Reposted from The Independent UK.

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Dying Seas

The DEFRA Study

Britain’s seas are seriously ailing and the species that depend on them suffering as never before. The most comprehensive “health check” ever made of the waters around our shores has revealed that, while Britannia once ruled the waves, now it is helping destroy what lives beneath them.

Fish stocks are on the brink of collapse. Species are changing sex because of pollution. Dolphins and porpoises are being killed at unprecedented rates. Water temperatures are rising, and the seabed is being destroyed.

In a disturbing insight into the state of our seas, the government-led investigation has found clear proof that the seas around the British Isles are already suffering the effects of global warming – threatening the survival of fish such as cod and raising the risk of a sudden, catastrophic change in weather patterns.

The study, compiled by the Department for Food, Environment and the Regions (Defra) after 18 months of reviewing all current marine research, found that water temperatures and sea levels are now rising around Britain, while salt levels are dropping because of melting Arctic ice caps. Meanwhile native plankton species – vital to the survival of many fish stocks – are slowly disappearing.

This deeply worrying picture has emerged from 900-page report, which is being published by ministers on Tuesday, into the true state of the seas around the British Isles – historically one of the world’s richest marine environments. The audit, which has been peer reviewed, reveals how:

• sea temperatures have risen by 0.6C a decade, and by up to 1.5C in winter;
• sea levels are rising by up to 2mm a year because of melting ice caps and increased rainfall;
• sea water is becoming more acidic because of increasing carbon dioxide levels in the air;
• fish, such as cod, haddock, herring, blue whiting and sole, are being fished outside safe limits, with cod “in danger of collapse”;
• common skate and angel shark have disappeared from the Irish Sea and the Channel;
• cold-water plankton – the most basic food stuff for young cod and other native species – is moving northwards and being replaced by warm-water plankton;
• deep-sea trawlers are harming fish such as orange roughie and anglerfish, and devastating ancient and fragile coral beds off western Scotland;
• winter storms are growing more intense and wave heights increasing by 30cm a decade, risking flooding and cliff erosion in regions such as East Anglia, north Wales and southern England;
• estuaries such as the Mersey, Clyde and Tees are showing “undesirably high” toxic contamination from heavy metals and chemicals, which has led to flounder and dab showing signs of cancer and suffering sex changes;
• a “significant” number of shellfish farms are unsafe and beaches are being closed due to sewage contamination;
• massive new offshore windfarms off Wales, north-west England and the South-east pose a “major challenge” to marine life.

The document forms a crucial part of a new Government campaign to combat climate change and introduce tough new controls on over-fishing, campaigns that will be stepped up this week.

Elliott Morley, the environment minister who oversaw the report, told The Independent on Sunday: “For the dwindling band of doubters, I would really recommend that they look at this report. It demonstrates there are serious problems with climatic change, and we’ve really got to get a grip on it. The longer we delay taking effective action, the more difficult it will be to turn things around. Even a five-year delay could be significant.”

He warned that these trends could lead to the weakening of a crucial ocean current and weather system that keeps Britain warm, which is known as the North Atlantic Oscillation and is connected to the Gulf Stream. “This is new. These are the kinds of things which have just appeared on the radar screen.” There was, he claimed, an “urgent” need to start preparing an even more sweeping global agreement to cut climate change gases to replace the Kyoto Protocol despite US opposition.

The fishing industry would also get a rude shock, he claimed. “This report makes very clear the impact of commercial fishing on the marine ecosystem. We can’t go on with these unsustainable levels of fishing. In that respect, it’s very powerful.”

The report, based on 800 pages of scientific analysis, also uses a “traffic light” system to show how the health of the seas in 22 key areas. A healthy “green light” is awarded for only three of them – oil pollution, oil spills and the health of sea mammals such as seals.

The most heavily used colour is amber, for 12 areas such as human sewage, radioactivity, salmon farming and chemical pollution, which it claims have “room for improvement”. Even so, sea birds are still at risk of death from trawler nets, oil spills and pollution, and salmon farms are still threatening wild salmon with interbreeding and sea lice.

The study says that chemical and radioactive releases are getting better, but it warns that some persistent chemicals, such as hormone-disrupting chemicals causing sex changes, are not properly understood or monitored. Farming fertilisers are still causing serious problems for some ports and regions, leading to algeal blooms and unchecked seaweed growth.

However, red “warnings” are slapped on seven areas: the collapse of key fish stocks; the unprecedented changes in plankton species; the deaths of dolphins and porpoises from trawler nets; a collapse in some North Sea bird populations due to overfishing of sandeels; the 50 non-native species which have arrived in British waters; the sea life affected by climate change; and the beaches still despoiled by litter.

An Interview with Matthew Simmons is reposted from Aljazeera.Net.

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Has Saudi Oil Peaked?

Adam Porter

As oil stubbornly refuses to fall below $45 a barrel, a major market mover has cast a worrying future prediction.

Energy investment banker Matthew Simmons, of Simmons & Co International, has been outspoken in his warnings about peak oil before. His new statement is his strongest yet, “we may have already passed peak oil“.

The subject of peak oil, the point at which the world’s finite supply of oil begins to decline, is a hot topic in the industry. Arguments are commonplace over whether it will happen at all, when it will happen or whether it has already happened. Simmons, a Republican adviser to the Bush-Cheney energy plan, believes it “is the world’s number one problem, far more serious than global warming“.

 Speaking exclusively to Aljazeera, Simmons came out with a statement that, if proven true over time, could herald by far the biggest energy crisis mankind has known.

The technical term for damaging an oilfield by overproduction is rate sensitivity. In other words, if the oil is pulled out of the ground too fast, it damages the fragile geological structure of the field. This can make as much as 80% of the oil within the field unextractable. Of course, at the moment, virtually every producer is at full tilt. The most important among them is Saudi Arabia; their Gharwar field is the world’s biggest.

One of the first hints that Simmons got over possible Saudi Arabian overproduction was from researching an obscure US Senate committee meeting in 1974.

Currently, at near maximum production, Saudi Arabia is producing about 9mbpd, though recently they claimed they could potentially produce 12mbpd or even as much as 20mbpd. A claim Simmons called “pie in the sky”.

Simmons also says the same thing happened with the oil company El Paso last year.

In 2004 Shell first announced it had lost about 20% of its oil reserves. Another clue came as Simmons discovered a ferocious debate that had been going on inside Saudi Aramco about overproduction.

The reasons for maximising production are not always obvious, they can be technical, but also geo-political.

The idea that Saudi Arabia could force its production up to 12mbpd or higher is met with scorn by Simmons.

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Matthew Simmons is one of the leading energy advisors to President George Bush and the United States Congress.

Reposted from The Guardian UK.

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Leave Iraq Now!

Hassan Juma’a Awad

We lived through dark days under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. When the regime fell, people wanted a new life: a life without shackles and terror; a life where we could rebuild our country and enjoy its natural wealth. Instead, our communities have been attacked with chemicals and cluster bombs, and our people tortured, raped and killed in our homes.

Saddam’s secret police used to creep over the roofs into our homes at night; occupation troops now break down our doors in broad daylight. The media do not show even a fraction of the devastation that has engulfed Iraq. Journalists who dare to report the truth of what is happening have been kidnapped by terrorists. This serves the agenda of the occupation, which aims to eliminate witnesses to its crimes.

Workers in Iraq’s southern oilfields began organising soon after British occupying forces invaded Basra. We founded our union, the Southern Oil Company Union, just 11 days after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. When the occupation troops stood back and allowed Basra’s hospitals, universities and public services to be burned and looted, while they defended only the oil ministry and oilfields, we knew we were dealing with a brutal force prepared to impose its will without regard for human suffering. From the beginning, we were left in no doubt that the US and its allies had come to take control of our oil resources.

The occupation authorities have maintained many of Saddam’s repressive laws, including the 1987 order which robbed us of basic union rights, including the right to strike. Today, we still have no official recognition as a trade union, despite having 23,000 members in 10 oil and gas companies in Basra, Amara, Nassiriya, and up to Anbar province. However, we draw our legitimacy from the workers, not the government. We believe unions should operate regardless of the government’s wishes, until the people are able finally to elect a genuinely accountable and independent Iraqi government, which represents our interests and not those of American imperialism.

Our union is independent of any political party. Most trade unions in Britain only seem to be aware of one union federation in Iraq, the regime-authorised Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, whose president, Rassim Awadi, is deputy leader of the US-imposed prime minister Ayad Allawi’s party. The IFTU’s leadership is carved up between the pro-government Communist party, Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord, and their satellites. In fact, there are two other union federations, which are linked to political parties, as well as our own organisation.

Our union has already shown it is able to stand its ground against one of the most powerful US companies, Dick Cheney’s KBR, which tried to take over our workplaces with the protection of occupation forces.

We forced them out and compelled their Kuwaiti subcontractor, Al Khourafi, to replace 1,000 of the 1,200 employees it brought with it with Iraqi workers, 70% of whom are unemployed today. We also fought US viceroy Paul Bremer’s wage schedule, which dictated that Iraqi public sector workers must earn ID 69,000 ($35) per month, while paying up to $1,000 a day to thousands of foreign mercenaries. In August 2003 we took strike action and shut down all oil production for three days. As a result, the occupation authorities had to raise wages to a minimum of ID 150,000.

We see it as our duty to defend the country’s resources. We reject and will oppose all moves to privatise our oil industry and national resources. We regard this privatisation as a form of neo-colonialism, an attempt to impose a permanent economic occupation to follow the military occupation.

The occupation has deliberately fomented a sectarian division of Sunni and Shia. We never knew this sort of division before. Our families intermarried, we lived and worked together. And today we are resisting this brutal occupation together, from Falluja to Najaf to Sadr City. The resistance to the occupation forces is a God-given right of Iraqis, and we, as a union, see ourselves as a necessary part of this resistance – although we will fight using our industrial power, our collective strength as a union, and as a part of civil society which needs to grow in order to defeat both still-powerful Saddamist elites and the foreign occupation of our country.

Bush and Blair should remember that those who voted in last month’s elections in Iraq are as hostile to the occupation as those who boycotted them. Those who claim to represent the Iraqi working class while calling for the occupation to stay a bit longer, due to “fears of civil war”, are in fact speaking only for themselves and the minority of Iraqis whose interests are dependent on the occupation.

We as a union call for the withdrawal of foreign occupation forces and their military bases. We don’t want a timetable – this is a stalling tactic. We will solve our own problems. We are Iraqis, we know our country and we can take care of ourselves. We have the means, the skills and resources to rebuild and create our own democratic society.

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Hassan Juma’a Awad is general secretary of Iraq’s Southern Oil Company Union and president of the Basra Oil Workers’ Union. You can write him at: hssnawad@yahoo.com

Reposted from Monbiot.com.

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Now for the Bad News: Spring is early!

George Monbiot

It is now mid-February, and already I have sown 11 species of vegetable. I know, though the seed packets tell me otherwise, that they will flourish. Everything in this country – daffodils, primroses, almond trees, bumblebees, nesting birds – is a month ahead of schedule. And it feels wonderful. Winter is no longer the great gray longing of my childhood. The freezes this country suffered in 1982 and 1963 are, unless the Gulf Stream stops, unlikely to recur. Our summers will be long and warm. Across most of the upper northern hemisphere, climate change, so far, has been kind to us.

And this is surely one of the reasons why we find it so hard to accept what the climatologists are now telling us. In our mythologies, an early spring is a reward for virtue. “For, lo, the winter is past,” Solomon, the beloved of God, exults. “The rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come.” How can something which feels so good result from something so bad?

Tomorrow, after 13 years of negotiation, the Kyoto protocol on climate change comes into force. No one believes that this treaty alone – which commits 30 developed nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 4.8% – will solve the problem. It expires in 2012 and, thanks to US sabotage, there has so far been no progress towards a replacement. It paroles the worst offenders, the US and Australia, and imposes no limits on the gases produced by developing countries. The cuts it enforces are at least an order of magnitude too small to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at anything approaching a safe level. But even this feeble agreement is threatened by our complacency about the closing of the climatic corridor down which we walk.

Why is this? Why are we transfixed by terrorism, yet relaxed about the collapse of the conditions that make our lives possible? One reason is surely the disjunction between our expectations and our observations. If climate change is to introduce horror into our lives, we would expect – because throughout our evolutionary history we survived by finding patterns in nature – to see that horror beginning to unfold. It is true that a few thousand people in the rich world have died as a result of floods and heatwaves. But the overwhelming sensation, experienced by all of us, almost every day, is that of being blessed by our pollution.

Instead, the consequences of our gluttony are visited on others. The climatologists who met at the government’s conference in Exeter this month heard that a rise of just 2.1 degrees, almost certain to happen this century, will confront as many as 3 billion people with water stress. This, in turn, is likely to result in tens of millions of deaths. But the same calm voice that tells us climate change means mild winters and early springs informs us, in countries like the UK, that we will be able to buy our way out of trouble. While the price of food will soar as the world goes into deficit, those who are rich enough to have caused the problem will, for a couple of generations at least, be among the few who can afford to ignore it.

Another reason is that there is a well-funded industry whose purpose is to reassure us, and it is granted constant access to the media. We flatter its practitioners with the label “skeptics”. If this is what they were, they would be welcome. Skepticism (the Latin word means “inquiring” or “reflective”) is the means by which science advances. Without it we would still be rubbing sticks together. But most of those we call skeptics are nothing of the kind. They are PR people, the loyalists of Exxon Mobil (by whom most of them are paid), commissioned to begin with a conclusion and then devise arguments to justify it. Their presence on outlets such as the BBC’s Today program might be less objectionable if, every time Aids was discussed, someone was asked to argue that it is not caused by HIV, or, every time a rocket goes into orbit, the Flat Earth Society was invited to explain that it could not possibly have happened. As it is, our most respected media outlets give Exxon Mobil what it has paid for: they create the impression that a significant scientific debate exists when it does not.

But there’s a much bigger problem here. The denial of climate change, while out of tune with the science, is consistent with, even necessary for, the outlook of almost all the world’s economists. Modern economics, whether informed by Marx or Keynes or Hayek, is premised on the notion that the planet has an infinite capacity to supply us with wealth and absorb our pollution. The cure to all ills is endless growth. Yet endless growth, in a finite world, is impossible. Pull this rug from under the economic theories, and the whole system of thought collapses.

And this, of course, is beyond contemplation. It mocks the dreams of both left and right, of every child and parent and worker. It destroys all notions of progress. If the engines of progress – technology and its amplification of human endeavor – have merely accelerated our rush to the brink, then everything we thought was true is false. Brought up to believe that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, we are now discovering that it is better to curse the darkness than to burn your house down.

Our economists are exposed by climatologists as utopian fantasists, the leaders of a millenarian cult as mad as, and far more dangerous than, any religious fundamentalism. But their theories govern our lives, so those who insist that physics and biology still apply are ridiculed by a global consensus founded on wishful thinking.

And this leads us, I think, to a further reason for turning our eyes away. When terrorists threaten us, it shows that we must count for something, that we are important enough to kill. They confirm the grand narrative of our lives, in which we strive through thickets of good and evil towards an ultimate purpose. But there is no glory in the threat of climate change. The story it tells us is of yeast in a barrel, feeding and farting until it is poisoned by its own waste. It is too squalid an ending for our anthropocentric conceit to accept.

The challenge of climate change is not, primarily, a technical one. It is possible greatly to reduce our environmental impact by investing in energy efficiency, though as the Exeter conference concluded, “energy efficiency improvements under the present market system are not enough to offset increases in demand caused by economic growth”. It is possible to generate far more of the energy we consume by benign means. But if our political leaders are to save the people rather than the people’s fantasies, then the way we see ourselves must begin to shift. We will succeed in tackling climate change only when we accept that we belong to the material world.

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References:

1. The Song of Solomon, Chapter 2, verses 11 and 12.

2. See George Monbiot, 21st December 2004. America´s War with Itself.

3. New Scientist (3rd February 2005) reports a study by Malte Meinshausen from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, which suggests that global carbon emissions must fall by between 30% and 50% of 1990 levels by 2050, to stabilise CO2 in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million. This would introduce ìa 50-50 chance that the world´s average temperature rise will not exceed 2∞C by 2050.” The committee report from the Exeter conference (see (6) below) warns that ìlimiting warming to a 2 C increase with a relatively high certainty requires the equivalent concentration of CO2 to stay below 400 ppm”. But even 2C is way above the level at which grave impacts are felt by hundreds of millions of people.

4. The Meteorological Office, 1st – 3rd February 2005. Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Table 2a. Impacts on human systems due to temperature rise, precipitation change and increases in extreme events.

5. See for example, No author, 12th February 2005. Meet the sceptics. New Scientist; and www.exxonsecrets.org

6. The Meteorological Office, 3rd February 2005. International symposium on the stabilisation of greenhouse gases: Report of the Steering Committee. Hadley Centre, Met Office, Exeter, UK

Reposted from ABC in Australia.

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An Interview with Ron Nielsen

Eleanor Hall

Now to some alarming scientific research on the state of the planet: destructive climate change; the depletion of energy, food and fish stocks; a looming shortage of fresh water and social chaos.

According to a detailed survey which will be launched later this month, the human race is facing extinction in a matter of decades and will run out of some critical resources in just a few years.

The Little Green Handbook, which examines the ecological limits of human life on earth, warns that for the first time in human history we are approaching these limits, and in some cases have already crossed them.

But while this research is wide-ranging, looking not just at the physical environment but at social trends as well, it’s been conducted by a scientist within a very specific discipline.

Dr Ron Nielsen is a nuclear physicist. Born in Poland he has worked at the Australian National University as well as research institutes throughout Europe and his work has been published in scientific journals internationally.

When Dr Nielsen spoke to me from our Brisbane studio he explained to me why as a nuclear physicist he is qualified to make these warnings about the future of the human race on the planet.

RON NIELSEN: The main advantage which I have is a long research in science, because one has to be very careful with the data which are presented with the discussion and I have to say I was disappointed with people who are very enthusiastic about environmental issues, but they present distorted views, and this is not good, because people, some time, they will discover that they are being misled, so I think what I brought into this book is a sober and clear assessment of the situations which we have in the world.

ELEANOR HALL: It’s sober and clear and very mathematical in its way, and yet you also paint a quite frightening picture. You say that never before has the human race been so threatened and that we’re reaching the ecological limits on a number of fronts. Were you surprised at just how dire the evidence was as you did your research?

RON NIELSEN: In a way, I was. I felt that the situation is not good, but in many areas I was surprised at how bad it is. The aim of my book was not to frighten people, not to make them panic or not to paint a doomsday scenario.

My aim was to analyse the problem, present the problem as it is and then leave to the people to use their intelligence and their initiative to do something about it.

ELEANOR HALL: So where are we reaching ecological limits?

RON NIELSEN: As far as global consumption is concerned, which includes food and energy and material resources, we are already over the limit. We have reached the limit around 1975, 76.

This is measured by so-called footprint, global footprint. So we have crossed this limit. But we are going to various limits, and you have to look to regional areas.

Globally water supply, we still have the adequate amount of water, but if you look at regional areas we are over the limit in a wide range of countries, so we are crossing the limits in various areas, but definitely in overall consumption we have passed the limit.

ELEANOR HALL: So what do people need to do to address these problems?

RON NIELSEN: Well, we can’t solve everything, but in the area of destruction of atmosphere and climate change, definitely we have to do it quickly, immediately, take steps to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, of carbon dioxide and develop alternative sources of energy, we have to do it much faster and much more energetically.

This could have the most dramatic effect on our planet. I mean, it is unbelievable, it is unthinkable that we human beings can change climate, global climate, that we can influence the atmosphere.

Now, the new research, which I don’t mention in the book because it is just the latest research, the results this year show that we are changing acidity of the oceans. Can you imagine that?

We have influence on the acidity of the oceans on the huge reservoirs of water. This will have devastating affect on life in oceans, on coral reefs, and again on protection of coastal regions.

We have strong influence on our planet, and this is probably the area which might bring us to our knees.

ELEANOR HALL: Do you think that your book will have an impact on world leaders to change their point of view on global warming and to make them confront this more urgently?

RON NIELSEN: Look, Eleanor, I believe that I have strong confidence in people’s power. I have strong belief in people’s intelligence and I believe that the book which will be read, I hope that it will be read by the common people, people have so much ability to invent various ways of solving problems.

I hope that this book will create a tide of response among common people and they will be able to influence the leaders in the Government and whatever leaders in business, there is a lot of power there and I expect that this will be the response because I have written the book in such a way that anyone can read.

ELEANOR HALL: If things don’t change though, you seem to be suggesting that the survival of the human race is in peril?

RON NIELSEN: Yes it is, unfortunately it is and we have to take it, uh, we have to face the fact. We are facing global crisis. We are facing the problem of our survival for the first time in the history of the human race we have many things which are happening which threaten our survival on this planet.

ELEANOR HALL: If there is so clearly a rapidly approaching crisis, why do you think that there is no real sense of panic yet amongst world leaders?

RON NIELSEN: I think in a way human nature is that we still hope that things will go on as they were going on for ages and ages. We cannot accept that something unusual is happening because we don’t have the whole picture of it, and that’s why I wanted to paint a whole picture of it, I’ve included all critical trends.

When we have all in one place, then we shall be able to appreciate it. I don’t think that we can do everything, we can solve all the problems, but we haveÖ we still have a chance to soften the blow, to have perhaps a softer landing. If we do it quickly, we have a chance.

ELEANOR HALL: And that’s Dr Ron Nielsen, an internationally renowned nuclear physicist whose survey of the state of the planet, The Little Green Handbook, will be launched in Australia later this month.