The Doomsday Handbook

by Alok Jha

  Replacement is also important. In the past two decades, flat-panel displays have overtaken the traditional cathode-ray screens in our living rooms. These screens are also used in mobile phones and other devices. But there is an impending bottleneck: each screen needs indium, an element that is notoriously hard to extract.

  * * *

  There will be more terrorist attacks against the US and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and australia.

  * * *

  In 2002, Hideo Hosono and colleagues at the Tokyo Institute of Technology showed that they could use alumina and lime instead of indium, replacing a rare substance with the more abundant aluminum, calcium and oxygen. Similarly, catalysts such as platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium and ruthenium are being replaced by iron, copper, zinc and manganese.

  “Carbon is present abundantly and universally, and can be transformed into many kinds of compounds,” say Eiichi Nakamura and Kentaro Sato, both chemists at the University of Tokyo. “It is therefore a very promising candidate as an ingredient in alternative materials for a range of functions. A pioneering example is the organic semiconductors that are used in OLEDs and thin-film solar cells. In that respect, the position of organic thin-film solar cells relative to silicon solar cells and compound solar cells should be assessed not merely in terms of our energy policy, but also in terms of the element strategy.”

  Can we do it?

  This is not the first time that humans have experienced a shortage of materials relying on certain elements, say Nakamura and Sato. “About a century ago, when the advent of food shortages caused by the lack of nitrogen fertilizers became apparent, the advanced chemistry of that time averted disaster: the Haber-Bosch process saved the world from the crisis. The process enables ammonia and nitrate, which are essential for food production, to be synthesized from nitrogen in the air.”

  Passing through the coming bottleneck will require a level of collective action that is nowhere yet in sight, believes Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a special adviser to the former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, writing in the journal Science. “Budget funding for the future technologies that could underpin sustainable development is a small fraction of military spending, and only a slight part of that spending is directed at the health, energy, and environmental needs of the world’s poorest people.”

  Although the depletion of rare elements could trigger a new conflict, it could also serve as an opportunity to make a dream come true, to create new science and technology. Diamond is cautiously optimistic, citing rising awareness of environmental issues around the world in recent years as his reason for hope. “The world has serious consumption problems, but we can solve them if we choose to do so.”

  Environmental Collapse

  * * *

  Humans need food, drink, energy and raw materials to live. We need space to create cities, grow food and build factories. All of it comes, ultimately, from the Earth, and the success of our species is crowding out hundreds of thousands of others.

  * * *

  We cut down swathes of forest, we fish the oceans empty of life, we poison and concrete over the land. We drive tens of thousands of animal and plant species to extinction as we outcompete them for basic resources such as energy or, simply, space. We are living through a mass extinction of species that has not been matched since the age of the dinosaurs, but this time it is being caused by humans.

  This loss of biodiversity is not just a concern for tree-huggers and bird-lovers. A decline in the world’s species can cause ecosystems to become stressed, degraded and liable to collapse. “This threatens the continued provision of ecosystem services, which in turn further threatens biodiversity and ecosystem health,” said the environmental charity WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) in its Living Planet report of 2010, a stocktake of the total human footprint on the world. “Crucially, the dependency of human society on ecosystem services makes the loss of these services a serious threat to the future well-being and development of all people, all around the world.”

  Billions of years of evolution on Earth have created a web of life forms that are dependent on each other for survival. The animals and plants of the world are the foundation of complex ecosystems, and we humans are more critically tied into and dependent on nature than most of us care to acknowledge. If it fails, so do we.

  What are we doing to the world?

  Humans degrade our environment in multiple ways. We destroy and cut up natural habitats: forests might be cleared to make way for agricultural land or a new town or industrial plant; a river might be dammed to build a hydroelectric power plant or to improve the irrigation of nearby fields. We overexploit animals and plants in the wild for food, raw materials, medicines or sport. We move species from one habitat to another, causing major problems for local varieties as they are forced to compete for resources or cannot fight off diseases brought in by the interloper. And through pollution and climate change, we are poisoning and changing the environment of the whole world.

  In the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005, researchers concluded that changes in biodiversity in the past 50 years had been more rapid than at any other time in human history, and that the drivers of these changes were showing no evidence of decline.

  “We’re living in a time of mass extinctions that exceeds the fossil record by a factor of 10,000,” said Stephen Petranek, former editor of Discover magazine, in a lecture for TED.com. “We have lost 25% of the unique species in Hawaii in the last 20 years, California is expected to lose 255 of its species in the next 40 years. Somewhere in the Amazon forest is the marginal tree. You cut down that tree, the rainforest collapses as an ecosystem. There’s really a tree like that out there. That’s really what it comes to. And when that ecosystem collapses, it could take a major ecosystem with it, like our atmosphere.”

  In 2010, WWF reported on the health of the world’s biodiversity. Populations of species in the tropics, it found, were falling through the floor, yet human demand for natural resources was shooting up. We are using a planet and a half’s worth of resources, said its Living Planet report.

  * * *

  Somewhere in the Amazon forest is the marginal tree. You cut down that tree, the rainforest collapses as an ecosystem.

  * * *

  In the past 40 years, our consumption of nature has doubled, while the “Living Planet index”—a measure of the decline and increase of almost 8,000 populations of more than 2,500 species of marine, fluvial and land species—has dropped by 60 percent in the tropics and 30 percent overall.

  “There is an alarming rate of biodiversity loss in low-income, often tropical countries while the developed world is living in a false paradise, fuelled by excessive consumption and high carbon emissions,” said Jim Leape, director general of WWF International, when the 2010 report was launched.

  The biggest declines in biodiversity were found in the lowest-income countries, with an almost 60 percent overall drop in the past 40 years.

  The WWF blamed unsustainable consumption in wealthier nations, which depleted the natural resources of poorer countries. The report found that the ten countries with the largest ecological footprints per person were the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Denmark, Belgium, the United States, Estonia, Canada, Australia, Kuwait and Ireland. Furthermore, the 31 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, which include the world’s richest economies, account for nearly 40 percent of the global footprint. Twice as many people live in the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, and their ecological footprint per person could overtake that of the OECD countries if they were to follow the same path of development.

  If we continue living beyond the Earth’s limits, by 2030 we will need the resources of two Earths to keep up with annual demand. “The report shows that continuing the current consumption trends would lead us to the point of no return. 4.5 Earths would be required to support a global population living like an aver
age resident of the US,” said Leape.

  What is disappearing?

  As of 2010, the golden-headed langur, which is found only on the island of Cat Ba in north-eastern Vietnam, was down to 60 to 70 individuals. There were fewer than 100 northern sportive lemurs left in Madagascar, and around 110 eastern blackcrested gibbons in north-eastern Vietnam. The Sumatran orang-utan is down to around 6,600 due to fragmentation of their habitats and the removal of forest to make way for agricultural uses such as palm oil plantations.

  The World Conservation Union (IUCN) reckons that almost half the world’s primate species—which include apes, monkeys and lemurs—are threatened with extinction due to the destruction of tropical forests and illegal hunting and trade. The plight of primates from Madagascar, Africa and Asia to Central and South America is desperate—48 percent of the world’s 634 primate species are threatened, with many at imminent risk of extinction. And when a population is small, the disasters are always big—a tropical cyclone could easily wipe out the last few hundred individuals.

  In the seas, sharks are disappearing fast. The scalloped hammerhead shark has declined by 99 percent over the past 30 years in some parts of the world, and has been declared globally endangered on the IUCN’s Red List of species at risk, which contains more than 130 varieties of shark. Populations in the northwest Atlantic Ocean have declined by an average of 50 percent since the early 1970s. In 2007, 21 shark-fishing nations reported catching more than 10,000 tons of shark. The top five—Indonesia, India, Taiwan, Spain and Mexico—accounted for 42 percent of this figure.

  Sharks are especially vulnerable because they can take decades to mature and they produce few young. “Sharks are definitely at the top of the list for marine fishes that could go extinct in our lifetimes,” says Julia Baum of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California and a member of the IUCN shark specialist group. “If we carry on the way that we are, we’re looking at a really high risk of extinction for some of these shark species within the next few decades.”

  The orang-utan is Asia’s only great ape and is classified into two species: those, such as the one on the left, that live on Borneo (Pongo pygmaeus), and the more orange-colored Sumatra orang-utans (Pongo abelii). According to conservationists, the Sumatran orang-utan is classified as critically endangered and the Bornean as endangered.

  There are countless other examples of animals and plants threatened in some way as humans spread: tigers, coral reefs, gorillas, northern white rhinoceroses, axolotls, leatherback sea turtles, Chinese alligators, Hawaiian crows and snow leopards are just a minuscule portion of the species under pressure.

  But what has all this got to do with people?

  Excessive fishing in recent decades has caused a 90 percent decline in shark populations across the world’s oceans, and up to 99 percent along the US east coast. This has already started affecting the way people live. After a collapse of shark numbers in 2000, the sharks’ prey, cownose rays, exploded on US shores. The rays in turn decimated the bay scallop populations around North Carolina in 2004, disrupting the fisheries there and shutting down a local economy that had lasted for well over a century.

  In Costa Rica, it is well known that coffee farms located within close distance of forests produce better coffee and can increase yields by 20 percent. The pollination service from forest areas translated into an income of $60,000 per year for one farm.

  * * *

  LIVING PLANET INDEXS PECIES’ POPULATION DECLINE IN THE LAST 40 YEARS

  60% in the tropics

  30% overall

  * * *

  In Ecuador, 80 percent of the water for the capital, Quito, comes from three protected areas that are threatened by human activities, according to WWF, such as logging and conversion into farms.

  According to the World Health Organization, natural compounds from animals, plants and microorganisms are an important source of drugs to treat human diseases. Half of all current medical compounds start life as natural products such as aspirin, digitalis and quinine.

  Can we reverse the decline?

  The WWF warns that current rates of consumption and degradation of the natural environment will lead to ecosystem collapse within 50 years. “We must balance our consumption with the natural world’s capacity to regenerate and absorb our wastes. If we do not, we risk irreversible damage,” says Leape.

  There are international schemes afoot to try and stem some of the losses. The UN’s REDD program (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries), which is proposed as part of any global deal to tackle climate change, will be crucial in maintaining falling primate populations. The idea is that rich countries would pay developing countries to maintain their forests, therefore locking in the carbon and preventing further greenhouse gas emissions. In an enhanced version of the idea, developing countries will be incentivized to plant more trees, expanding their forest areas.

  In 2010, environment ministers from almost 200 countries responded to the catastrophic situation by agreeing plans to try and stop the worst loss of life on Earth since the demise of the dinosaurs. At a meeting in Nagoya, Japan, they resolved to halve the destruction of natural habitats and expand nature reserves to 17 percent of the world’s land area by 2020, up from less than ten percent today. These Aichi targets, named after the region around Nagoya, mean more refuges for sealife too, with an increase of marine protected zones to cover ten percent of the world’s oceans, up from today’s one percent.

  The Aichi targets will come into force in 2020, and require all signatories to draw up national biodiversity plans. In combination, it is hoped that these plans will, among other things, stop overfishing, reduce pollution and control invasive species.

  But agreeing targets is one thing, implementation quite another. After the resolutions were passed in Nagoya, environmental journalist George Monbiot was skeptical about whether they would change anything. “The draft saw the targets for 2020 that governments were asked to adopt as nothing more than ‘aspirations for achievement at the global level’ and a ‘flexible framework,’ within which countries can do as they wish. No government, if the draft has been approved, is obliged to change its policies,” he wrote.

  * * *

  Governments are determined to protect not the marvels of our world but the world-eating system to which they are being sacrificed.

  * * *

  “It strikes me that governments are determined to protect not the marvels of our world but the world-eating system to which they are being sacrificed; not life, but the ephemeral junk with which it is being replaced. They fight viciously and at the highest level for the right to turn rainforests into pulp, or marine ecosystems into fishmeal. Then they send a middle-ranking civil servant to approve a meaningless and so far unwritten promise to protect the natural world.”

  It suits governments to let us trash the planet, said Monbiot. “It’s not just that big business gains more than it loses from converting natural wealth into money. A continued expansion into the biosphere permits states to avoid addressing issues of distribution and social justice: the promise of perpetual growth dulls our anger about widening inequality. By trampling over nature we avoid treading on the toes of the powerful. A massive accounting exercise, whose results were presented at the meeting in Japan, has sought to change this calculation.”

  Ecosystems are still under pressure, and it is a problem we are far from starting to solve.

  Rising Sea Levels

  * * *

  Rising sea levels are one of the clearest indications that the Earth’s climate is changing. Scientists might still be engaged in finding out how fast, how much and where the effects will be most keenly felt, but there is little doubt that it is already having an impact on our seas.

  * * *

  Low-lying areas of the world are being slowly subsumed by water, storms are on the rise, and coastal towns and cities are experiencing bigger floods more often. The worst part is, anything that has happened so
far is just the beginning. Climate change has much more in store for those who live by the sea and, perhaps later this century, for people living further inland too.

  We know that sea levels will rise over the next century as the world continues to warm, and we also know that this means death, devastation and the end of livelihoods for millions of people.

  The Earth has easily enough water to drown most of its human population. Worse still, we have built most of our biggest and most important cities near oceans, rivers and seas. A major increase in sea level would change every one of our lives. The higher the seas rise, the less food we can grow, the fiercer storms will be and the smaller the human population will become. The question is, how far will we go in forcing the Earth to pull out all the stops?

  Why does the sea-level change?

  Water exists in three distinct forms on Earth: the familiar liquid that fills the seas and washes on to coastlines; the vapor in the air; and the vast sheets of ice covering continents and floating on oceans. The balance of these three in any part of the world depends in the short term on local temperature and weather. Long-term, it depends on climate and the flow of energy around the planet.