Humanity Faces 'Revenge of Gaia'
by Michael McCarthy
17.01.06

LONDON - The world has already passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilisation is now unlikely to survive, according to the scientist who conceived Gaia theory - the Earth as a living, breathing organism. In a profoundly pessimistic new assessment, Professor James Lovelock suggests that efforts to counter global warming cannot succeed, and that, in effect, it is already too late. The world and human society face disaster to a worse extent, and on a faster timescale, than almost anybody realises, he predicts.

"Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable." In making such a statement, far gloomier than any yet made by a scientist of comparable international standing, Lovelock accepts he is going out on a limb. But as the man who conceived the first wholly new way of looking at life since Charles Darwin, he feels his own analysis of what is happening leaves him no choice.

Lovelock says it is the self-regulating mechanism of Gaia itself which will ensure that global warming cannot be mastered. This is because the system contains myriad feedback mechanisms which in the past have acted in concert to keep the Earth much cooler than it otherwise would be. Now, however, they will come together to amplify the warming being caused by human activities through huge emissions of greenhouse gases. It means that the harmful consequences of human beings damaging the living planet's ancient regulatory system will be non-linear - in other words, likely to accelerate uncontrollably.

WATER AND CLIMATE CHANGE
How will climate change affect the water supplies where you live?
CANA has just released a comprehensive and easy to read website that uses all of the Australian research on the impacts of climate change on our water, and identifies how climate change will affect water for our cities, our farmers and our environment. www.cana.net.au/water

Climate Change:
by Alan Roberts
An article written for The Big Scrub Environment Centre Newsletter s Autumn/Winter 2005

It’s up to us people...
Are we prepared to expend strenuous human effort to establish a bright new sustainable era or will we allow ‘business as usual’ to beguile us into chaos, more drastic climate change and extinction?

Setting up the trap and snaring both our feet simultaneously
Since civilisation discovered the magic of that hitherto hidden source of detritus 200 years ago we have crawled out on a fossil fuel branch. Drudgery has been eliminated by the flick of a switch and on a whim with the turn of a key, sitting comfortably, we can whisk ourselves all over the place. Even food, on average, in the US is 90% fossil (6).

Unimaginably US mutton is 99.5% fossil. Structurally our civilisation is so inextricably dependent on fossil fuel that economic myths defend it. Fossil is either infinite or, if not infinite, the as yet unknown wonders of technology will rescue us with a replacement. The accelerating fossil CO2 we’re pumping into the atmosphere makes the world greener. Human induced global warming is minuscule. Increasing droughts, record heat waves, more destructive storms and floods are part of a natural cycle. Science and common sense hold no sway against these dominating economic myths.

In 1952 Charles Galton Darwin wrote (1):
“The fifth revolution will come when we have spent the stores of coal and oil that have been accumulating in the earth during hundreds of millions of years... It is to be hoped that before then other sources of energy will have been developed... Whether a convenient substitute for the present fuels is found or not, there can be no doubt that there will have to be a great change in ways of life. This change may justly be called a revolution, but it differs from all the preceding ones in that there is no likelihood of its leading to increases of population, but even perhaps to the reverse.”

As everyone should know and as will be exposed as our historic lunacy, intelligence hasn’t prevented us from being caught with our pants down – we’re running out of fluid fossil (2) and we don’t have a substitute. To hide the fact and their embarrassment authorities are blaming terrorism, developing countries, everything but the corporate driven consumption orgy.

Drastic as the effects of declining fossil fuels are, the problem pales into insignificance compared with the climate change caused by us continuing to burn the stuff. Climate change that we’ve already set in motion is estimated to extinguish a large percentage of all land animals by 2050 (3) and there’s a distinct possibility of extinguishing life itself. A 6 degree Celsius rise in global temperature, which is on the cards by around mid century if we don’t change our fossil burning habit, would release polar methane which then burns with atmospheric oxygen, causing anoxia. (4)

More energy falls on the earth as sunlight in 24 hours than all the energy in all the oil, past and future!

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Let’s take stock of our civilisation’s dilemma.
We’ve multiplied our population 6 times in devouring more than half our detritus branch.
We have less than a generation’s worth of detritus left and we can’t burn it without risking extinction.
We do not have a plan for supporting this population without fossil fuel.
We have wasted the bulk of the fossil fuel resource, severely limiting the amount available to establish replacement renewable energy systems.
We are not informed but instead drowned in hype about continued economic expansion, consumerism and population growth.

The remaining oil supply will be utilised in three ways:
To maintain the global economy;
To fight over the oil that remains;
To create a new solar economy which will not depend upon oil.

The first 2 points benefit corporations the last one benefits people.

Extricating ourselves
This isn’t a fairy story, living a fairy story got us into this mess and no fairy can undo the environmental ravages of our civilisation or let us out of our trap. With good honest science and hard work to establish a low fossil lifestyle we can barely crawl out. Daily life at least for a few decades will have to be organised on the local level. Commuting to work and long cheap fossil fuel supply lines will no longer be viable. Globalisation of commerce will be practically extinct. As well with our over-stretched population we have severely reduced our resource base and options. Sustainability requires that each person consumes no more than can be produced from the land areas shown in table 1.

Besides this land is an area of sea with 238m sides already fished to the limits. On top of this again, in the same area, we have to leave room for 30 million odd other species we haven’t yet extinguished. Without fossil fertilisers crop rotations will be leaving barely enough cultivable land to grow food. To grow any kind of biomass energy as a fossil replacement requires cultivable land of 1 to 7ha/person (1ha = 10,000m2), this is obviously not viable. Fanciful notions of a return to horse transport are extremely limited as there’s only enough rangeland for either 1/8 of a cow or 1/8 horse or else 1.2 sheep per person. In short if we don’t want to be badly caught out we have to think hard.

Table 1
“Available” Land Areas/person at a world population of 6.3 billion

Land Type	Side of square	Area m2
Cultivable Rangeland Forest Desert Antarctica Remainder	49m 74m 71m 69m 46m 61m	2388 5462 5063 4750 2105 3703
Total	153m	23500

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Some essential changes
(1) Re-inventing daily life
Fossil free communities will grow food Organically, harvest their own solar and wind energy, manufacture goods, work, socialise and organise locally - preferably all within walking distance. For most people in the developed world this requires a rapprochement with the natural environment, an entirely different view of their responsibility to the reciprocity involved in maintaining its health and a new way of viewing all of life and themselves.

David Holmgren (5) is optimistic that the 1000m2 (1/4 acre) suburban block can be adapted to fossil free living. People would convert their houses and garages for work and manufacture. This would bring social life back into the suburbs. The hard surfaces (roads) with the storm water system makes an excellent water harvesting system and reticulated water is already there. At least one TROPO member is ploughing his income back into permanent water controlling earth works on his farm whilst fossil is still affordable. Moving earth is comparatively energy efficient and if designed properly, is permanent. Your local Organic farmers are a strategic knowledge resource on nutritious environmentally friendly farming. Supporting and learning from them is a very good investment for the near future.

(2) Harvesting Energy
The solar resource is often denigrated. Let’s get it in perspective.
In only 24 hours the Earth intercepts solar energy which is equal to 3 times all the energy in all the oil there ever was.
In only 24 hours the Earth absorbs solar energy which is equal to 2 times all the energy in all the oil there ever was.
In only 12 hours the Earth absorbs solar energy which is equal to all the energy in all the oil that’s still left and is harder to get.
In only 24 hours the solar energy absorbed by the Earth is equal to nearly 10,000 (9252) times all the fossil fuel, nuclear & hydro used by people in 24 hours.
The solar energy absorbed daily on the Earth’s deserts is equal to about 600 times the nonrenewable energy that people use daily.
All the oil there ever was, if spread evenly on the earth’s surface, would have formed a layer 0.54mm thick.
All the oil that’s still left would form a layer the thickness of a jam tin lid (0.25mm).
If all the oil that’s left were to be divided evenly amongst the world’s population there would be 20,000 litres of oil for each person. Australians used 6.7 litre oil/person.day in 2003. We would exhaust our allotment in 8 years, which occurs in 2011. [20,000 litres is a 2.7m cube – the size of a small jail cell.]

Even though solar energy is abundant we still need the most efficient systems to convert it to useful forms. Higher efficiency systems require less collecting area, less material and less fossil energy to manufacture compared to a necessarily larger less efficient system of the same output. The most efficient systems are the solar parabolic dish and wind turbine systems. In one year or less of their 30 year lifetime they replace all the energy used in their manufacture (including mining). People can make both systems largely from recycled materials with a little experience.

Solar Parabolic Dish
A 7.9m diameter parabolic dish in the Northern Rivers provides sufficient energy to support the electricity, transport (via solar hydrogen), food production, heating and goods manufacturing requirements of a 1990 vintage Australian. Currently the Climate Change Action Network (CCAN) is making a small mobile, 3m diameter, demonstration parabolic dish to power an oven, griddle plate, kettle and hot water for a market food stall. It will have red hot rock thermal storage capable of lasting about 1 week (7). A community sized parabolic dish could store energy for longer periods by high temperature water electrolysis to produce hydrogen.

Wind Turbine
A 14.5m diameter wind turbine in a good site in the Northern Rivers is the size required to support the 1990 Australian citizen. It has the attraction of generating electricity directly but requires storage via hydrogen from water electrolysis then back to electricity via fuel cells in the car, house etc. Another CCAN project is to build a smaller 12.8m diameter wind turbine at Gundarimba to power a small car to travel 50,000km/yr.

Energy Returned on Energy Invested (ERoEI)
Both solar parabolic dish and wind turbine return 30 times more energy than was used to manufacture them – about the same return as the cheapest oil discovered in Saudi. Oil, on average now, has an EroEI of 8.4 (8). Oil’s chief advantage is its high energy density as a transport fuel. Coal’s ERoEI is about 25 now and dropping. Nuclear power plants with an ERoEI ranging from 3.84 to 4.5 take about 10years to build (9). PV panels themselves have an EroEI of 4 and if batteries are included the EroEI is 2.

Why bother drilling, mining, storing hazardous waste, destroying the environment, maintaining complex distribution networks when there’s more energy efficient, cleaner ways of doing it with decentralised solar and wind energy?

Manufacturing renewable energy systems
With the attraction of never having to pay an energy bill again people can establish community supported manufacturing enterprises to manufacture various components for solar parabolic and wind turbine systems. It will be a big industry and a big employer if we are to harvest enough to emulate our pro•igate fossil lifestyle.

(3) Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Avoiding buying something in the first place saves the most energy. Reusing and recycling locally will be crucial as we appreciate the now disappearing fossil embodied in goods (10).The forests along with their ecological services that were the genesis of Big Scrub EC are again in dire threat of dying, this time from human induced climate change. With climate change in its infancy, local forests are already stressed. We can diminish further devastation with a massive effort now to reduce then eliminate fossil fuel burning.

Moving people after the 1990 oil squeeze on Cuba. This low loader converted to a bus called "the camel" in Havana transports 300 people when full.

After the 1959 Cuban revolution and the US trade embargo Cuba exported ship loads of sugar to Russia and the Eastern Block. The ships returned with grain, vegies, beef, oil and Russian tractors. Then in 1990 Yeltsin removed all monetary controls on the rouble. Foreign traders then drove the rouble’s value down, stopping only when there wasn’t a breath of life left in the Russian economy. The rouble went from 4 to the US$ to 5000 to the US$. Cuban oil and food imports stopped overnight. Just about every Cuban lost 30% of their body weight in the lean times while sugar plantations were converted to food crops. Meat is still scarce. Cars not carrying a full load of passengers, including cars carrying government ministers, could be legally stopped until they were full. Most public transport was via converted trucks with a canvas cover to keep the rain off. There are valuable lessons to be learnt from the Cubans.

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References:
1. “The Next Million Years”, Charles Galton Darwin, 1952.

2. There are numerous sources:
(a) BP statistical revue 2004 from http://www.bp.com
(b) http://www.energybulletin.net is continually updated with current info.
(c) Post Carbon Institute http://www.postcarbon.org
(d) Association for the study of Peak Oil & Gas at: http://www.peakoil.net

3. Chris Thomas et al, Nature 427, 145-148, 2004

4. Michael J. Benson, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, London, Thames & Hudson.

5. http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/INTERVIEWS/DAVID.HOLMGREN/

6. Norman Church, “Why our food is so dependent on Oil” at: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/040605_world_stories.shtml#0
It’s of course easier to use Google. Also “Bio-energetics” at: http://www.uta.edu/biology/mcmahon/classnotes/bioenergetics/PDFs Lectures/B&L-9 Terreculture and Aquaculture.pdf

7. Climate Change Action Network (CCAN) is a group of interested people operating as a sub committee of TROPO Tweed Richmond Organic Producers Organisation PO Box 5076 EAST LISMORE NSW 2480 02 6684 5396 Fax 02 6684 5395TROPO.
The plan is to link the Big Scrub Environment Centre, TROPO & CCAN to work together on abating climate change.
For details of these projects and the arithmetic & issues behind them the new CCAN website which will shortly be at: http://www.climatechangeactionnetwork.org.au will be the place to look.
Recent issues of “Going Organic” also have details or contact me.

8. “Game Over: The Industrial Devolution” at: http://www.playahata.com/pages/eyecalone/gameover.htm

9. Gene Tyner, “Net Energy from Nuclear Power” at: http://www.mnforsustain.org/

10. http://www.tufts.edu/tuftsrecycles/

Also see Climate Change North: http://www.climatechangenorth.ca

and for the low down on the Kyoto Protocol: www.cana.net.au/index.php?site_var=343

Article by Alan Roberts
e-mail: alan_roberts@ozemail.com.au

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