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The Royal Society gets it wrong on people and the planet
The Royal Society – Britain’s premier scientific institution – has just released a major report called People and the Planet, arguing that per capita resource consumption in the richest parts of the world needs to come down dramatically if the poorest 1.3 billion are to be lifted out of extreme poverty whilst protecting the Earth’s environment from irreparable harm. (Do join Leo Hickman’s debate on the Guardian site here, and my thanks to him for prompting this piece.)
I wouldn’t argue with most of the data underpinning this report, but I do have problems with some of the assumptions. The first is that population growth is necessarily a bad thing, and that there is therefore a pressing need to reduce the rate of growth in developing countries. The report states early on:
“At a time when so many people remain impoverished and natural resources are becoming increasingly scarce, continued population growth is cause for concern.”
Recent
Where sea-level rise isn’t what it seems
Whilst working for the Maldives government I was always aware of the need to resist the temptation of making sweeping statements about the impacts of climate change and sea-level rise in the service of wider political ends. I saw part of my role as advisor to push back against the simplistic view that given that we know that the planet is warming, and the seas are rising, surely the impacts - in terms of erosion, flooding events and disasters – should increasingly be visible now, right?
A new paper published in the AGU’s house journal Eos Transactions shows why caution is often justified. Here (via a screengrab, as the entire thing is behind a password) is the 1993-2011 sea level trend data from Tarawa atoll, part of Kiribati in the central Pacific:
Whoa! No sea-level rise there, then. And yet of course climate campaigners – and even the Kiribati government – understandably anxious to highlight the future existential threat to the islands, have used storm surges, flooding events and suchlike as evidence of current sea-level rise impacts. Which they are almost certainly not, at least not in Tarawa atoll anyway.
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North Korea – a stain on the conscience of the world
How long is the world going to tolerate the human rights hell-hole that is North Korea? Part theological Communist dictatorship, part dynastic monarchy, the so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea reportedly has somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 people confined permanently in its network of Soviet-style gulags, subject to slave labour, starvation, torture and execution. No other human rights-abuser comes close to North Korea’s record of hideous crimes inflicted on its own population – not Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran nor any of the other ‘rogue states’ still present on the international map today.
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Fukushima’s impact on the ocean environment revealed
Many environmentalists oppose nuclear power presumably because they think it is bad for the environment. Concerns about waste, radioactive releases and so on are often cited as evidence for this. Having released a very large quantity of artificial radioactive isotopes into the marine environment, Fukushima gives us a very good opportunity to test this concern in a real-world setting. Some fascinating results are now in, courtesy of Ken Buesseler and colleagues, in a paper just published in the highly-respected journal PNAS.
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A letter to David Cameron
Countering the letter sent to him by four former directors of Friends of the Earth.
From George Monbiot, Stephen Tindale, Fred Pearce, Michael Hanlon and Mark Lynas.
(See also George Monbiot in the Guardian: ‘Why I am urging David Cameron to act against Friends of the Earth‘)
By fax and email
15 March 2012
Dear Mr Cameron
We write because we believe you have been misled by four prominent environmentalists who contacted you recently about nuclear power. This quartet – Jonathon Porritt, Charles Secrett, Tom Burke and Tony Juniper – were all in the past directors of Friends of the Earth, an organisation which also put its official seal of approval on the letter sent by them to you on 12 March 2012.
We believe their advice to be wrong both in fact and interpretation, and feel that if you act on it without further consideration of the alternatives, you risk threatening both the energy security of the UK and our climate-change targets.
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