However, KFC still have the same rather less responsible menu.

P P P Peak oil!!

Mark Forskitt, Daniel Wimberley, Chris Perkins and myself all raised the forthcoming spectre of peak oil when we stood for election in 2008. We warned about the consequences for the way we currently do things. Guess what? Just about nobody listened. Well, here's an Australian documentary that shows very authoritative figures saying that we are at (probably past!) peak oil now - the only way is down (sorry Yazz). In this film, Dr Jonica Newby goes to the International Energy Authority to find out how much and how fast they have changed their views recently. Guess what? We were right, they were wrong.

 

Ooh Missus! Rap science - more swearing on Nick’s blog!

Before you all get shocked by the robust rap language in the video that this post is about (the second one below), you ought to first watch the LHC rap to get broken in gently to the sight of real scientists speaking out. In 2008, Kate McAlpine (A.K.A Alpinekat) released the Large Hadron Rap about the LHC at Cern, Switzerland. She is a science communicator (click for her website). Her rap music inspired video went viral and has had at least 6 million views so far.

Large Hadron Rap

 

Real climate scientists are a bit sick of the numbers of people in the media who talk disparagingly about climate science as if their views were worth anything (mostly, they’re not…). This video is a fun but serious rap by real working climate scientists from Australia. Here’s a link to an article about the making of the rap video

Be warned, the following video contains the “M-F bomb” - words that are often found in rap music - but get past that (or, if you’re too delicate, I’ve included the “clean” version afterwards – which seems a bit silly by comparison) and this is a shrewd comment on the huge numbers of people expressing opinions about subjects they don’t know enough about – such as those who pick up a few deceptive ideas from climate change denialist propaganda and think their “new understanding” gives their fond beliefs the edge over peer reviewed science. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect writ large. This particular manifestation of human stupidity just might be the death of many of us and untold future generations before the climate settles down again. Alarmism (I hear the deniers cry)? Why not? The potential of climate change is actually terrifying and it should scare people. Remember those multiple AGU (American Geophysical Union) delegates who have already made survival retreat plans? If you read that and don’t get alarmed, you’ve got more than one screw loose… Click for link to post.

The problem is the Dunning-Krugers then go on with such confidence in their own judgement that they pontificate about their ridiculously (and dangerously) warped understanding as if they had discovered some smoking gun holes in the science that the whole of science had somehow missed and this implausible idea seems to be unfortunately received rather well by too many people. No doubt some would like the smartest scientists to fall flat on their faces but, realistically, that’s not going to happen.

It’s all rather like those early stage X-Factor contestants who tell Simon Cowell that he’s a fool not to recognise their fantastic talent. This widespread misplaced confidence (A.K.A. unjustified arrogance) seems to be a bit of an epidemic these days. Unfortunately, most of these people can vote which is why the deceitful forces of denialism are trying so hard to spread their disinformation.

Favourite lines?

“Droppin’ facts all over this wax, while bitches are crying ‘bout a carbon tax”

“Denialists deny this in your dreams, coz climate change means greater extremes”

I'm a Climate Scientist (HUNGRY BEAST)

 

I'm A Climate Scientist - Extended Version - (CLEAN)