Nature has so much to teach us
If you’ve got kids, or if you were a kid in the 90s, you probably know that song from The Lion King called The Circle of Life. It shows a thing that really amazes me: how plants and animals live in a cycle of life, a web of interconnectedness.
For example, trees take carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into leaves for animals to eat, branches for them to nest in. And then those animals become food for other animals, and when they die their bodies break down into the soil, which nourishes the trees which once fed and housed them. It’s a loop where nothing goes to waste.
Humans are the only animals that don’t really participate in this cycle properly. We keep creating waste that isn’t useful to any other living being, for example the oil we turn into plastic which can’t be eaten by anything or broken down by any bacteria. Or we remove elements of the cycle, like the trees which do such a wonderful job of keeping the CO2 we make out of our atmosphere.
We tend to think nature is built on competition, but mature ecosystems are often symbiotic and co-operative. I think we really have a lot to learn from the life forms on this planet that were here before us and managed to live in balance with everything else. That’s where the idea of biomimicry comes in.
Some designers noticed that the problems they were trying to solve with new technology had already been figured out by plants and animals. For example, termites have been keeping their homes cool without using any electricity for eons now, so architects in Zimbabwe decided to mimic termite mound structure in a building they were making. You can see more examples in this Treehugger slideshow about Nature-inspired Innovation.
Via Greensense, I came across this TED talk about biomimicry by architect Michael Pawlyn. He describes three habits of nature that could transform society: radical resource efficiency, closed loops, and drawing energy from the sun. I really enjoyed this talk and the creativity of the ideas he’s promoting, which were inspired by soap bubbles and Namibian beetles. It’s just under 14 minutes long, so why not grab a cuppa before you watch it…
Climate change commission
Photo credit: Mark Coulson, 5th World Conference of Science Journalists
So what do you think about the new climate change commission? It’s the one headed by Professor Tim Flannery with a goal of informing and educating Aussies about climate change and it’s related issues.
Predictably, the usual nay-sayers have been sniping with comments about how Flannery isn’t a climate scientist and this is just an attempt to brainwash people. I think it’s a great idea for scientists to make an effort to educate the public on the science – clearly we can’t rely on journalists to do even the most basic fact-checking, let alone properly inform the public!
Flannery has a way of explaining complicated science in a way that everyone can understand, without being condescending or snooty about it. He’s pretty open to innovative ideas, and non-judgemental too (he can even find something nice to say about climate deniers, if you’ve seen his interview on Denton’s Enough Rope show) so I think he’s a great person to have in the leadership role.
The rest of the panel is an interesting mix of scientists, media specialists and business people:
- Professor Will Steffen, executive director of the ANU Climate Change Institute and advisor to the Department of Climate Change.
- Mr Roger Beale (links to a pdf), an economist and public policy expert, and currently the Executive Director of Economics and Policy at Pricewaterhouse Coopers. He used to be secretary of the Department of Environment and contributed to the IPCC’s climate change reports.
- Professor Lesley Hughes from Macquarie University, a biologist researching the impacts of climate change and a contributor to the IPCC’s reports on the same.
- Dr Susannah Eliott, CEO of the Australian Science-Media Centre, which is dedicated to helping the media understand evidence-based science.
- Mr Gerry Hueston, who recently-retired as president of BP Australasia and is a current board member of the Australian Institute of Petroleum. He’s also a member of the Chairman’s Panel of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and is Chairman of the BP group of companies in Australia. He’s got a degree in Science (Chemistry) and Commerce (Accounting and Economics).
- 8 climatologists to provide scientific details and advice to the main panel.
The commission reminds me of the Hollywood, Health and Society group in the USA, which I read about at Grist.org in the article How to get the boob tube to tell the truth about climate change. Medical scientists were tired of TV, movies and news shows making very silly and sometimes dangerous mistakes when they got onto health topics. So they started a place where writers could ask questions and get straight answers. They want to inspire and inform people, rather than tell them what to do or to get involved in production. Now they’re going to expand into climate science as well, which is great.
I’d love to see our climate change commission start a resource (maybe a website?) where writers and journalists could confidentially ask questions of our panel and get solid answers they can use. What else do you think the panel can do to help get the word out?
What happens when the ice melts?
You might have already seen video of the 10,000-year-old Wilkins Ice Shelf collapsing in Antarctica the other week. Brian at Larvatus Prodeo has also collected some maps and graphics to put it into context. This particular collapse isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s part of a larger pattern. There have been many ice shelves disappearing lately – Wordie, Larsen B, Larsen A, Mueller and Jones have all gone in recent years.
What effect does all this ice running into the ocean have? If you remember a bit of high-school science, you probably already know that glaciers in the sea don’t increase sea-levels when they melt. It’s just like an ice-cube in a glass of water. But these ice-shelves are partly in the sea already, and partly on land. As they melt, they do increase sea levels. And that’s not good news for us.
I haven’t got any Antarctic melting to show you, but for comparison you should check out this dramatic video showing scientists taking ice-melt measurements in Greenland by hanging over a giant crevasse filled with rushing water.
The problem isn’t just sea-levels – it’s that the bright white ice also reflects a lot of sunlight back into space. If there’s less ice, more sunlight is absorbed by the oceans, which heats them up even more. It creates a runaway effect that’s difficult to stop.
We’ve probably already heated up the planet enough that we’re going to lose summer ice in the Arctic in the next 10 years, and will be living with 1-2 metres of sea-level rise within a few decades. It doesn’t sound like much, does it? You might have dived that kind of depth into a pool as a kid.
But it will have a huge effect on our ports and coastal towns. Something like 80% of the Australian population lives on the coast. At the very least, we’ll need to shift people from low-lying coastal areas inland a bit. And what happens if we don’t stop climate change?
If we continue with business as usual, we’ll be locked into much higher sea-levels. As the temperature increases, we could end up with over 50 meters of increase after a century or two. We won’t be around to see it, so here’s a graphic from the Climate Code Red website (Science A pdf, page 6, via) to illustrate the effect it’d have on Australia.
The good news is that this is preventable. By becoming energy efficient, reducing our reliance on coal, and even scrubbing some CO2 out of the atmosphere, we can stop this from happening. We just need to get started…
What is biochar?
Biochar is a possible way to reduce the carbon emissions that come from farming. It’s been in the news a little bit lately, and I think it’s got the potential to really help Australia reduce it’s eco-footprint, and hopefully will have other benefits for farmers too.
By RaeAllen at Flickr.com
Our agricultural sector is responsible for nearly 20% of our climate-change emissions, so a new technique for farmers would have a huge impact. Biochar doesn’t need any special advances in technology, so there are trials of it starting up already.
Basically, you start with biological materials, like crop waste, animal manure, forestry offcuts, etc. This waste is usually left to rot in the field, which returns it’s trapped CO2 to the atmosphere. But you can take that waste, and put it through a process called pyrolysis instead, which means burning it in the absence of oxygen. It’s a bit like bbq-ing a steak – the inside cooks by pyrolysis, since there’s no oxygen inside it, while the outside burns if you leave it too long because it’s exposed to air.
When you pyrolysise the crop waste, it turns into charcoal. Why is that such a good thing, you wonder? Because the carbon is locked inside it, instead of being able to get out into the atmosphere. So we’ve tucked away our carbon in a much safer format.
But wait, there’s more! The bonus is that this charcoal can then be dug back into the soil, where all the bacteria and soil fungi that you need for growing crops soon move into the carbon. It actually makes your soil healthier and more nutritious for the plants. It also holds more moisture, which is very useful in our dry country, and prevents the water run-off that carries fertilisers into our rivers and oceans.
The other benefit is that the machines that do the pyrolysis create a synthetic gas. This gas can then be used to run the machine, and the leftover gas can be used to generate lower-emission electricity than our coal-fired power stations do.
The main drawback is that pyrolysis machines are expensive. I assume the price will come down as they become more available, same as any other product, but in the meanwhile farmers might have to get together in large groups to buy them for shared use. If they’re paid a fee for reducing carbon in the atmosphere (perhaps as part of a proper ETS), then that could go a long way towards making it affordable for them.
It’s an exciting prospect for Australia, and I’d love to see more action on it. If you’re interested in finding out more, here’s a few links to get you started:
Rapid decline in Arctic ice
On Tuesday, Brian from Larvatus Prodeo posted 7 graphs showing the incredibly rapid decline in Arctic ice last year. It beats all other extremes that have been recorded already, and shows how close we are to the point of no return.
Scientists previously predicted that the Arctic ice-cap would be no longer there during summertime by 2040, but have now revised that date to 2012. When it’s gone, we’re looking at faster sea-level rises and changed weather patterns with a knock-on effect around the world.
I was struck by the comment from one of the NASA climate scientists, Jay Zwally, as quoted in the National Geographic article Arctic Sea Ice Gone in Summer Within 5 Years (and quoted by Brian as well)
“The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming,” said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal. “Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.”
Brian’s article Trouble at the top of the world shows just how bad the damage is getting. He’s going to post more articles explaining the issue, and is encouraging people to send them to any policy-makers they know. Please read it, and send a link to it to anyone who you think needs to know more about what’s going on.
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