Study: Climate change crisis requires less growth-oriented global economy


The pursuit of affluence is a major impediment to curbing global warming and repairing Earth's damaged ecosystems, researchers argue in a new paper. Photo by nikolabelopitov/Pixabay

June 19 (UPI) -- Economies and consumers can't aspire to both affluence and sustainability, researchers warn in a new paper, published Friday in the journal Nature Communications.

Hundreds of studies have highlighted the challenges facing the planet's climate, biodiversity and food systems -- global warming, pollution, habitat loss -- but few have focused on the relationship between Earth's climate and ecological crises and the planet's growth-oriented economies and the pursuit of affluence.


Many economists, business leaders, policy makers and even a few climate scientists have suggested technological advances will see planet Earth and its economies through the climate crisis -- continuing economic growth but with a smaller carbon footprint.

But a new paper by an international team of scientists argues such predictions ignore the realities of economic and environmental history.

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The authors claim the pursuit of affluence is a major impediment to curbing global warming and repairing Earth's damaged ecosystems.

"Our paper has shown that it's actually dangerous and leads to planetary-scale destruction," Julia Steinberger, a professor of ecological economics at the University of Leeds in Britain, said in a news release. "To protect ourselves from the worsening climate crisis, we must reduce inequality and challenge the notion that riches, and those who possess them, are inherently good."

For the study, researchers looked at the drivers of consumption across the world's largest economies, as well as the role of technology in the pursuit of sustainability.

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"In our scientists' warning, we identify the underlying forces of overconsumption and spell out the measures that are needed to tackle the overwhelming 'power' of consumption and the economic growth paradigm -- that's the gap we fill," said lead study author Tommy Wiedmann, professor of environmental engineering at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Analysis of economic and energy-use trends over the last four decades showed that wealth growth has continuously outpaced efficiency gains.

"Technology can help us to consume more efficiently -- to save energy and resources -- but these technological improvements cannot keep pace with our ever-increasing levels of consumption," Wiedmann said.

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The new research also highlighted what many critiques of climate change mitigation plans have pointed out -- that the world's wealthiest citizens shoulder most of the blame for the planet's environmental problems.

The wealthiest citizens have the largest carbon footprint and apply the greatest negative pressure to natural resources, researchers said.

"Consumption of affluent households worldwide is by far the strongest determinant - and the strongest accelerator -- of increased global environmental and social impacts," said study co-author Lorenz Keysser, researcher at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

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But authors of the new study suggest it is not just individual attitudes about affluence that must change. They also note that all of the world's largest economies are designed to prioritize growth, which they call problematic.

"The structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies leads to decision makers being locked into bolstering economic growth, and inhibiting necessary societal changes," Wiedmann said. "So, we have to get away from our obsession with economic growth -- we really need to start managing our economies in a way that protects our climate and natural resources, even if this means less, no or even negative growth."

To address the problem of overconsumption by the planet's wealthiest citizens, researchers suggest a range of taxes could be used to alter spending behaviors and shift investment patterns.


Some scientists estimate that the world's economies will actually need to shrink in order to stave off ecological disaster.

"'Degrowth' proponents go a step further and suggest a more radical social change that leads away from capitalism to other forms of economic and social governance," Wiedmann said.

"Policies may include, for example, eco-taxes, green investments, wealth redistribution through taxation and a maximum income, a guaranteed basic income and reduced working hours," Wiedmann said.

While there is disagreement on what must be done, authors of the new paper claim there is no doubt that current economic trends are unsustainable.



"The strongest pillar of the necessary transformation is to avoid or to reduce consumption until the remaining consumption level falls within planetary boundaries, while fulfilling human needs," researchers wrote in the new paper.

"Avoiding consumption means not consuming certain goods and services, from living space (overly large homes, secondary residences of the wealthy) to oversized vehicles, environmentally damaging and wasteful food, leisure patterns and work patterns involving driving and flying."

Global warming has erased 6,500 years of cooling
Temperatures have increased by 1 degree Celsius since the mid-1800s, meaning they are higher now than at any point in the last 12,000 years, researchers say. Photo by Pexels/Pixabay

June 30 (UPI) -- New paleoclimate research suggests the last 150 years of global warming have erased 6,500 years of cooling.

For the study, an international team of scientists applied a variety of statistical models to paleoclimate data sets in order to reconstruct global temperature averages during the Holocene Epoch, the period that followed the last ice age and began roughly 12,000 years ago.

The analysis -- published Tuesday in the journal Scientific Data -- showed temperatures peaked in the middle of the Holocene, roughly 6,500 years ago, topping out at 0.7 degrees above the mid-19th century temperature average.

"Before global warming, there was global cooling," lead study author Darrell Kaufman, a professor of paleoclimatology at Northern Arizona University, said in a news release. "Previous work has shown convincingly that the world naturally and slowly cooled for at least 1,000 years prior to the middle of the 19th century, when the global average temperature reversed course along with the build-up of greenhouse gases."

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"This study, based on a major new compilation of previously published paleoclimate data, combined with new statistical analyses, shows more confidently than ever that the millennial-scale global cooling began approximately 6,500 years ago," he said.

Kaufman was the lead author a study published early this year that catalogued the most extensive set of Holocene paleoclimate data yet assembled.

At 659 different sites around the globe, Kaufman and his research partners recorded hundreds of measurements of both marine and terrestrial samples, including lake deposits, marine sediments, peat and glacier ice.

RELATED Ancient sea ice loss spurred Antarctic cold reversal 15,000 years ago

Illustration by Victor O. Leshyk/Northern Arizona University

For the new study, researchers used several statistical methods to synthesize the global data sets, revealing the rates of warming and then cooling that characterized the post-glacial period.

"The rate of cooling that followed the peak warmth was subtle, only around 0.1 degrees Celsius per 1,000 years," said study co-author Michael Erb, an assistant research professor at Northern Arizona.

"This cooling seems to be driven by slow cycles in the Earth's orbit, which reduced the amount of summer sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere, culminating in the 'Little Ice Age' of recent centuries," Erb said.

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Since the middle of the 19th century, global temperatures have increased by 1 degree Celsius, which means temperatures are higher today than at any time during the last 12,000 years.

"It's possible that the last time the sustained average global temperature was 1 degree Celsius above the 19th century was prior to the last Ice Age, back around 125,000 years ago when sea level was around 20 feet higher than today," Kaufman said.

By tracing the rise and fall of pre-industrial temperatures during the Holocene, scientists can more accurately predict the future of climate change, researchers say.

"Our future climate will largely depend on the influence of human factors, especially the build-up of greenhouse gases," said co-author and assistant research professor Cody Routson.

"However, future climate will also be influenced by natural factors, and it will be complicated by the natural variability within the climate system," Routson said. "Future projections of climate change will be improved by better accounting for both anthropogenic and natural factors."

Gnawing beavers could accelerate thawing of Arctic permafrost


New research suggests beavers are accelerating the thawing of the Arctic's permafrost in Alaska. Photo by Pixabay/CC

June 30 (UPI) -- The Arctic's permafrost could begin to thaw more rapidly as beavers in Alaska continue to proliferate.

According to a new study, published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, beaver numbers are up across Alaska's Arctic tundra, and they're building more and more dams, creating new bodies of water.

The big, sharp buck teeth of the beaver help the industrious mammals fell trees and shrubs to construct homes and dams, flooding valleys and creating new ponds and lakes -- transforming landscapes. Few animals can alter their environs with the efficiency of the beaver.

"Their methods are extremely effective," study co-author Ingmar Nitze, scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute's Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research, said in a news release.

RELATED Large freshwater animal populations see 88 percent drop in 40 years

Nitze and his colleagues have been actively monitoring Arctic tundra to better understand the how climate change is affecting the region's permafrost and its ability to store carbon.

But climate isn't the only variable. As temperatures have warmed in recent decades, the Arctic has become increasingly green. With more shrubs and small trees to eat, beavers have moved farther north into the Arctic Circle.

In 2018, Nitze and other researchers reported beavers living in a 7,000-square-mile section of northwest Alaska had created 56 new lakes in only five years. The latest research, which focused on two different plots of land in Alaska, suggests beavers have continued to spread

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"Of course, we knew that the beavers there had spread substantially over the last few decades," said Nitze. "But we never would have dreamed they would seize the opportunity so intensively."

In a plot measuring 38 square miles, near the town of Kotzebue, satellite images confirmed the creation of an average of five new beaver dams per year between 2002 and 2019 -- a 5,000 percent increase in less than two decades. Scientists documented similar dam construction rates across the entire northern Baldwin Peninsula.

"We're seeing exponential growth there. The number of these structures doubles roughly every four years," Nitze said.

WORLD'S BIGGEST BEAVER DAM
NORTHERN ALBERTA,
 WOOD BUFFALO NATIONAL PARK

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Researchers found beavers prefer to take advantage of drained lake beds.

"The animals have intuitively found that damming the outlet drainage channels at the sites of former lakes is an efficient way to create habitat," said lead study author Benjamin Jones, researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "So a new lake is formed which degrades ice-rich permafrost in the basin, adding to the effect of increasing the depth of the engineered water body."

Researchers found the water area in the Kotzebue region grew by 8.3 percent between 2002 and 2019. These more expansive and deeper lakes are warmer than the surrounding tundra, and researchers worry the increasing number of beaver-built lakes in the region will accelerate the melting of Arctic permafrost.

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Jones, Nitze and their colleagues plan to investigate the spread of beavers across the Canadian Arctic.

"Anyone who wants to predict the future of the permafrost should be sure to keep the beaver in mind," Nitze said.

RELATED New source of carbon, nutrients found in Arctic groundwater


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Ancient Japanese birds looked a lot like New Zealand's monster penguins


Some species of plotopterids, such as Copepteryx, grew to heights of more than six feet. Photo by Mark Witton


June 29 (UPI) -- New analysis suggests New Zealand's giant penguins and a much younger group of Northern Hemisphere birds, the plotopterids, were physically quite similar.

The research, published Monday in the Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research, could help scientists figure out how birds evolved wings better suited for swimming than flying.

Fossil remains suggest as many as nine different species once swam the tropical seas that washed over most of what's now New Zealand, some 62 million years ago. While some species were the size of modern penguins, others grew to heights of more than five feet.

Plotopterids don't appear in the Northern Hemisphere fossil record until 30 million years later. Their remains have been recovered from several sites in Japan and North America. Like penguins, plotopterids used flipper-like wings to navigate coastal seas. But while the relatives of New Zealand's ancient penguins can still be found today, plotopterids went extinct around 25 million years ago.

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For the new study, scientists compared the fossilized remains of plotopterids recovered from Japan with the fossils of three giant penguin species. In addition to boasting similar wings, the analysis showed both groups of birds possessed long beaks with slit-like nostrils, as well as chest and shoulder bones conducive to swimming. Like the giant penguins, some plotopterid species were oversized, growing to heights of more than six feet.

Despite their physical similarities, plotopterids and penguins aren't particularly close relatives. Plotopterids are more closely related to other seaworthy birds like boobies, gannets and cormorants.

"What's remarkable about all this is that plotopterids and ancient penguins evolved these shared features independently," study co-author Vanesa De Pietri, curator at the Canterbury Museum in New Zealand, said in a news release. "This is an example of what we call convergent evolution, when distantly related organisms develop similar morphological traits under similar environmental conditions."

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Though plotopterids and giant penguins were separated by several thousand miles and nearly 30 million years, had they lived side-by-side, they would have been hard to distinguish.

"Plotopterids looked like penguins, they swam like penguins, they probably ate like penguins -- but they weren't penguins," said Paul Scofield, study co-author and Canterbury curator.

The newly published comparison of the two ancient bird groups has helped scientists begin to develop an explanation for why some birds developed wings for swimming.

"Wing-propelled diving is quite rare among birds; most swimming birds use their feet," said study co-author Gerald Mayr, scientist at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Germany.

"We think both penguins and plotodopterids had flying ancestors that would plunge from the air into the water in search of food," Mayr said. "Over time these ancestor species got better at swimming and worse at flying."

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TURNING JAPANESE 

Gold mining stunts Amazon rainforest recovery

ILLEGAL ARTISANAL MINING
Illegal mining severely hinders the recovery abilities of the Amazon rainforest. 

Photo by Planet Labs/Wikimedia Commons

June 29 (UPI) -- The effects of gold mining on forest health are long lasting. According to new research, gold mining stunts the regrowth of Amazon forests, limiting their ability to store carbon.

"Historically gold mining was often overlooked in deforestation analysis as it occupies relatively small areas when compared to pastures or large-scale agriculture," lead study author Michelle Kalamandeen told UPI in an email.

Kalamandeen started the research as a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds but is now a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge University.

"Yet, given recent proliferation in mining activities since 2007-2008 and again in 2012, the potential areas may be underestimated and the impact on biodiversity and forest recovery unquantified," she said.

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For the study, Kalamandeen and her colleagues sampled soil and measured trees at 18 test plots in two main gold mining areas in Guyana. Researchers also established two control sites in old-growth forests.

"We measured trees/saplings/seedlings within each plot and took soil samples from abandoned gold mining sites, active sites and control 'old-growth' sites," Kalamandeen said.

The data -- published Monday in the Journal of Applied Ecology -- showed trees in forests damaged by gold mining activity struggled to reestablish themselves. Where as forest harmed by other kinds of activities, such as logging and agriculture, were able to rebound, the negative effects of mining on growth and carbon storage persisted.

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"Our analysis showed that the lack of nitrogen was the primary driving force for the lack of recovery occurring on the tailing ponds and mining pits," Kalamandeen said. "On the overburden, where there was an abundance of nitrogen, regrowth of trees were similar to other Neotropical secondary, recovery forests."

Researchers were surprised to find that a lack of nitrogen, instead of an excess of mercury, was to blame for the stunted regrowth.

"Our research showed that active mines had on average 250 times more mercury than abandoned mining sites, suggesting that this mercury leaches into neighboring forests and rivers," Kalamandeen said.

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Researchers found that in the few mining sites where topsoil was replaced and fertilized with nitrogen -- an often mandated, but rarely enforced, restoration step -- regrowth was comparable to plots where trees were cleared for other types of activity.

Scientists hope their findings will inspire politicians and policy makers in the Amazon to strengthen environmental regulations for gold mining.

"It's important the current environmental policies are enforced. Most Amazonian countries have reasonable monitoring and enforcement policies but weakening of such policies or reduced funding to regulatory agencies as we've seen in Brazil and Venezuela, means that enforcement isn't occurring," Kalamandeen said.

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"Addressing corruption in mining agencies is also another issue that needs addressing at the national scale," Kalamandeen said. "For restoration, many Amazonian countries don't have a forest restoration policy when it comes to gold mining and this needs to be tested and developed for tropical forests at the landscape-scale."

Gold prices often rise in the wake of economic crises, and when they do, small-scale gold mining activity ramps up in the Amazon.

Though under new leadership, Brazil has recently been weakening environmental regulations. But in the years that followed the financial crisis, strong rainforest protections forced miners to pursue gold in neighboring countries, especially the dense forests of Guyana and the French Guiana.

With the COVID-19 pandemic putting a significant dent in global economic growth, researchers worry gold mining activity will once again proliferate across a large stretch of forest known as the Guiana Shield. In the future, scientists hope to test new technologies designed to curb the threat of gold mining.

"We hope to use remote sensing to help detect gold mining especially illegal mining within the Amazon," Kalamandeen said.

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Soft coral garden found in Greenland's deep sea 

WELL THAT WAS UNEXPECTED

Researchers found an abundance of sea anemones in the deep sea coral garden off the western coast of Greenland. Photo by ZSL/GINR
June 29 (UPI) -- Scientists have discovered a soft coral garden off the coast of western Greenland, some 1,600 feet below the ocean surface.

The ecosystem -- described Monday in the journal Frontiers in Marine Biology -- was discovered using a novel, low-cost underwater video system developed by researchers at University College London, the Zoological Society of London and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources.he discovery could have implications for the management of nearby deep-sea trawl fisheries.

"The deep sea is often over-looked in terms of exploration. In fact we have better maps of the surface of Mars, than we do of the deep sea," Stephen Long, first author on the new study, said in a news release.

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"The development of a low-cost tool that can withstand deep-sea environments opens up new possibilities for our understanding and management of marine ecosystems," said Long, a postdoctoral researcher in the geography department at UCL. "We'll be working with the Greenland government and fishing industry to ensure this fragile, complex and beautiful habitat is protected."

The soft coral garden features an abundance of cauliflower corals, as well as feather stars, sponges, anemones, brittle stars and hydrozoans bryozoans.

"Coral gardens are characterized by collections of one or more species -- typically of non-reef forming coral -- that sit on a wide range of hard and soft bottom habitats, from rock to sand, and support a diversity of fauna," said Chris Yesson, study co-author and ZSL researcher. "There is considerable diversity among coral garden communities, which have previously been observed in areas such as northwest and southeast Iceland."

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In addition to being pitch black, deep sea environments host extreme ocean pressures. The pressure at 500 meters, or 1,600 feet, underwater is 50 times greater than at sea-level.

Most deep sea observations require expensive remote-controlled submersibles, but for the latest survey, researchers developed a low-cost alternative using a GoPro video camera, outfitted with lights and lasers, and housed in a pressure-proof container. Scientists situated the protected camera system in a large steel frame and lowered it into the ocean off the coast of Greenland.

The researcher team deposited their video sled on the ocean bottom and started recording. Scientists captured 15 minutes at a time across 18 different locations.

RELATED Study shows changes in Great Barrier Reef fish during heat wave

"A towed video sled is not unique. However, our research is certainly the first example of a low-cost DIY video sled led being used to explore deep-sea habitats in Greenland's 2.2 million square kilometers of sea," Long said. "So far, the team has managed to reach an impressive depth of 1,500 meters. It has worked remarkably well and led to interest from researchers in other parts of the world."

The deep sea is one the planet's least understood environs, but researchers hope their new video sled will make deep sea research more accessible to scientists across the globe.

"Greenland's seafloor is virtually unexplored, although we know is it inhabited by more than 2000 different species together contributing to complex and diverse habitats, and to the functioning of the marine ecosystem," said Martin Blicher, researcher at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources.

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"Despite knowing so little about these seafloor habitats, the Greenlandic economy depends on a small number of fisheries which trawl the seabed. We hope that studies like this will increase our understanding of ecological relationships, and contribute to sustainable fisheries management," Blicher said.

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