Think you love shopping? It's the marketing scam of the century

US author Benjamin Barber explains how buying things ceased to be a chore and became a fun day out

Sophie Morris, The Independent 19 Jun 08;

The folly of rampant consumerism as resources grow scarcer is lost on no one, least of all the marketing community. Still, desperate to maximise profits, manufacturers and marketing men are targeting very young children, buying their loyalty almost from birth, and infantilising adults, to deter them from making considered decisions about what they buy. This way, adults and children will be attracted to the same product, and buy it for most of their lives, trapped in a Peter Pan cycle of consumption, constructed by branding supremos.

For many, shopping changed from chore to leisure pursuit long ago. You will be hard pushed to find a British consumer who hasn't, at least once, gone out street with the intention of finding something they want to buy, rather than buying something they need. This behaviour contrasts not only with that of consumers in developing countries, but also with the Europe and US of just 60 years ago.

The exact point at which a life of frugality – led by most people until the 1950s – developed into one of comfort, before slipping into absurd excess, is impossible to determine, admits Benjamin Barber, author of the best-selling Jihad Vs. McWorld. His new book, Consumed, tackles obsessive, "hyper" consumption. This trend, predicts Barber, is leading democratic societies towards an early grave.

"It struck me that a lot of what makes up McWorld is superfluous," he says of his inspiration to analyse this hyper-consumerism, which is most acute in Barber's US. "An awful lot of products are not necessary, whether fast food or gadgets or games," he explains. "I can't tell you where the tipping point is, but we're way over it."

Since basic human needs – food, shelter, clothing – have long since been met for most people in the developed world, marketing professionals now bang their heads together to reinvent and recreate goods in order to sell more stuff.

Barber is far from the first to draw attention to the fact that consumers are very often attracted by the image of a product, rather than its function, and that we would all benefit from consuming less. Yet he goes one further, blaming hyper-consumption for the current economic crisis. He also believes the anti-consumer movement lacks the wherewithal to address the problem. "I love the anti-consumer movement temperamentally, but it risks turning these issues into minority problems," he says.

Consumption is not only out of control at the shops. Barber uses television watching as an example: there is nothing wrong with reaching for the remote after a long day at work, he says. But 60 hours – the time each week an average American spends watching television – is way too much. "It's a little like pornography," says Barber.

Watching TV is just part of the problem. What we are choosing to watch has changed considerably over the years and now resembles a homogenous lowbrow pulp designed to appeal to children and adults alike. Barber's book is subtitled "How markets corrupt children, infantilise adults and swallow citizens whole". Commentators have been documenting the rise of the scooter-pushing, iPod-toting kidult for a number of years now, but in Barber's opinion, the "40 is the new 20" spirit does not mean that people are retaining their youthfulness and energy for longer, but that they are not growing up at all. Why not? Because marketers desperate for instant profits are cutting corners by lumping child and adult tastes and products together, instead of building a sustainable market. This then reduces diversity and threatens to eliminate choice altogether.

The success of films such as Shrek and Spider-Man, aimed at all ages, illustrate this. "If you want to see the future of Britain, don't look at what 40-years-olds are buying, look at what 15-year-olds are buying and watching and what their music tastes are," predicts Barber. For anyone who has sat next to a gang of schoolgirls playing Pussycat Dolls loudly on mobile phones, the idea that their musical tastes will never mature and that the shade of their nail varnish will never be toned down is sobering. But why can't adults enjoy the nuances of an episode of The Simpsons, say, or a Harry Potter film? Does growing up mean becoming boring?

"I'm not saying that when we grow up we lose all pleasures," insists Barber. "But growing up means becoming more complex and that you require greater stimulation. If you can be pleased and satisfied with comic books, it means you've kept yourself as a kid. I'm not saying there's something wrong with people who have fun, but I have fun in a different way from how I did when I was 12."

Barber buried his head in marketing textbooks to try to make sense of why we buy more and more stuff we don't need, and often do not want or enjoy having, either. Saatchi & Saatchi chief executive Kevin Roberts, the man who loves Head & Shoulders so dearly he continues to use it despite the fact he is now bald, receives frequent scoldings in Consumed.

It is Roberts and his ilk who are driving our impulse to buy. These big guns are only too aware that most of our needs were met long ago, and it is with this in mind that they have set about eternalising childhood desires and fabricating new adult ones. In Consumed, the merchandising guru Gene del Vecchio explains: "the demand for adult goods and services has proved not to be endless," he observes. This must be tackled with a "kidquake of kid-directed goods and services". Del Vecchio also worked out that if you want to sell goods globally, you can't sell to adults who belong to distinct cultures. But children are the same everywhere, and if you get adults to behave like children, you can sell the same products to any generation, anywhere.

Hyper-consumerism is a major contributor to environmental problems, yet so-called green marketers are as guilty as your average marketing man. "Don't fool yourself," warns Barber. "Green consumerism is still consuming. The simplest way to go green is not to consume, or to consume less, but these people want you to consume their way, because if you stop consuming they don't make any money."

When Barber bought his last car he was tempted by a Lexus hybrid, until a friend pointed out that the hybrid's powerful engine used more petrol than many non-hybrid vehicles. Last year, a magazine advertisement for Lexus hybrids was banned in the UK, for misleadingly implying that the car caused little or no harm to the environment.

Barber records a moment when he orders bottled water in the bar of his London hotel, during a visit in his capacity as president of CivWorld, an international political NGO. Bottled water, in a country where clean water flows straight from the tap, is perhaps the ultimate in manufactured need. "Over a billion people are without drinking water," says Barber. "Why don't we find out ways to get the water they need to them, instead of new ways of getting water to us?"

All this makes Consumed sound like depressing reading. In many ways, it is, and the idea that Western shoppers are to blame for environmental degradation, even if they have been hoodwinked into buying unnecessary products, is a heavy cross to bear.

Is capitalism eating itself? Barber is optimistic. "Capitalism has a tendency to overdo itself," he says. "It destroys everything in its path. This is a strategy for saving capitalism. There are deep, pressing human needs that still need to be met and capitalism is the perfect thing to meet them."

'Consumed' by Benjamin R Barber, Norton, £9.99. To order for the special price of £9.49, including post and packing, call 0870 079 8897 or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk

Read more!

Texas Cotton Crop Hit Hard by Sand Storms and Heat

Rene Pastor, PlanetArk 18 Jun 08;

NEW YORK - Blowing sand and blistering heat have badly damaged the cotton crop in Texas, the country's biggest grower, industry analysts said Wednesday.

The losses in Texas, which is expected to plant 4.7 million acres of cotton out of the 9.5 million acres planted to the plant in the United States, range from 500,000 up to 1.5 million acres, they said.

While most of the country's attention was riveted by the devastating floods which drowned large swathes of the US Midwest cropland, farms in Texas were savaged by heat, wind and blowing sand which scythed through emerging cotton plants.

"We're going to take a hit on total production," Carl Anderson, an influential cotton economist who had worked with Texas A&M University, told Reuters in an interview.

"I am writing off 1.0 million acres in cotton," he said. "I will stick with 1.0 million because others are talking of (losses up to) 1.5 million acres."

Roger Haldenby of Plains Cotton Growers, which monitors the largest cotton growing area in the Lone Star State, said there were between 500,000 and 1.0 million acres which "are in desperate need of rainfall."

Recent rains in the area may have come too late to save the cotton, with Anderson saying the blowing sand over the past few weeks "absolutely killed a lot of that cotton."


TRADE MULLS LOSSES

The question uppermost in the minds of the cotton trade right now is how much of a hit US cotton production in 2008/09 will sustain, especially since Texas was expected to produce half of the crop this season.

Anderson said the losses should lead to a fall in US cotton output to around 12.5 million to 13.0 million (480-lb) bales, against the estimate by the US Agriculture Department that the US would harvest 14.5 million bales this season.

Other analysts believe the rains in the area threw a wrench into most analysts' estimates about those losses, and it would take time to unravel them.

"It sure muddies the picture," Sharon Johnson, cotton expert for First Capitol Group in Atlanta, Georgia, said in a separate interview.

She said the recent rains and prospects for more showers during the week may slightly lower the losses. "It sure makes the situation not as dire, but we have a long way to go."

Mike Stevens, an analyst with brokers SFS Futures in Mandeville, Louisiana, said the rains in Texas meant that "nobody has a good handle" on how this would affect production and yields.

Haldenby explained that half an inch of rain in Texas may just dampen the fields and another round of blowing sand could batter cotton plants this summer.

"It clouds the picture as to what the losses are likely to be," he said. "We're definitely looking at a moving target." (Editing by John Picinich)

Read more!

Australia Wheat Farmers Bet on Drought-Busting Crop

Michael Byrnes, PlanetArk 19 Jun 08;

NARRABRI, Australia - Wheat farmers in Australia, the world's second-biggest exporter, raced this week to plant their fields, gambling that recent soaking rains would lead to one of the best crops on record and put an end to seven hard years of drought.

In one of Australia's biggest grain-belts, wheat farmers struggling with years of losses were once again ploughing and sowing their fields around the clock, encouraged by a few weeks of steady rain and forecasts for a rebounding harvest.

"It was fantastic rain," said Ron Greentree, the nation's biggest individual grower, whose workers were busily sowing about 80,000 hectares (198,000 acres), roughly the size of Hong Kong.

"Everyone around here is working 24 hours, now we've got the rains," he said as he walked through one of his fields, his boots sinking into the crumbly, moist soil.

"We have waited a long time for this rain. We are 70 percent done. Hopefully we will finish in the next 10 days."

Greentree is looking forward to a good crop of around 250,000 tonnes from his properties alone. Last year, encouraged by a winter sprinkling of rain, he and other farmers sowed their fields, only to watch the wheat wither as the rains dried up.

Global food markets are also hoping this year will not be another false dawn for the world's second-biggest wheat exporter.

On Tuesday, Australia caused some concern in markets by cutting its official wheat output forecast by nearly 9 percent after the return of dry weather in April and May in parts of the country.

It still expects wheat exports to more than double to 16.3 million tonnes in 2008/09, but news of the smaller crop threatened to tighten wheat markets at a time when record corn prices had put food inflation in the spotlight once again.

The downgrade was also bigger than similar cuts announced by private forecasters over the past week, though the new 2008/09 crop estimate of 23.68 million tonnes would still mean a rebound of more than 80 percent from last year's drought-hit production.

In Narrabri, about 500 km (311 miles) northwest of Sydney, farmers are investing about A$250 a hectare to plant their fields -- roughly A$20 million for Greentree's estate -- and in some cases straining bank credit to the limit to put in another crop.

"It's been a pretty devastating last four to five years. It has really hurt the communities," said Greentree, his face shaded from the clearing sky by a battered felt hat.

"It was a real relief when it did rain, but people are a bit gun-shy. Last year it looked good until the end of July and then it didn't rain and all the crops failed."

Australia's main eastern wheat-growing state of New South Wales normally accounts for 30 percent of the country's crop, but encouraging rains early this year stalled in April and May and only resumed in the Narrabri-Moree district early this month.

Elsewhere, the state is still dry, waiting anxiously for rain. But planting is well underway in Narrabri, making it one of the main hopes for good production from parts of eastern Australia.

The drought halved Australia's previous crop and helped drive global wheat prices to all-time highs earlier this year.

An estimated 26 percent of the New South Wales wheat crop has been sown, mostly into dry soil, the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries estimated this week.

Victoria state, which produces about a tenth of the national wheat crop, is in slightly better shape than New South Wales, with rainfall about 50-60 percent of average by late last month.

South Australia, which normally supplies 15 percent of the annual crop, also got planting underway well before New South Wales. Western Australia, which normally contributes about 40 percent, was best placed of the cropping states, with good early rain across most of the state.

Australia's best wheat crop was 26.132 million tonnes in 2003/04. Drought cut the two most recent crops to just 13.1 million tonnes in 2007/08 and 10.64 million tonnes in 2006/07. (Editing by Mark Bendeich and Mathew Veedon)

Read more!

Biotech crops seen helping to feed hungry world

Carey Gillam, Reuters 18 Jun 08;

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - Biotechnology in agricultural will be key to feeding a growing world population and overcoming climate challenges like crop-killing droughts, according to a group of leading industry players.

"It is critical we keep moving forward," said Thomas West, a director of biotechnology affairs at DuPont, interviewed on the sidelines of a biotechnology conference in San Diego. "We have to yield and produce our way out of this."

DuPont believes it can increase corn and soybean yields by 40 percent over the next decade. Corn seeds that now average about 150 bushels per acre could be at well over 200 bushels an acre, for example, DuPont officials said.

Crop shortages this year have sparked riots in some countries and steep price hikes in markets around the globe, and questions about how to address those issues were the subject of several meetings at the BIO International Convention being held this week.

Despite persistent reluctance in many nations and from some consumer and environmental groups, genetically modified crops, -- and the fortunes of the companies that make them -- have been on the rise. Growing food and biofuel demands have been helping push growth.

By using conventional and biotech genetic modification, crops can be made to yield more in optimum as well as harsh weather conditions, can be made healthier, and can be developed in ways that create more energy for use in ethanol production, according to the biotech proponents.

"You can bring a number to tools to bear with biotechnology to solve problems," said Syngenta seeds executive industry relations head director Jack Bernens. "As food prices increase ... it certainly brings a more practical perspective to the debate."

Syngenta is focusing on drought-resistant corn that it hopes to bring to market as early as 2014, as well as other traits to increase yields and protect plants from insect damage. Disease-resistant biotech wheat is also being developed.

Syngenta and other industry players are also developing biotech crops that need less fertilizer, and corn that more efficiently can be turned into ethanol.

Bayer CropScience, a unit of Germany's Bayer AG, has ongoing field trials with biotech canola that performs well even in drought conditions, said Bayer crop productivity group leader Michael Metzlaff.

Water scarcity is a problem seen doubling in severity over the next three decades even as the world population explodes, and will only be exacerbated by global warming climate change, he said.

With some 9 billion people expected to populate the planet by 2040 and 85 percent of the population seen in lesser developed countries, decreased land for agriculture and multiple demands on water use will come hand in hand with an expected doubling in food demand, said David Dennis CEO of Kingston, Ontario-based Performance Plants.

Performance Plants is working with the Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation International to develop and field test drought-tolerant white maize.

"The biggest problem we have in crops is environmental stresses and the biggest stress is drought," said Dennis.

Biotech crop opponents rebuke the idea that biotechnology is the answer, and say industry leaders continue to focus much of their efforts on plants that tolerate more chemicals even as they push up seed prices and make more farmers reliant on patented seed products that must be repurchased year after year.

"I know they love to talk about drought tolerance but that is not what they are really focusing on," said Bill Freese, science policy analyst at the Washington-based Center for Food Safety.

Freese said conventional breeding had the ability to address climate change and food needs, but funding cuts to public-sector crop breeders had reduced the ability of non-biotech groups to advance crop improvements.

"The facts on the ground clearly show that biotech companies have developed mainly chemical-dependent GM crops that have increased pesticide use, reduced yields and have nothing to do with feeding the world," Freese said. "The world cannot wait for GM crops when so many existing solutions are being neglected."

(Editing by Christian Wiessner)

Read more!

UN warns of growth in climate change refugees

Hannah Strange, Times Online 17 Jun 08;

Climate change is forcing growing numbers of people in the developing world to flee their homes and seek refuge abroad, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees warned today.

Announcing findings that the number of refugees worldwide had risen steeply for the second year running, António Guterres said that environmental degradation induced by climate change was forcing greater displacement as resources became increasingly scarce.

The UNHCR’s 2007 Global Trends report says the number of international refugees under its responsibility rose from 9.9 to 11.4 million by the end of last year. Meanwhile the number of people displaced internally by conflict increased from 24.4 million to 26 million, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. "After a five-year decline in the number of refugees between 2001 and 2005, we have now seen two years of increases, and that's a concern," Mr Guterres said.

"We are now faced with a complex mix of global challenges that could threaten even more forced displacement in the future,” he warned. “They range from multiple new conflict-related emergencies in world hotspots to bad governance, climate-induced environmental degradation that increases competition for scarce resources, and extreme price hikes that have hit the poor the hardest and are generating instability in many places."

Competition for natural resources has long been a source of conflict in the developing world, particularly on the African continent. Now, as climate change exacerbates environmental degradation, access to water and fertile land is becoming ever more scarce, feeding displacement either directly, as communities relocate in search of resources, or indirectly through conflict, poverty and food shortages.

Darfur, where 2.5 million people have been displaced by conflict, was a case in point, Peter Kessler of the UNHCR told The Times. “The root of the conflict is greatly due to the competition for water and grazing land between tribes.”

Sudan has become one of the world’s refugee hotspots, with over half a million having fled the country in search of a better life elsewhere, according to UN figures.

“We are seeing right across the planet, particularly in the developing world, that climate change is generating levels of environmental degradation and wearing down the life support systems on which millions of people depend,” Nick Nuttall of the United Nations Environment Programme told The Times.

“Whereever you look, the footprint of climate change and environmental degradation is bring people to a situation where resources are increasingly scarce and forcing them to move.”

Mr Nuttall pointed to Uganda’s Rwenzori mountains, where retreating glaciers were threatening the existence of rivers – including the Nile - on which millions of people depended for their livelihood. In Haiti, he said, deforestation and the resulting erosion of fertile topsoil was contributing to conflict, while in Mali, Chad and Ethiopia, entire lakes had all but disappeared over the last two decades.

Meanwhile in Asia, the Himalayan glaciers which fed the continent’s life-supporting rivers could have all but vanished by 2030, he added.

In India, preparations to stem the flood of ecological refugees are already underway. The government is currently constructing a 2,500 mile barrier along its border with Bangladesh, from which it already sees a substantial flow of illegal immigrants. In this low-lying nation, rising sea levels and storm surges could force 34 million people to flee their homes over the next several decades.

Mr Nuttall warned that increasing effort would have to be put into adapting to climate change, as even if greenhouse gas emissions were reduced to zero certain effects had already been put in motion. Regional cooperation on water supplies were particularly important, he said, alluding to anxieties over looming water wars which the British Government has cited as a major security concern for the coming decades.

“Countries have in the past got together and cooperated over water,” he said. “Whether that same level of cooperation will endure in a world where climate change is not addressed is a moot point.

“But in Darfur, a red flag has been raised.”

The UNHCR’s 2007 Global Trends report says the number of international refugees under its responsibility rose from 9.9 to 11.4 million by the end of last year. Meanwhile the number of people displaced internally by conflict increased from 24.4 million to 26 million, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. "After a five-year decline in the number of refugees between 2001 and 2005, we have now seen two years of increases, and that's a concern," Mr Guterres said.

"We are now faced with a complex mix of global challenges that could threaten even more forced displacement in the future,” he warned. “They range from multiple new conflict-related emergencies in world hotspots to bad governance, climate-induced environmental degradation that increases competition for scarce resources, and extreme price hikes that have hit the poor the hardest and are generating instability in many places."

Competition for natural resources has long been a source of conflict in the developing world, particularly on the African continent. Now, as climate change exacerbates environmental degradation, access to water and fertile land is becoming ever more scarce, feeding displacement either directly, as communities relocate in search of resources, or indirectly through conflict, poverty and food shortages.

Darfur, where 2.5 million people have been displaced by conflict, was a case in point, Peter Kessler of the UNHCR told The Times. “The root of the conflict is greatly due to the competition for water and grazing land between tribes.”

Sudan has become one of the world’s refugee hotspots, with over half a million having fled the country in search of a better life elsewhere, according to UN figures.

“We are seeing right across the planet, particularly in the developing world, that climate change is generating levels of environmental degradation and wearing down the life support systems on which millions of people depend,” Nick Nuttall of the United Nations Environment Programme told The Times.

“Whereever you look, the footprint of climate change and environmental degradation is bring people to a situation where resources are increasingly scarce and forcing them to move.”

Mr Nuttall pointed to Uganda’s Rwenzori mountains, where retreating glaciers were threatening the existence of rivers – including the Nile - on which millions of people depended for their livelihood. In Haiti, he said, deforestation and the resulting erosion of fertile topsoil was contributing to conflict, while in Mali, Chad and Ethiopia, entire lakes had all but disappeared over the last two decades.

Meanwhile in Asia, the Himalayan glaciers which fed the continent’s life-supporting rivers could have all but vanished by 2030, he added.

In India, preparations to stem the flood of ecological refugees are already underway. The government is currently constructing a 2,500 mile barrier along its border with Bangladesh, from which it already sees a substantial flow of illegal immigrants. In this low-lying nation, rising sea levels and storm surges could force 34 million people to flee their homes over the next several decades.

Mr Nuttall warned that increasing effort would have to be put into adapting to climate change, as even if greenhouse gas emissions were reduced to zero certain effects had already been put in motion. Regional cooperation on water supplies were particularly important, he said, alluding to anxieties over looming water wars which the British Government has cited as a major security concern for the coming decades.

“Countries have in the past got together and cooperated over water,” he said. “Whether that same level of cooperation will endure in a world where climate change is not addressed is a moot point.

“But in Darfur, a red flag has been raised.”

Read more!

Scientists fighting disease with climate forecasts

Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press Yahoo News 18 Jun 08;

A cyclone wrecks coastal Myanmar, spawning outbreaks of malaria, cholera and dengue fever. Flooding inundates Iowa, raising an array of public health concerns.

As these disasters draw attention to weather hazards, which many fear could be exacerbated by climate change, scientists are working to be able to better predict health dangers as they forecast the weather.

"Everything is connected in our Earth system," Conrad C. Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said at a panel on "Changing Climate: Changing Health Patterns."

The key is bringing all types of data together — health, weather, human behavior, disasters and others — "it's science without borders," Lautenbacher said.

He said 73 countries and more than 50 international organizations are currently participating in the Global Earth Observation System of Systems and more are expected to join.

"It's a full court press" to observe what's going on on the Earth, he said. When it comes to health and disasters "we can't afford to be wrong a lot of the time. We have got to get ahead of it."

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, noted that "we have these very modern technologies that are very good at sensing atmosphere and earth surfaces, and you can put them in computers and model some of these weather events ... and we're pretty good at it right now.

"But imagine for a moment, that not only that we measure that stuff, that we then actively and aggressively do something about it to mitigate the effects to people, to the environment, to planets, to plants."

Take a disease like cholera, Lautenbacher said, noting that research has shown that outbreaks in India vary with the temperature of the Bay of Bengal. Satellites cam measure that temperature.

In addition, climate researchers are now doing forecasts of the Pacific Ocean phenomenon known as El Nino, which affects temperatures in the bay, so that might also be used to forecast cholera.

Barbara Hatcher, secretary-general of the World Federation of Public Health Associations, likened the research to the work of Dr. John Snow, the 19th century English physician who first tracked down a source of cholera in London, using a map of victims' homes and where they got their water.

Lautenbacher noted that changes in vegetation and moisture can help forecast outbreaks of malaria, showing a vegetation map of Africa based on satellite data.

But it isn't just weather data that must be worked into the system, he added, researchers must also use information on population changes, transportation, migration, epidemiology and social and behavioral factors.

Robert W. Corell of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment said he had been asked to investigate an outbreak of anaphylactic shock in Alaska.

He traced it to stings from a type of bee that hibernates in wet soil, which had never lived there before but had moved north as the climate became milder and wetter.

In another case, he said, diarrhea-causing giardia has appeared in parts or northern Norway, where moderating climate has allowed beavers — which can spread the germ — to move into territory once exclusive to reindeer.

Dr. Bryan McNally of Emory University School of Medicine, suggested requiring hospitals, as part of being accredited, to set up plans to work with local weather and warning forecasters.

Traditionally hospitals have sought to ride out storms, but that didn't work out well when hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans.

Having a relationship with a warning forecaster would allow a hospital to prepare for arrival of floods, hurricanes, tornadoes or whatever the local hazard is, he explained.

They could work out plans in advance if they needed to evacuate, and hospitals nearby would have plans to take in the patients as well as to deal with the newly injured.

Predicting the arrival of flooding should be more than just protecting property, it could include warnings about the spread of disease such as schistosomiasis, also known as snail fever, said Joshua P. Rosenthal of the National Institutes of Health. Such warnings should also include the spread of things like fuel and toxic pollutants, he said.

Factors to be considered should include land use patterns, urbanization, agriculture, poverty, economic infrastructure and wastewater treatment facilities.

"It's important ... that we build climate into these other types of long-term analyses rather than trying to separate it out," he said.

"What we do know is it's probably going to hit the most vulnerable populations the hardest: The poor, children, the elderly, those in low- and middle-income countries with weak infrastructure, degraded ecological environments, poor health-delivery systems," he said.

Read more!

Jellyfish outbreaks a sign of nature out of sync

Jerome Cartillier, Yahoo News 18 Jun 08;

The dramatic proliferation of jellyfish in oceans around the world, driven by overfishing and climate change, is a sure sign of ecosystems out of kilter, warn experts.

"Jellyfish are an excellent bellwether for the environment," explains Jacqueline Goy, of the Oceanographic Institute of Paris. "The more jellyfish, the stronger the signal that something has changed."

Brainless creatures composed almost entirely of water, the primitive animals have quietly filled a vacuum created by the voracious human appetite for fish.

Dislodging them will be difficult, marine biologists say.

"Jellyfish have come to occupy the place of many other species," notes Ricardo Aguilar, research director for Oceana, a international conservation organisation.

Nowhere is the sting of these poorly understood invertebrates felt more sharply than the Mediterranean basin, where their exploding numbers have devastated native marine species and threaten seaside tourism.

And while much about the lampshade-like creatures remains unknown, scientists are in agreement: Pelagia noctiluca -- whose tentacles can paralyse prey and cause burning rashes in humans -- will once again besiege Mediterranean coastal waters this summer.

That, in itself, is not unusual. It is the frequency and persistence of these appearances that worry scientists.

Two centuries worth of data shows that jellyfish populations naturally swell every 12 years, remain stable four or six years, and then subside.

2008, however, will be the eighth consecutive year that medusae, as they are also known, will be present in massive numbers.

The over-exploitation of ocean resources by man has helped create a near-perfect environment in which these most primitive of ocean creatures can multiply unchecked, scientists say.

"When vertebrates, such as fish, disappear, then invertebrates -- especially jellyfish -- appear," says Aguilar.

The collapse of fish populations boost this process in two important ways, he added. When predators such as tuna, sharks, and turtles vanish, not only do fewer jellyfish get eaten, they have less competition for food.

Jellyfish feed on small fish and zooplankton that get caught up in their dangling tentacles.

"Jellyfish both compete with fish for plankton food, and predate directly on fish," explains Andrew Brierley from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. "It is hard, therefore, to see a way back for fish once jellyfish have become established, even if commercial fishing is reduced."

Which is why Brierley and other experts were not surprised to find a huge surge in the number of jellyfish off the coast of Namibia in the Atlantic, one of the most intensely fished oceans in the world.

Climate change has also been a boon to these domed gelatinous creatures in so far as warmer waters prolong their reproductive cycles.

But just how many millions, or billions, of jellyfish roam the seas is nearly impossible to know, said scientists.

For one things, the boneless, translucent animals -- even big ones grouped in large swarms -- are hard to spot in satellite images or sonar soundings, unlike schools of fish.

They are also resist study in captivity, which means a relative paucity of academic studies.

"There are only 20 percent of species of jellyfish for which we know the life cycle," said Goy.

And the fact that jellyfish are not commercially exploited, with the exception of a few species eaten by gastronomes in East Asia, has also added to this benign neglect.

But the measurable impact of these stinging beasts on beach-based tourism along the Mediterranean has begun to spur greater interest in these peculiar creatures whose growing presence points to dangerous changes not just in the world's oceans, but on the ground and in the air as well.

Read more!

Oceans warm more quickly than suspected: study

Marlowe Hood, Yahoo News 18 Jun 08;

The world's oceans have warmed 50 percent faster over the last 40 years than previously thought due to climate change, Australian and US climate researchers reported Wednesday.

Higher ocean temperatures expand the volume of water, contributing to a rise in sea levels that is submerging small island nations and threatening to wreak havoc in low-lying, densely-populated delta regions around the globe.

The study, published in the British journal Nature, adds to a growing scientific chorus of warnings about the pace and consequences rising oceans.

It also serves as a corrective to a massive report issued last year by the Nobel-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to the authors.

Rising sea levels are driven by two things: the thermal expansion of sea water, and additional water from melting sources of ice. Both processes are caused by global warming.

The ice sheet that sits atop Greenland, for example, contains enough water to raise world ocean levels by seven metres (23 feet), which would bury sea-level cities from Dhaka to Shanghai.

Trying to figure out how much each of these factors contributes to rising sea levels is critically important to understanding climate change, and forecasting future temperature rises, scientists say.

But up to now, there has been a perplexing gap between the projections of computer-based climate models, and the observations of scientists gathering data from the oceans.

"The numbers didn't add up," said Peter Geckler, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California.

"When previous investigators tried to add up all the estimated contributions to sea level rise" -- thermal expansion, melting glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets, along with changes in terrestrial storage -- "they did not match with the independently estimated total sea level rise," he told AFP.

The new study, led by Catia Domingues of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, is the first to reconcile the models with observed data.

Using new techniques to assess ocean temperatures to a depth of 700 metres (2,300 feet) from 1961 to 2003, it shows that thermal warming contributed to a 0.53 millimetre-per-year rise in sea levels rather than the 0.32 mm rise reported by the IPCC.

"Our results are important for the climate modelling community because they boost confidence in the climate models used for projections of global sea-level rise resulting for the accumulation of heat in the oceans," Domingues said in a statement.

"The projections will in turn assist in planning to minimize impacts, and in developing adaptation strategies," she added.

The IPCC report was criticised for including only the impact of thermal expansion in its projections of sea level rises over the next century, despite recent studies showing that melting ice is a significant -- and growing -- factor.

The planet's oceans store more than 90 percent of the heat in the Earth's climate system and act as a temporary buffer against the effects of climate change.

Read more!

Arctic sea ice melt 'even faster'

Richard Black, BBC News 18 Jun 08;

Arctic sea ice is melting even faster than last year, despite a cold winter.

Data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that the year began with ice covering a larger area than at the beginning of 2007.

But now it is down to levels seen last June, at the beginning of a summer that broke records for sea ice loss.

Scientists on the project say that much of the ice is so thin that it melts easily, and the Arctic may be ice-free in summer within five to 10 years.

"We had a bit more ice in the winter, although we were still way below the long-term average," said Julienne Stroeve from NSIDC in Boulder, Colorado.

"So we had a partial recovery; but the real issue is that most of the pack ice has become really thin, and if we have a regular summer now, it can just melt away," she told BBC News.

In March, Nasa reported that the area covered by sea ice was slightly larger than in 2007, but much of it consisted of thin floes that had formed during the previous winter. These are much less robust than thicker, less saline floes that have already survived for several years.

A few years ago, scientists were predicting ice-free Arctic summers by about 2080. Then computer models started projecting earlier dates, around 2030 to 2050.

Then came the 2007 summer that saw Arctic sea ice shrink to the smallest extent ever recorded, down to 4.2 million sq km from 7.8 million sq km in 1980.

By the end of last year, one research group was forecasting ice-free summers by 2013.

"I think we're going to beat last year's record melt, though I'd love to be wrong," said Dr Stroeve.

"If we do, then I don't think 2013 is far off anymore. If what we think is going to happen does happen, then it'll be within a decade anyway."

Rising tide

Countries surrounding the Arctic are eyeing the economic opportunities that melting ice might bring.

Canada and Russia are exploring soverignity claims over tracts of Arctic seafloor, while just this week President Bush has urged more oil exploration in US waters - which could point the way to exploitation of reserves off the Alaskan coast.



But from a climate point of view, the melt could bring global impacts accelerating the rate of warming and of sea level rise.

"This is a positive feedback process," commented Dr Ian Willis, from the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.

"Sea ice has a higher albedo (reflectivity) than ocean water; so as the ice melts, the water absorbs more of the Sun's energy and warms up more, and that in turn warms the atmosphere more - including the atmosphere over the Greenland ice sheet."

Greenland is already losing ice to the oceans, contributing to the gradual rise in sea levels. The ice cap holds enough water to lift sea levels globally by about 7m (22ft) if it all melted.

Natural climatic cycles such as the Arctic Oscillation play a role in year-to-year variations in ice cover. But Julienne Stroeve believes the sea ice is now so thin that there is little chance of the melting trend turning round.

"If the ice were as thin as it was in the 1970s, last year's conditions would have brought a dip in cover, but nothing exceptional.

"But now it's so thin that you would have to have an exceptional sequence of cold winters and cold summers in order for it to rebuild."

Read more!

Deep-sea carbon storage must be tested, says leading scientist

David Adam, The Guardian 18 Jun 08;

Scientists must start dumping carbon dioxide into the deep ocean to see whether it provides a safe way of tackling global warming, a leading expert on climate change has said.

Wallace Broecker, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at New York's Columbia University, says experiments must be carried out "promptly" and has called on environmental campaigners to drop their opposition to such schemes. Experts have said carbon dioxide stripped from the exhaust gases of power stations and dumped in deep water would stay there for hundreds of years, but there is concern about the impact on marine life.

Writing for the Guardian, Broecker says: "While we know enough to say with confidence that deep ocean disposal of CO2 is certainly feasible, unless small-scale pilot experiments are conducted, information necessary to assess the impact [on sea life] will remain obscure. It is my view that a series of experiments involving one-tonne quantities of CO2 should be conducted."

He says such injections of the gas could be made from deep-sea drill ships, and monitored to see how it dispersed and affected marine life. Otherwise, he warns, the gas could be dumped in future with no idea of the consequences. "If marine disposal proves to be economically favourable and if push comes to shove, forces ... will likely intervene and deep-sea disposal will commence without adequate testing and evaluation."

Unlike most carbon capture and storage schemes, which aim to trap the gas and pump it into underground saltwater reservoirs or empty oil and gas fields, deep-sea storage would release the carbon dioxide directly into the water. Only very deep water would be suitable as great pressures are needed to stop the gas simply leaking back to the surface. At depths greater than 3,500m, scientists think the gas would be compressed into a slush that would settle on the sea bed. That rules out shallow seas such as the North Sea, but makes the Pacific Ocean a prime candidate — particularly as underground reservoir storage sites for carbon dioxide in the Pacific region could be vulnerable to earthquakes.

Broecker says 480bn tonnes of carbon dioxide could be safely dumped directly into the waters of the deep Pacific, equivalent to the carbon pollution from about 16 years of the world's current fossil fuel use.

Worms and other organisms on the sea bed directly beneath the storage site would be killed, Broecker admits, but he says the impact would be "trivial" compared to that of the fishing industry. Other experts have said the injected carbon dioxide could damage larger marine life including fish because the gas will dissolve in the seawater and make it more acidic.

Small amounts of CO2 have been injected into deep water off the California coast but there have been no large-scale experiments to test the concept. A planned pilot scheme off Hawaii was scrapped in the late 1990s after protests from local people and environmental groups. Greenpeace remains implacably against such experiments.

Broecker says: "I am in full sympathy with those who claim that the benthic world [the lowest level of a body of water] is likely a fragile one. Hence, before we poke it with CO2, we should do our homework. Therefore, I challenge Greenpeace to relax its stand and allow pilot CO2 injections to proceed."

But Bill Hare of Greenpeace said: "The urgency of reducing emissions of CO2 has never been greater. But just as with an emergency in a heavy passenger jet, the crew should never rush in to hasty actions that will ultimately make a very bad situation a lot worse. Ocean disposal of CO2 is one such option. The position of Greenpeace and of other groups opposed to this option was based on research into the effects of ocean disposal of CO2."

Read more!

Leading climate scientist challenges Greenpeace's opposition to storing CO2

Deep divisions
One of the world's leading climate scientists challenges Greenpeace's opposition to storing CO2 in the depth of the oceans

Wallace S Broecker, The Guardian 18 Jun 08;

Most of us who are concerned about global warming agree that an important part of any strategy designed to stem the ongoing build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will be to capture and store CO2. Potential storage sites include spent oil fields, saline aquifers, layered basalts and the deep ocean.

While Greenpeace accepts the inevitability that CO2 will be captured and stored, it strongly opposes storage in the deep sea. As it is clear that virtually all the CO2 released to the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuel burning will ultimately find its way to the deep sea, its objection is focused on the "point pollution" created by purposeful injections of CO2. The fear is that such an activity will put at risk benthic biota - the community of creatures and plants in the deep sea - living in the vicinity of the injection sites.

In February 2007, I contacted Bill Hare, a senior scientist at Greenpeace, asking him to reconsider his organisation's stance against experiments to evaluate the environmental consequences of CO2 injected into the deep sea. I pointed out that if marine disposal proves to be economically favorable, and if push comes to shove, forces more powerful than Greenpeace will probably intervene and deep sea disposal will commence without adequate testing and evaluation.

Hare agreed to reconsider this matter in consultation with members of his and other like-minded organisations. In June 2007, he reported back that no change in policy would be made.

As a scientist, I seek rational decisions. So let me begin by outlining what is known about deep ocean storage.

First, in order to ensure that the injected CO2 has adequate time to mix throughout the deep sea, injection should be at depths greater than 3,500 metres - that is, the depth below which "liquid" CO2 becomes more dense than sea water.

Experiments conducted by Peter Brewer, of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, not only confirm that this is the case but also demonstrate that the CO2 injected rapidly reacts with sea water to form a solid clathrate, which is more dense than both liquid CO2 and sea water. Hence, the injected CO2 would end up on the sea floor as a slush. This would gradually dissolve, releasing the CO2 to the surrounding sea water, where it would react with the dissolved carbonate and borate ions to become chemically bound in the form of bicarbonate ion. As the concentration of carbonate and borate ions is small, the neutralisation would take place gradually as the CO2-rich sea water mixed into the surroundings.

We know that, based on radiocarbon measurements, the residence time of water in the abyssal Atlantic is in the order of 200 years. For the Indian Ocean, it is about 800 years, and for the Pacific about 1,000 years. As the deep Pacific has the largest volume, and is adjacent to earthquake-prone land areas where below-ground storage could not be safely done, it will be a prime target for storage.

A conservative upper limit on the storage capacity of the deep Pacific would be to require that the CO2 concentration in the water returning to the surface not be allowed to exceed the concentration in cold surface water at equilibrium with the atmosphere. Were this the limit to be adopted, then the capacity of water deeper than 1,500 metres in the Pacific would be about 480 gigatons of CO2, or about 130 gigatons of carbon for each 100 parts per million rise in atmospheric CO2 content.

We know enough to say with confidence that deep ocean disposal of CO2 is certainly feasible, but unless small-scale pilot experiments are conducted, information necessary to assess the impact on the macro abyssal biota will remain obscure. The injections could be made from ships equipped for deep sea drilling, and if the CO2 were tagged with radiocarbon, its dispersal away from the sea floor clathrate pile could be sensitively monitored.

Studies of the costs associated with ocean disposal would also be conducted. The CO2 would have to be sent through pipelines from its collection point to a port, where it would be loaded on tankers that would carry it to a floating ocean station, from which it would be piped to the abyss.

Putting aside the opposition by the environmental community, ocean disposal will become a viable option only if the costs are competitive with those associated with storage in hyper-saline continental aquifers.

Reduce stress

As any strategy designed to stem the build-up of greenhouse gases will have adverse environmental consequences, we must seek to minimise their impact. To the extent that we could capture and store CO2 produced by fossil fuel burning, we would reduce the acidification of the surface ocean, and hence the additional stress on coral reef communities. To date, there is no indication that the projected rise in upper ocean CO2 content will have adverse impacts on fish. If so, assuming the limit described above were to be observed, then once spread through the deep sea, the injected CO2 would not adversely impact on benthic biota.

However, I sympathise with those who claim that the benthic world is a fragile one. Hence, before we poke it with CO2, we should do our homework. Therefore, I challenge Greenpeace to relax its stand and allow a pilot project to proceed.

· Wallace S Broecker is the Newberry professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, US, and is a scientist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth observatory.

Read more!

CO2 disposal in the ocean is a dangerous distraction: Greenpeace adviser

The Guardian 18 Jun 08;

Bill Hare, Greenpeace adviser and visiting scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany, responds to Wallace Broecker's call for carbon storage experiments in the depths of the Pacific Ocean

The urgency of reducing emissions of CO2 has never been greater. The science of climate change has revealed that the risks are much higher and more imminent than we had estimated only a few years ago. But just as with a deadly emergency in a heavy passenger jet: the crew should never, ever rush into hasty actions that will ultimately make a very bad situation a lot worse. Ocean disposal of CO2 is one such option.

A careful, rational and scientific analysis of the option of CO2 disposal in the ocean leads to the conclusion that it is not viable. In 2006 the German government's scientific Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) came down against this option: "introducing CO2 into seawater should be prohibited, because the risk of ecological damage cannot be assessed and the retention period in the oceans is too short." The main arguments were "the largely incalculable ecological risk" and the fact that over longer timeframes a significant fraction of the stored CO2 would get back to the atmosphere.

In the long run (hundreds to thousands of years) which, given the very long lifetime of CO2 we must always keep in mind when devising climate policies to limit warming, this option would not help reduce CO2 below levels that would have otherwise occurred.

As the IPCC Fourth Assessment Mitigation report, in which I was a lead author, has shown, conventional options to rapidly reduce emissions in the next few decades are available now. What is lacking to deploy these at scale and quickly are the appropriate policy settings. The absence of these is most acute in Dr Broecker's own country, the USA.

It is not just Greenpeace and other environmental groups that think that ocean disposal is a bad option. The decision by OSPAR, for example, to explicitly rule out the disposal of CO2 into the ocean and on to the sea bed, is by no means irrational, nor the result of "strong-arm tactics". Neither is it a decision in which Greenpeace played any major role.

Turning to some of the details in Dr Broecker's arguments.

Deep water injection CO2 would cause inevitable and potentially irrevocable damage to those deep-water ecosystems directly impacted (smothering, asphyxiation, acidification), and at scale would result in far more widespread effects in the abyssal zone over time as the clathrates dissolve. Over far longer timescales it would result in changes to abyssal ecosystems which in turn feed back to the global carbon cycle.

To suggest that there is "no indication that the projected rise in upper ocean CO2 content will have adverse impacts on fish" and, on this basis, to argue that spread of CO2 through the deep sea would therefore also be benign, is misleading in the extreme. This statement ignores the growing evidence that projected rises in upper ocean CO2 and consequent acidification is likely to have profound impacts on calcification rates and calcifying organisms. It is predicted that upper ocean pH levels will drop to levels lower than those recorded at any time over tens of millions of years, and at a rate orders of magnitude greater than any previous change. There is also evidence that deep water crustacean species, sediment dwelling organisms and associated ecosystem processes could also be adversely affected, including changes to nutrient cycling thought to occur through impacts on sediment microflora.

The fact that deep water CO2 concentrations are currently lower than those of surface waters should not be taken as an indication of a vast unexploited capacity for CO2 disposal. Our knowledge of the biogeochemical processes which have contributed to the current distribution of CO2 in the deep oceans remains limited, as does our capacity therefore to predict the consequences of multi-billion tonne injections of CO2 at depth. To assume that uniformity of concentration is somehow an acceptable target, or one which will have minimal impact on marine ecosystems and the carbon cycle, is oversimplistic.

Dr Broecker argues that a series of experiments involving the release of one tonne quantities of CO2 at depths greater than 3,500m are the next logical step. One tonne release experiments to observe behaviour and determine impacts is one thing. However, one tonne experiments intended as proof of the concept for multi-gigatonne injections in the future is quite another.

An obvious critical aspect is the potential for cumulative impacts resulting from continuous injections over long periods, or a large number of injections, such as would be a necessary characteristic of any deep injection strategy for climate change mitigation. The nature and likelihood of these cumulative impacts simply could not be assessed from the results of the experiments he suggests.

Existing ocean dumping laws are designed to protect the marine environment from irresponsible and unsustainable waste disposal operations. The London Convention and its 1996 Protocol, which are currently in force in parallel, preclude the disposal at sea of industrial waste, including CO2, with the specific exception to enable carbon capture and storage in sub-sea bed geological formations under strict conditions of operation, verification, monitoring and control.

By definition, injection of CO2 at the sea bed deliberately and immediately relinquishes any control over the waste. Such disposal operations are effectively irreversible, and any adverse consequences, on whatever geographical and time scales they may occur, cannot be prevented or mitigated. If the models Broecker suggests we should rely on prove to be inadequate or inaccurate, or both, what do we do?

In short, ocean disposal of CO2, in common with other proposals for geoengineering our way out of climate change, is simply a dangerous distraction and draws attention away from the real solutions. There is no alternative but to drastically reduce emissions and this is best done at source using renewable energy, energy efficiency, reducing deforestation and improving the efficiency of industry and agriculture.

Many in the scientific community and in environmental groups such as Greenpeace share Dr Broecker's deep sense of frustration at the lack of action to date and his great sense of foreboding over the fate of the planet if we do not succeed in getting emissions reduced quickly.

Dr Broecker's work and writings since at least the mid-1970s warning of the dangers of rising CO2 helped to inspire a generation of scientists such as myself to work on this subject, and moreover to work hard and long to develop a global agreement to reduce emissions and limit the risk of rapid human-induced and dangerous climate change. As such his views are to be taken seriously and considered carefully. But in this case we must agree to disagree.

Read more!