ClimateChangeFork

Yesterday (Wednesday) was the first day of classes in my school. I am scheduled to teach two related courses this semester: Energy Use and Climate Change for advanced undergraduates, and Physics & Society for physics seniors and graduate students. I am going to start both courses with the picture shown in Figure 1. At first glance, one might confuse the picture either with mediocre art or maybe more generously with science fiction. Yet the picture comes from an article that was just published in Science magazine, one of the most prestigious publications in science (I subscribe to it, but anybody can download this picture through Google images). I mentioned that article, “Marine Defaunation: Animal Loss in the Global Ocean,” (Science, 347, 247 (2015)) last week, together with the book The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. Both publications deal with species extinctions of the past, present and future. The picture shows an artist’s representation of how the world once looked and how it might look in the future, both on land and in the ocean. As always, there is no way of knowing what the future will actually bring; the best we can do is to base our suppositions on models that we hope can inform us about what the future will entail. In this case, the picture’s scope extends from 50,000 years ago – the approximate time that early modern humans started to spread from Africa to Asia and Europe – to toward the end of this century (what I call the “End of Now” in my book).

Figure 1
Timeline of marine and terrestrial defauntation

 To fit the provided space, the horizontal baseline was presented on a logarithmic scale (August 6, 2012 blog). Additionally, to give us an idea of the environment, not only do the climates of the past and present show up on the middle of the diagram, but the projected IPCC temperature rise (October 14, 2014) is superimposed on the area that represents the future.

The starting supposition in both publications is that we are now living in the Anthropocene (May 14, 2013 blog) period. “Officially” we are not there yet, but with 7 billion people (as of October 2012) and growing, the change in designation becomes inevitable and humans will soon officially become the dominant part of the “natural environment.” A fully qualified group is now discussing the issue, Here is their charge:

The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) is an interdisciplinary body of scientists and humanists working under the umbrella of the International Commission on Stratigraphy and tasked with developing a proposal for the formal ratification of the Anthropocene as an official unit amending the Geological Time Scale. On occasion of its very first meeting, the AWG together with HKW convene a socio- and science-political forum, bringing together scientific experts, political stakeholders, media outlets, and an interested public. The forum presents insights into current scientific findings in defining a global impact of human activities and debates the far-reaching implications of the Anthropocene hypothesis for science and society alike.

Figure 2
Comparative chronology of human-associated terrestrial and marine animal extinctions.

Kolbert’s book takes the position that we were basically dominant as soon as humans started to move around about 50,000 years ago. Her reasoning is that we almost immediately started to use killing tools whose effectiveness were independent from our body size and our physical strength. The book focuses on the role that humans play throughout the entire period depicted by the picture. There is no question in my mind that the official designation of the time period will not be quite so broad.

The Science paper emphasizes defaunation in the oceans; its main argument is that in comparison with that on land, the process started much more recently in marine environments, and thus, in principle, is still reversible. Figure 2 illustrates the timeline for land defaunation (again, the image was posted through Google Images, not directly taken from the Science paper). The loss of species shown is confined mostly to megafauna – a class of animals often defined as having body mass that exceeds 45 kg. Many of these species became extinct in Australia between 16,000 – 50,000 BCE. These include monotremes, various marsupials (the largest one exceeding 2 tons), big birds, and large reptiles. There has long been a dispute over who is to blame for these extinctions, but recent studies show a clear “preference” for humans as a cause.

Here is a short (non-exhaustive) list of what is included among the North American megafauna:

Pleistocene fauna in North America included giant sloths; short-faced bears; several species of tapirs; peccaries (Including the long nosed and flat-headed peccaries); the American lion; giant tortoises; Miracinonyx (“American cheetahs”, not true cheetahs); saber-toothed cats like Smilodon and the scimitar cat, Homotherium; dire wolves; saiga; camelids such as two species of now extinct llamas and Camelops; at least two species of bison; stag-moose; the shrub-ox and Harlan’s muskox; 14 species of pronghorn (of which 13 are now extinct); horses; mammoths and mastodons; the beautiful armadillo and the giant armadillo-like Glyptotherium and giant beavers as well as birds like giant condors and other teratorns. The nine-foot sabertooth salmon lived at the time as well. In contrast, today the largest North American land animal is the American bison.

The global extinction phase in the figure is represented by the dodo, an animal that became extinct once the island of Mauritius was settled by humans (July 30, 2013 blog). Mass marine extinction, which is shown as a small vertical blue line that hugs the origin of the figure, only started in the 20^th Century, with the advent of industrialized fishing.

The Science paper differentiates between these different kinds of extinctions:

Local extinction

Defaunation has caused numerous geographic range constrictions in marine animal species, driving them locally extinct in many habitats. These effects have been particularly severe among large pelagic fishes, where ~90% of studied species have exhibited range contractions (8, 14) (Fig. 3). Local extinctions, however, are not unique to large pelagic predators. Close to a third of the marine fishes and invertebrates off the North American coasts that can be reliably sampled in scientific trawl surveys (often small to medium bodied species) have also exhibited range contractions (Fig. 3). Such contractions can result from the direct elimination of vulnerable subpopulations or from region-wide declines in abundance (14). Available data suggest that the magnitude of the range on tractions for this diverse set of trawl-surveyed marine species is, on average, less than the contractions observed for terrestrial animals such as mammals, birds, and butterflies. Though data deficiencies are abundant, most marine animal species also do not yet seem to exhibit some of the most extreme range contractions recorded for terrestrial animals. Asian tigers, for example, have lost ~93% of their historical range (15), whereas tiger sharks still range across the world’s oceans (16).

Ecological extinction

Reductions in the abundance of marine animals have been well documented in the oceans (17). Aggregated population trend data suggest that in the last four decades, marine vertebrates (fish, seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals) have declined in abundance by on average 22% (18). Marine fishes have declined in aggregate by 38% (17), and certain baleen whales by 80 to 90% (19). Many of these declines have been termed ecological extinctions—although the species in question are still extant, they are no longer sufficiently abundant to perform their functional roles. Ecological extinctions are well known in terrestrial environments and have been demonstrated to be just as disruptive as species extinctions (20). On land, we know of the phenomenon of “empty forests” where ecological extinctions of forest fauna alter tree recruitment, reshape plant dispersal, and cause population explosions of small mammals (1, 20, 21). We are now observing the proliferation of “empty reefs,” “empty estuaries,” and “empty bays” (7, 14, 22).

Commercial extinction

Species that drop below an abundance level at which they can be economically harvested are extinct from a commercial standpoint. On land, commercial extinctions affected species ranging from chinchilla to bison (23). Cases of commercial extinction are also common in the oceans. Gray whales were commercially hunted starting in the 1840s.

By 1900, their numbers were so depleted that targeted harvest of this species was no longer regionally tenable (24). Likewise, the great whales in Antarctica were serially hunted to commercial extinction (25). Not all species, however, are so “lucky” as to have human harvesters desist when they become extremely rare. Demand and prices for certain highly prized marine wildlife can continue to increase as these animals become less abundant—a phenomenon termed the anthropogenic Allee effect (26). Individual bluefin tuna can sell for >US$100,000, rare sea cucumbers >US$400/kg, and high-quality shark fins for >US$100/kg. Such species are the rhinos of the ocean—they may never be too rare to be hunted.

How could man – a comparatively small animal with (at best) a bow and arrow, be responsible for the extinction of beasts such as the wooly mammoth? Kolbert’s book presents an interesting theory: big animals like the mammoth or today’s African elephants and rhinos are big for a reason. They didn’t use to have any natural enemies.

A very large animal is living on the edge with respect to its reproductive rate. The gestation period of an elephant, for example, is twenty two months. Elephants don’t have twins, and they don’t start to reproduce until they are in their teens.

With such restrictions, they can survive only because they didn’t have predators that could take them on. Once man was able to develop the tools and the social skills to take them on, they didn’t stand a chance. It’s true that the human population was still small and the people killed only the animals that they needed for survival. With the help of computer modeling, however, researchers have found that such a dynamic was more than enough to cause mass extinction within a few hundred years – in geological time, that is an instant.

In the oceans, the process is just starting. 70% of the Earth is covered by oceans, which have an average depth that exceeds 2.2 miles. Marine animal ranges are naturally much larger than those of terrestrial animals with similar body weight. Man’s access is much more limited, or has been up to now. The balance has yet to be completely monopolized by humans. To some extent, fish can still flee from human predators as well as from the changing environment caused by anthropogenic climate change. However, our ever increasing population and technological developments are starting to close that gap. Hopefully, going on the business as usual warming scenario shown in Figure 1, we still have some time to restore the balance.

As we approached the new year, I started to describe the global energy transition that’s been taking place, which we hope will take us away from fossil fuels and closer to non-carbon-based energy sources. My plan was to study the efforts of a few key countries, each of which serves as a potential example from which the rest of us can learn; I started that series of blogs with a look at Germany’s main steps  (December 9 – 30, 2014). All of these efforts are largely targeted toward the meeting that will take place in Paris, in December of 2015, where a global agreement regarding such approaches will be discussed. As often happens with any plan, however, reality interfered, so I am pausing from that train of thought – in this case the distraction came, in the form of a short New York Times article about a conflict between two groups of people in the state of Maine.

PORTLAND, Me. — In the vast gulf that arcs from Massachusetts’s shores to Canada’s Bay of Fundy, cod was once king. It paid for fishermen’s boats, fed their families and put their children through college. In one halcyon year in the mid-1980s, the codfish catch reached 25,000 tons.

Today, the cod population has collapsed. Last month, regulators effectively banned fishing for six months while they pondered what to do, and next year, fishermen will be allowed to catch just a quarter of what they could before the ban.

But a fix may not be easy. The Gulf of Maine’s waters are warming — faster than almost any ocean waters on earth, scientists say — and fish are voting with their fins for cooler places to live. That is upending an ecosystem and the fishing industry that depends on it.

Regulators this month canceled the Maine shrimp catch for the second straight year, in no small part because shrimp are fleeing for colder climes. Maine lobsters are booming, but even so, the most productive lobster fishery has shifted as much as 50 miles up the coast in the last 40 years. Black sea bass, southerly fish seldom seen here before, have become so common that this year, Maine officials moved to regulate their catch. Blue crab, a signature species in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, are turning up off Portland.

In decades past, the gulf had warmed on average by about one degree every 21 years. In the last decade, the average has been one degree every two years. “What we’re experiencing is a warming that very few ocean ecosystems have ever experienced,” said Andrew J. Pershing, the chief scientific officer for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute here.

Joe Orlando, 60, who fishes from a Gloucester, Mass., base, said the effect of the ban was terrifying. “It’s completely, completely over,” he said. “I got a house, kids, payments.”

But many other fishermen do not blame climate change. They blame the regulators, calling the moratorium cruel and needless, because they say their latest cod catches are actually better than in recent years. More than a few talk of a conspiracy between scientists and environmentalists to manufacture a fishing crisis that will justify their jobs.

Scientists say the truth is more prosaic: Although the gulf is generally warming — 2012 was the hottest year on record — the last year was cooler, and kinder to cod. Moreover, the gulf’s remaining cod have congregated in deeper, colder waters in southern Maine and Massachusetts, where their abundance masks their scarcity elsewhere.

“A fisherman’s job isn’t to get an unbiased estimate of abundance. It’s to catch fish,” said Michael Fogarty, the chief of the ecosystem assessment program at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors sea life. “The world they see is a different world than we see in the surveys.”

Two weeks later, another article appeared in the New York Times in the form of an Op-Ed that expanded the issue:

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — IN November, regulators from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shut down recreational and commercial cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine, that enchanting arm of the coastal sea stretching east-northeast from Cape Cod. They did not have much choice: Federal law requires action to rebuild fish stocks when they are depleted, and recent surveys revealed cod populations to be at record lows, despite decades of regulations intended to restore them.

The fishery resources of the western Atlantic once seemed virtually limitless, with fish supposedly as numerous as grains of sand in the Sahara. And yet the current emergency effort to restore cod populations is simply the latest chapter in a 150-year saga in which fishermen, scientists, industrialists and politicians have consistently confronted emptier nets and fewer fish.

As early as the 1850s, fishermen from Maine and Massachusetts began to pester their governments to do something about declining cod catches. Those men fished with hooks and lines from small wooden sailboats and rowboats. Fearing “the material injury of the codfishing interests of this state” by increased fishing for menhaden, a critical forage fish for cod, fishermen from Gouldsboro, Me., implored the Legislature in 1857 to limit menhaden hauls.

Yet annual cod landings in the Gulf of Maine continued to slide, from about 70,000 metric tons in 1861 to about 54,000 metric tons in 1880, to about 20,000 tons in the 1920s, to just a few thousand metric tons in recent years. There have been a few upticks along the way, such as one bumper year in the mid-1980s when the cod catch reached 25,000 tons (due, in part, to an unnecessarily large expansion of the fishing fleet), but for the most part the trend has been noticeably downward since the era of the Civil War. There have been plenty of warnings along the way. Maine’s fishery commissioner, Edwin W. Gould, spoke out plainly in 1892. “It is the same old story,” he said. “The buffalo is gone; the whale is disappearing; the seal fishery is threatened with destruction.” For Mr. Gould, the path forward was clear: “Fish need protection.”

Maine is a small state (in terms of population and economic activity) with about 0.4% of the US population and 0.3% of its GDP. A reported clash between fishermen and regulators should not be big news. It might be big news if served as a laboratory for resolution of similar clashes in much larger setting.

I have two academic friends, both of whom are retired professors of history; they now split their lives between teaching in New York and vacationing in a cabin situated on the shores of a beautiful lake in Maine. The cabin is not connected to the electrical grid, but gets its electrical power from a small generator supplemented by a solar panel. When I was making a the movie, “Quest for Energy,” about a community of people living in the Sundarbans in India and their quest to transition their access to electrical power, I invited myself over to my friends’ cabin for a few days so I could learn the intricacies of living off the grid. Since then I have tried to visit for fun – instead of just for reasons relating to my work. My wife and I simply love their place (and their company) and we have great time there. Recently, I met up with them and showed them the article. I asked them what they think can be done to bridge the gap between the fishermen and the scientists (regulators); they told me to forget about it – such a thing will never happen. According to them, the fishermen want to keep guys like me (an academic from NY) as far away as possible from Maine and more specifically from Maine’s precious shoreline.

Maine is not indifferent to climate change. Here is what the Energy Information Administration (EIA) writes about environmental activities in Maine:

Quick Facts

• The Port of Portland receives crude oil shipments that are transported by pipeline to refineries in Quebec and Ontario.
• Maine is the only New England state in which industry is the largest energy consuming sector; the industrial sector accounted for 34% of energy consumed in 2011.
• Maine had the lowest average electricity retail prices in New England at the end of 2013.
• Virtually all of Maine’s net electricity generation comes from nonutility power producers.
• In 2013, over half of Maine’s net electricity generation came from renewable energy resources, with about 29% from hydroelectricity, 25% from wood, and 7% from wind.

Maine: Profile Analysis

Hydroelectric dams and biomass from wood products provide almost half of Maine’s net electricity generation, the largest share from renewable sources in the eastern United States. Biomass alone accounts for more than one-fifth of generation, the largest share by far of any state, placing Maine among the top U.S. producers of electricity from wood and wood waste-derived fuels, such as wood pellets. The state has the highest generation per capita in the nation of electricity from biomass. Use of wood for home heating has grown in rural Maine as the price of home heating oil has risen.

Hydroelectric turbines produce nearly one-fourth of Maine’s net electricity generation, the largest share of any state east of the Mississippi. Water-powered mills were built on Maine’s numerous rivers to run its earliest industries, and when electricity became available in the late 1800s, small hydroelectric dams were built all over the state. By the mid-1980s, the state was home to 782 dams. A few have since been removed to restore natural river flows and fish migrations. Recently, Maine hydroelectric dam owners and conservationists have reached agreements to increase turbine generating capacity at some dams while tearing down others.

In 1999, as part of electricity market restructuring, Maine regulators set a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) requiring that at least 30% of retail electricity sales come from renewable sources, although state electricity distributors had already surpassed that goal. Since then, the legislature has added a second, separate RPS that requires new renewable resources to supply increasing shares of electricity sales, topping out at 10% in 2017. New hydroelectric generators must be smaller than 100 megawatts to qualify under the second RPS. The state legislature has debated lifting that limit to allow more hydroelectricity imports from Canada.

Most new renewable generating facilities planned in New England are wind-powered. Maine has significant wind resources along crests of Appalachian ranges in the state’s northwest and along its Atlantic coastline. The Maine legislature has set goals of installing 2,000 megawatts of wind capacity in the state by 2015; 3,000 megawatts by 2020, with at least 300 megawatts offshore; and 8,000 megawatts by 2030, with at least 5,000 megawatts offshore. Wind energy has been gaining net electricity generating share in Maine rapidly in recent years, with more than a dozen projects coming on line. The state leads New England in wind generation. The first application for wind turbines in federal waters off Maine was filed in 2011. Also on the Maine coast is the first U.S. tidal power generating facility to produce electricity, a pilot project in Cobscook Bay. Because of concerns about the cost of new technologies, New England governors are exploring regional procurement of renewable resources, primarily wind, to meet state RPS goals more economically.

So what can be done to make the fishermen and scientists talk with each other? My first thought was of Katherine Hayhoe. I wrote about her efforts in my April 22, 2014 blog when I described the TV program “Years of Living Dangerously.” Don Cheadle, who narrated the first episode of the program, showed the difference in response to the droughts in both Texas and California. In California, common belief seems to be that climate change is an important contributor to the cause, while in Texas they believe that the droughts are an act of God. Cheadle went to Texas to interview Katherine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and devout evangelist, who joins the evangelists in their prayers but explains that there is no contradiction between believing in both God and science (The Pope is now strongly presenting the same view). Through her efforts, much of the audience was listening and starting to believe that anthropogenic climate change has something to do with the drought and that we can do something to mitigate it.

How could a similar experience help in Maine? Any ideas? Stay tuned!