A crate of geoducks for sale at a seafood market. Credit: iStockphoto

WHEN IT COMES to longevity in the animal kingdom, tortoises are usually the first to come to mind. Yet with specimens able to live to 168 years old, if there ever was a competition for who could live the longest, the geoduck (pronounced ‘gooey duck’) would give many species a run for their money. Additionally, having an average weight of 0.5-1.5 kg when mature, they can lay claim to being one of the largest species of clams.

The mollusc is native to the northwest coast of the United States and west coast of Canada. Their unusual name comes from a Native American word meaning ‘dig deep’ which is likely a reference to the practice used to harvest them.

So to what does the geoduck owe the pleasure of its long lifespan? According to Claudia Hand, research biologist at the Pacific Biological Station in Canada, being hidden from most predators is a great advantage.

“A geoduck’s long life is made possible due to low stress, or wear and tear, because they live buried in a metre of soft soil, well away from most predators,” Hand says. Geoducks can bury themselves up to one metre deep and have a siphon to match, which they use to feed on plankton through filtration. Reaching one metre in length, their siphon is on average four times longer than the shell and cannot be retracted.

Unfortunately for many, such an advantage doesn’t exist during their youth. Geoducks are ‘dioecious’, meaning they have separate sexes. Spawning typically occurs from late winter to early summer. Triggered by the ideal temperature conditions and other cues, the males release sperm, which, in turn stimulates female geoducks to release their eggs, which can number in the millions each year. With fertilisation taking place in the water column, success depends on many environmental factors, leaving the larvae very vulnerable.

“Their larvae, which are like plankton, suffer high mortalities through predation, and currents can carry them far out to sea,” explains Hand. “Depending on tidal currents and prevailing winds, usually around the two-month mark, if the surviving larvae find themselves in a suitable location of near soft shoreline sediments, they will settle. At this time, they are vulnerable to predators like crabs and sea stars until they dig deep enough. This type of hit-or-miss recruitment is sometimes referred to as sweepstakes recruitment because, when all the variables line up, there can be huge success.”

From its inception in the 1970s, the commercial harvesting industry for this clam has grown considerably. Hatchery production numbers in South Puget Sound (in the U.S. state of Washington) range between 2.5 million and 3.5 million annually, and the increasing demand from Asia (where they can be sold as much as $66 per kilogram) has helped foster a market estimated at around $80 million per year in Washington, USA and British Columbia, Canada.

However, they may yet serve more than our stomachs. Like trees, geoducks have annual growth rings, deposited on their shells every winter. Prior studies of shell growth in another mollusc called a bivalve show a strong correlation to temperature, so there is potential for the animals as climate proxies. With tree growth primarily responsive to conditions on land, and coral reefs limited to tropical regions, geoducks could prove to be very useful in helping bridge the gaps in Earth’s climate history and if their potential lifespan is anything to go by, they could have quite a story to tell.

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A species of Shrub frog from Vietnam, called Gracixalus quangi. Amphibians species are considered most at risk from climate change. Credit: Jodi J. L. Rowley

PARIS: More than half of common species of plants and a third of animal species are likely to see their living space halved by 2080 on current trends of carbon emissions, according to a new climate study.

Output of man-made greenhouse gases is putting Earth on track for four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100 compared with the pre-industrial 18th century, the study said. The unprecedented speed of warming will be a shock for many species, as it will badly affect the climatic range in which they can live, it warned.

Investigators from Britain’s University of East Anglia looked at 48,786 species and measured how their range would be affected according to models of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Living space halved by 2080

Fifty-five percent of plants and 35% of animals could see their living space halved by 2080 at current emissions growth for CO2, they found. The figures take into account the species’ ability to migrate into habitat that may open up as a result of warming.

The species most at risk are amphibians, as well as plants and reptiles, and regions that would lose most are Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, the Amazon and Australia, the paper said.

Lead researcher Rachel Warren said the estimates “are probably conservative” as they were based only on the impact of rising global temperatures. Other symptoms of climate change – storms, droughts, floods and pests, for instance – would amplify the problem.

“Animals in particular may decline more as our predictions will be compounded by a loss of food from plants,” Warren said in a press release.

“There will also be a knock-on effect for humans because these species are important for things like water and air purification, flood control, nutrient cycling and eco-tourism.”

A ray of light

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, said there was a ray of light. If carbon emissions peak in 2016 – and decline by three to four percent annually thereafter – this would limit 2100 warming to 2°C (3.6°F), avoiding around 60% of the projected impact from business-as-usual emissions.

But if the peak is delayed until 2021, emissions would have fall yearly by six percent to achieve 2°C (3.6°F) warming, which would need a costlier effort to rein in energy use. Alternatively, if emissions peak by 2030 and then are reduced at five percent annually to limit warming to around 2.8°C (5°F), the loss of climatic range would be reduced by 40% compared with business-as usual.

U.N. members have adopted the 2°C target in world climate talks, which aim to conclude a new treaty on carbon emissions by 2015 and have it ratified by 2020.

But the negotiations have been making poor progress, and the yearly rise in emissions, driven especially by the burning of coal in big developing countries, has led many scientists to conclude that warming of 3–4°C (5.4–7.2°F) is probable by century’s end.

The new study says that loss of climate range would be bound to boost the risk of species extinction.

The Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated that 20–30% of species would be at increasingly high risk of extinction if warming exceeds 2–3°C (3.6-5.4°F) above pre-industrial levels.

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Reconstruction of Acrotholus audeti, an 85 million year old dome-headed dinosaur, with the turtle Neurankylus lithographicus in the foreground. Credit: Julius Csotonyi

PARIS: The discovery of a new thick-skulled dinosaur the size of a large dog may challenge our image of a pre-historic Earth dominated by supersized lizards, a study said.

The planet may, in fact, have been inhabited by many more types of small dinosaur than widely thought, a group of researchers wrote in the journal Nature Communications.

“It would have been a world filled with a diversity of dinosaur life, both large and small,” study co-author David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum’s natural history department said of the results.

When monsters prevailed

Today, Earth is dominated by small-bodied animals, including mammals and reptiles.

But dinosaur fossil finds have painted a picture of a very different world during the Mesozoic era, from about 250 to 65 million years ago, in which monster-sized creatures prevailed.

Scientists disagree on whether this meant the bigger animals were simply more numerous, or that their remains have been better preserved.

Now, evidence for the latter theory has been found in fossilised skull fragments discovered in the Milk River Formation of southern Alberta, Canada.

Head-butting contests

The remains are from a small, plant-eating dinosaur that strode the Earth hunched on two muscled hind legs some 85 million years ago.

About 1.8 metres (six feet) from nose to tail and weighing in at 40 kilograms (88 pounds), the animal had a ridge of solid bone more than 10 centimetres (four inches) thick on the top of the skull – possibly used in head-butting contests.

The feature gave rise to its name: Acrotholus audeti after the Greek for “high dome”.

Acrotholus is the oldest species from a group of thick-skulled dinosaurs known as pachycephalosaurs in North America, and possibly the world, the researchers wrote.

From studying the new species’ place in the pachycephalosaur family tree, the team concluded there was a lot yet to be discovered about diversity in this and other groups of small dinosaur – classified as animals weighing less than 100 kilograms (220 pounds) each.

Thick skulls preserved well

“When we look back at the Age of Dinosaurs, it’s easy to focus on the big animals like T. rex,” said Evans.

“But there is a growing body of evidence that the landscape would have been filled with small dinosaurs as well.”

More is known about pachycephalosaurs than many other small dinosaur groups, mainly because their thick skulls were better able to resist the ravages of the elements and time.

The rest of their skeletons, like those of most small dinosaurs, were much more easily weathered or chewed up by predators before they could be turned into fossils.

“We can predict that many new small dinosaurs species like Acrotholus are waiting to be discovered by researchers willing to sort through the many small bones that they pick up in the field,” said Michael Ryan of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

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Crossley’s dwarf lemur from Tsinjoarivo, Madagascar, near its winter hibernation spot. Credit: M. Blanco

PARIS: The mystery of the Madagascar dwarf lemur’s winter disappearance has been revealed: it burrows deep into the soil, curled up for a months-long sleep, scientists were astonished to find.

The discovery, announced in a study published in Nature Scientific Reports, makes the island country’s eastern dwarf lemurs the only primates in the world known to hibernate underground.

The fat-tailed lemur, a cousin from the slightly warmer, drier forests of western Madagascar, was already known to hibernate in tree holes for about seven months of the year.

“They had to go somewhere…”

Researchers long suspected the eastern lemurs may be doing the same, but could never find them.

“You don’t see them, trap them or find them during the dry season (winter time) while walking the forests at night,” study co-author Marina Blanco of Germany’s Hamburg University said.

“They had to go somewhere…”

And so the team fitted radio-transmitter collars on 12 lemurs from two eastern species in summer, and waited.

The species – Sibree’s dwarf lemur and Crossley’s dwarf lemur – live in the forest of Tsinjoarivo.

Setting out in winter with signal trackers, the team fully expected to find the lemurs sleeping in tree holes.

“We started to dig … and found a furry ball”

“We were tracking the collar’s signal and pointing our antenna up in the air, towards the tip of a tree. But the signal was coming from the ground, so we thought the animal had lost the collar,” said Blanco.

“We looked around and didn’t see anything so we started to dig up the area and found a furry ball, the dwarf lemur was curled up and cold to the touch, still wearing its collar.”

The tiny bundles weighed about 250 gram (nine ounces) to 350 gram (12 ounces) depending on which species they belonged to.

They hibernated for anything from three to six months buried 10 to 40 centimetres (4 – 16 inches) under a spongy layer of tree roots, soil and decaying plant matter.

Rare primates hibernation

It is uncommon for primates to hibernate – in fact the western fat-tailed lemur was previously the only primate known to do so.

It is also rare behaviour for animals in tropical regions – residents of colder climes like polar bears, hedgehogs or squirrels are usually the ones who find it necessary to hide out from winter.

During hibernation, the metabolism slows down and the core body temperature reaches ambient levels – meaning the body has to work less hard to stay alive.

During the Madagascar winter, lemurs are exposed to drastic daily temperature fluctuations of as much as 30 degrees Celsius (54 degrees Fahrenheit).

In the highland rainforests, ambient temperatures can drop to between zero and five degrees C in winter – cold for animals used to summer averages in the 30s.

In retrospect, the team wrote, underground hibernation in the tropics made sense as it provides better insulation than tree holes or nests.

Sibree’s dwarf lemur is retrieved from underground hibernaculum at Tsinjoarivo forest. Credit: J.F. Ranaivoarisoa

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The first array zilched the couple’s electrical bill. The second freed them from the petrol pump. Both, he estimates, will pay for themselves in about 6.5 years, thanks to tax credits and a California law that lets them sell home-generated power to the grid at market rates. That means that on summer days, when owners of less-efficient homes are dialling up the air conditioning, they can sell power at peak rates… buying back in the evenings what they need for such uses as laundry or charging the cars, at as little as one-fifth the daytime price.

Parrott’s and Iwahashi’s lifestyle is a model for a decentralised energy future in which people generate their own energy, much as our ancestors once raised their own vegetables. But is it realistic?

Futurist and science-fiction writer Brenda Cooper, based in Seattle, Washington, thinks that such energy self-sufficiency is indeed the wave of the future. In part, she says, it will be driven by the desire to insulate us from the worst effects of climate change. “Bigger and broader storm systems are knocking out our old power grid pretty easily,” she says. “More self-sufficiency will allow households and businesses to be free of the grid. In a climate-change challenged world, this will be seen as a smart move.”

But if we’re striving for a carbon-neutral future to put the brakes on climate change, rooftop collectors may not be enough. Even Parrott and Iwahashi aren’t completely off the grid. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, residential needs account for only 22% of American energy use. It takes energy to build the couple’s cars, run the offices where they work, pave the streets they drive on, and build their energy-efficient house.

By 2063, it’s projected that the world will have more than nine billion people, all demanding developed-world standards of living. And while there is much to be gained from conservation, history says we find ever-new ways of using energy. Thom Mason is director of Tennessee-based Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which carries out much of America’s energy research. “Our standard of living is defined by energy consumption,” says Mason. “Standard of living equals energy use, and vice versa.”

Meeting this need will be difficult with conventional energy sources. “You can’t make the numbers add,” Mason says. “The demand will exceed what we can support and the environmental consequences would be pretty infeasible.”

This can be seen as an incredibly pessimistic point of view: a prescription for war, poverty, and – if we continue relying on fossil fuels – global environmental collapse. It’s also a challenge. “That’s why we need better alternatives,” Mason says.

HAPPILY, THERE ARE several alternatives, of which solar is one of the leading contenders – especially in Australia, where the nation’s entire electrical needs could be met by a perfectly efficient 50 x 50 km solar array in the sunniest portion of the desert. “Land is not an issue,” says Wes Stein, renewable energy manager at the National Solar Energy Centre, in Newcastle, north of Sydney. “There’s certainly enough to go around.”

Today, there are two basic solar technologies in use: photovoltaics, which generate electricity directly from light; and concentrated solar power (CSP), which uses mirrors to produce heat by focussing light.

Currently, photovoltaic cells are the primary form of solar power. Although they still represent less than 0.1% of total global energy production, they’re a proven technology that has been steadily dropping in price ever since NASA and other space agencies realised they were a good way to produce electricity for satellites and spacecraft.

For years, though, photovoltaics were viewed as too expensive for anything but specialised uses such as powering instruments at remote weather stations. However, just as the computer industry boasts Moore’s Law, which states that computing power doubles every two years, photovoltaic technology has Swanson’s Law. Named for Richard Swanson, founder of a California solar-panel manufacturing company, this rule-of-thumb holds that solar-panel prices drop 20% with each doubling of the industry.

That’s still not enough to let everyone live like Parrott and Iwahashi – their home-energy system is affordable only because of the fortuitous mix of California sunshine, tax breaks, and the state’s buy–sell law that allows them to take advantage of the difference between peak and off-peak rates. But the day is drawing nearer when solar might be able to stand on its own. According to data collected by energy market research group Bloomberg New Energy Finance, solar cell prices have fallen by a factor of more than 100 since 1997.

THE OTHER PRIMARY solar energy technology is CSP. The concept is simple… and ancient. As far back as 213 or 214 BC, Archimedes reputedly used the same principle to set fire to invading warships by having the defenders of his city focus sunlight on the ships using handheld mirrors. Modern attempts to replicate this feat have cast doubt on whether it was truly possible with the technology of his era, but the theory is well established. It’s the same one used by scouts the world over to start a fire with a magnifying glass or construct a solar oven for baking bread. With a large enough array of mirrors, CSP technology can be ramped up sufficiently to build large power plants that could replace their fossil-fuel counterparts. The only thing that’s different is the source of heat.

The hold-up comes from the combination of construction costs and thermodynamics. CSP ‘fuel’ – sunlight – is free, but the high-performance mirrors used to concentrate it are expensive. So to compete with fossil fuels, CSP plants need to be more efficient. That, in turn, requires temperatures at the focus to be quite hot.

“Thermodynamic theory says that if you increase operating temperature, you increase efficiency,” says Stein. In theory, the solution is simple: just focus the heat more intensely. But it turns out that if you do this, things start to burn up like Archimedes’s invading warships – not literally, but chemically, as the heat takes a toll on turbine blades and pipes.

One solution is to wait for metallurgists to develop alloys that can better withstand extreme conditions. Another is to make the turbine more efficient without changing the temperature – a boon not only to CSP, but also to existing fossil-fuel plants. Current turbines use two ‘cycles’ for tapping heat for electricity. Steam turbines boil water, then use the expanding steam to spin the turbine blades. Unfortunately, they lose large amounts of energy in the process of converting the steam back to water for the next cycle. Gas turbines bypass this by using hot gases that never have to be re-liquified, but lose comparable amounts of energy by having to re-compress the gas at the start of each cycle.

An alternative that’s drawing increasing attention is using supercritical carbon dioxide instead of water or gas – which, like the materials used in existing turbine cycles, is continuously reused, not released into the atmosphere to contribute to global warming. A supercritical fluid is a substance normally thought of as a gas, held at a combination of high temperatures and pressures that give it the characteristics of both a gas and a liquid. Since it doesn’t have to be re-liquified after each cycle, there’s no energy lost. Nor is there any need to waste energy re-compressing it.

The result might be a 25% to 35% increase in efficiency. “The coal, nuclear and CSP industries are all starting to look at that cycle,” Stein says, though the greatest benefits might be to CSP because it has the highest-cost source of energy, due to the expense of the mirrors.

Shifting to supercritical carbon dioxide can also be done at temperatures common for conventional steam or gas turbines. “You need only 700°C to 800°C, and that’s pretty doable with the metals available today,” Stein says.

WHAT WILL THE energy world of 2063 look like? “Who knows? There may be things we can’t even envision,” says Alan Krupnick, environmental and resource economist with Resources for the Future, a think tank based in Washington, DC. He lists hydrogen fuel cells, and improved battery technology “because that’s a possible game-changer”. But it’s just as likely the mix will be much like 2013’s – including wind, nuclear, biomass and old-fashioned fossil fuel.

Wind is the poster child for alternative-energy success. Every summer day, in America’s Pacific Northwest, a parade of giant trucks heads out along the freeway from Portland, Oregon, carrying giant pylons and turbine blades into the sagebrush steppes of the eastern Columbia River Gorge, which funnels gale-force winds from the Pacific Ocean into the inland desert. In Oregon, wind power already accounts for around 10% of electrical needs. Other places have done even better. In Spain, wind energy now supplies 16% of national electricity demand. In Denmark, it’s more than 25%.

Australia currently lags at just 2%, says Jonathan Whale, a wind-energy researcher at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. But wind farms, he says, will be the nation’s “go-to” form of renewable energy if it plans to meet its renewable energy target of 20% by 2020. And greater progress might come in the future, he says, if wind farms move offshore, where larger components can be brought in by barge.

Wind power has its disadvantages. Like solar, it’s fickle. There are two ways to deal with that. One is to interconnect numerous wind and solar plants onto a single large grid, thereby averaging out the fluctuations. But that can make one city’s power dependent on another region’s weather. If the wind changes dramatically in the Baltic (where much of Europe’s wind power is generated) the electricity supply in the Czech Republic becomes unstable, notes Mason. “And they’re a pretty long way from where the wind is.”

The other solution is to find ways to store energy for later use. When most people think of storing electrical power, they think of batteries. But at gigawatt levels these would be enormous, and absurdly expensive. A better way to do it, says Stein, is through “thermal storage” – a method that’s particularly appealing for heat-based generators such as CSP facilities.

This works by storing excess heat in well-insulated vaults of… well, anything hot. Ideally, the material would also be dense, so it wouldn’t require vats the size of supertankers to hold enough of it. “Molten salt is an example,” says Stein. “Nearly all of the CSP projects in Spain and the U.S. are integrating molten salt storage. When the clouds come over, or it’s night-time, you use the heat to generate steam.”

Another way of storing energy would be via thermochemistry, in which excess heat is used to drive high-energy chemical reactions uphill – that is, in the direction in which energy is added, rather than released. “So, you store the energy as chemical energy rather than straight-out heat,” Stein says. One advantage, he notes, is that you can store energy that way indefinitely. “You don’t have to worry about heat leaking out.”

Similar chemical processes can be used to produce solar fuels. In the early 2000s, there was much talk of a hydrogen economy in which hydrogen fuel cells replace petrol. Hydrogen does have a major advantage in that it’s pollution-free. When you burn it, the only byproduct is water. There’s just one problem: hydrogen is a beast to handle. It’s explosive. Its tiny molecules easily permeate out of storage containers. It can turn pipeline metals brittle. And to use it in a car, you need to either liquefy it or compress it, either of which takes a lot of energy.

Better, argues Ellen Stechel, deputy director of Lightworks, a solar-power project at Arizona State University in Tempe, is to take that hydrogen, and produce something easier to use – such as solar-derived petrol. Stechel’s work grew out of an interest in finding ways to make synthetic aviation fuels, other than via biofuels (fuels derived from biomass), which cannot be generated in sufficient quantities to power the world if we still want to grow crops to eat.

But nobody’s going to make a commercially feasible, electric jetliner in the near future. Even electric cars have their disadvantages. No matter how cheap batteries become, the ones we have don’t recharge quickly and their weight reduces energy efficiency except in cars used solely for short-range commuting.

“The fuels we use today have really nice properties,” Stechel says, “high-energy density both by mass and volume.” They are also very convenient. “We can fuel very fast, whether it’s a big truck, an airplane, or a car. You can’t do that with hydrogen and you can’t do that with electricity.”

There’s also an advantage to using fuels we are already equipped to handle. “We have an enormous amount of infrastructure,” she says.

There are several ways to make such fuels from air, water, and sunlight, but Stechel’s focus is via CSP. If sunlight is focussed on a metal oxide, such as zinc or tin oxide, that oxide will give up its oxygen. In a reaction chamber, once this is cooled back down and exposed to a mix of steam and carbon dioxide, the metal atoms will “steal back the oxygen”, Stechel says, producing the original metal oxide (ready for reuse), plus carbon monoxide and hydrogen: “building blocks to make any hydrocarbon you like”. It’s not a far-out technology. “We believe it could be pushed to market in about a decade,” she says.

In the interim, it might be possible to make solar-hybrid fuels. These start with a fossil-fuel source, then add solar energy to make that fuel even better. An example, says Stein, is using solar energy to split natural gas into syngas – the same combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide Stechel’s group is looking at making into pure solar fuels. “The solar-energy proportion is only 20% or 30%,” Stein says, but it’s a starting point. “Without even knowing it, consumers would be using solar energy.”

MORE PROBLEMATIC is the role of nuclear power. “My personal feeling is that we are suffering from a massive case of ‘Fukushima shock’,” says Krupnick. He’s referring to the Japanese reactor that, in the wake of a 2011 earthquake and tsunami, produced the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. It hasn’t helped, he adds, that ‘fracking’ technology, where high-pressure steam is used to fracture rock strata and release trapped gas reserves previously believed to be unobtainable, has produced a new boom in fossil-fuel production. “With low natural gas prices, there’s just no interest in nuclear.”

Mason believes the nuclear future (if we let it happen) will belong to small modular reactors and generation III nuclear plants. Small reactors are just that. They’re placed underground and produce 50 to 300 megawatts of power, which is far less than the thousands of megawatts derived from current reactors – more like the reactors long used on submarines and aircraft carriers. Because they’re smaller and underground, they’re safer, especially because they don’t need to keep large supplies of fuel on hand.

Generation III reactors are designed to be more failsafe than their predecessors. For example, the cooling system might be in a gravity-fed reservoir on the roof of the containment building. Cooling water would flow into the reactor via gravity, then heat to steam that would rise back to the roof, where it would cool and condense back into water for the next cooling cycle. The entire system is a continuous, passive loop relying only on the fact that water flows downhill and steam rises. “That’s a passive safety feature,” Mason says. “There is no need for operators or pumps.”

Another improvement, Mason says, is the use of “accident-tolerant fuels”. He says old-style fuels were encapsulated in zirconium alloys, which had the advantage of not absorbing neutrons (an impediment to reactor performance) but that, when overheated, cause water to disassociate into hydrogen and oxygen – the source of the explosion behind the Fukushima accident.

New-generation fuels are encapsulated in materials that don’t have this property. “If something happens and the system heats up, you don’t compound the problem by having this release of hydrogen,” Mason says. “It gives you a much greater safety margin.”

There’s more on the drawing board to massively reduce the quantities of nuclear waste, while increasing the efficiency of fuel. One of these is fuel recycling. “In the current fuel cycle, it’s only a [small] percentage of the potential energy that you’ve really used,” Mason says. “That means the waste volume per unit energy is large. You can do a whole lot better.”

One option is the breeder reactor, known since the 1940s, in which uranium-238 (which comprises 99% of natural uranium, but isn’t usable as reactor fuel) is converted to plutonium-239, an artificial, usable fuel. Another is the thorium fuel cycle, which converts thorium-232 into uranium-233, which doesn’t occur in nature but is a perfectly usable fuel source. “Because thorium is more abundant than uranium, there’s been renewed interest in this,” Mason says.

With these approaches, he adds, all of the world’s electricity could be generated from nuclear sources. But he continues, “I’m not sure that would be valuable or desirable. There’s a value in diversity of energy supply. I’m not sure you would want to put all your eggs in one basket.”

Nor does he expect fusion power to suddenly step up and fill the clean-energy gap, even in the next 50 years. “You
might hope that by the end of that timeframe, you’ve answered the scientific questions and are beginning to answer the engineering problems,” he says.

WHAT THIS MEANS is that the future will need a mix of energy facilities: centralised and decentralised – residential, commercial and industrial.

Few of the likely changes, however, will come quickly. Your mobile phone might be obsolete in two years, your laptop in five, but power plants are vastly more expensive, and designed to operate for decades. “The energy industry is very conservative and generally working with technologies that have 20, 30 or 40-plus-year asset lives,” says Stein.

Mason agrees. “Fifty years sounds like a long time, when you think about healthcare and information technology. But in ‘energy space’ 50 years is not very long. If you look at the time it’s taken for previous transitions – nuclear power, petroleum, before that, coal – each took half a century, and in some cases longer. You’re talking about capital investments that persist for 50-year timeframes. It can’t happen fast because the system has so much inertia in it.”

What this means is that new technologies may infiltrate the present power-generation system, but fossil fuels are likely to continue in use for a long time, at least until today’s plants wear out.

If more rapid shifts do occur, Stein says, they will probably be driven by climate change. “We just had a fairly severe heat wave on the east coast of Australia,” he says, “and we’re getting significant, abnormal climate events around the world. If something did happen, where significant heating led to significant drought that led to significant socionomic change, we could see a drastic acceleration in the move to these new technologies. But if it’s business as usual, you’ll probably wind up with a slow shift.”

If change does happen slowly, our lives may not be all that radically affected. “Ultimately, I don’t see that lifestyle should be affected,” Stein says. “If we do these technologies correctly, the consumer should not see any difference when they turn the switch or start their car. They should still get their electricity. They should still get from A to B in their vehicle. There should not be any noticeable effect at the end of the day except that, perhaps, the climate is cleaner.”

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It’s early January 2013, and these experts from across the globe have come to Australia’s southerly island state for a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Hobart’s weather generally tends toward mild and damp; cold winds from Antarctica regularly bring snow to the rocky peak of nearby Mount Wellington. Over the past century or so, the city’s average January maximum has been just 21°C.

Yet, during the previous week, Hobart had experienced its hottest day on record, with the temperature soaring above 40°C. Instead of clouds, the sky was wreathed in smoke. In the nearby fishing village of Dunalley, 80 homes, some 30% of the town, were destroyed by bushfires. Hundreds of residents were evacuated by boat from the Tasman Peninsula.

The scientists are here to help finalise sections of the IPCC’s latest and massively complex assessment report, the fifth such mammoth document released over the past 25 years. Part of their job is to outline the range of possible future climates humanity can expect over the coming decades.

A few weeks earlier, a draft version of the report was leaked on a blog by a climate sceptic who was also one of the experts engaged in the review process. The report is due to be released in three stages, beginning in September 2013, and wording may change. As it is, the draft suggests that 50 years from now, average surface air temperatures could be between 1°C and 2°C warmer than they were in the early 2000s. This is on top of a warming of about 0.8°C already recorded since the Industrial Revolution.

Other organisations have released more worrying forecasts. In November 2012, a report for the World Bank compiled by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany warned that, if governments fail to meet current mitigation pledges and commitments, the average global temperature could rise 4°C above pre-industrial temperatures by as early as the 2060s. In line with the IPCC, most of the experts I spoke with for this story said while this kind of hike was possible, by mid century, rises of the order of 1°C or 2°C were more likely, with further increases to follow.

Even this kind of rise approaches a level of warming that governments agree would risk dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. During a coffee break at the Hobart meeting I chatted with Andy Pitman, a climate modeller who directs the ARC Centre for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. A straight-talking man, he’s more than a little exasperated as he explains that much of the fundamental understanding of climate science is settled.

“There is zero disagreement over whether the Earth will warm if we continue to put nine billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year,” he says. “That’s just not up for discussion, which is why we find the debates with the sceptics so tedious. It’s like arguing the toss over whether the average car has four wheels or not.”

As the scientists begin filing back into their meeting rooms, I ask Pitman how likely we are to stay under the 2°C limit this century. “We’ve got,” he answers quickly, “a snowball’s chance in hell”.

A WEEK AFTER THE meeting, I arrange to meet Pitman for a longer talk. He makes me coffee and ushers me into the sort of office that could easily belong to a historian or psychiatrist. Pitman’s experiments take place not in a lab but amid millions of lines of computer code. He uses elaborate climate models to help pose the question: what is our climate future? Based on fundamental laws of physics, these models work at grid-level scales, using a 3-D array of ‘cells’ of regional zones to artificially generate all the complexities of a climate system: the swirling clouds and flooding rivers, dynamic oceans and polar ice caps. These cells and all their variables – including data on the rate of change of temperature, humidity, and the flow of energy in and out of the system – are enmeshed in mathematical relationships played out in supercomputers.

I ask him how these models work on a practical level. “We take the Earth as a sphere, and break it up into a chessboard pattern, and up into multiple levels – like the 3-D chessboard Spock plays on in Star Trek,” he explains. The model maps the climate now and mathematically predicts the next step of progress – perhaps just half an hour later – to see how the whole system changes. The model then solves the equations again for the next half hour – and so on, for however long he wants it to run. Just one of these simulations might take six to nine months in real time, and the output is a mathematical representation of the entire globe, inscribed in perhaps a million gigabytes of data.

Scientific groups around the world operate different versions of these virtual worlds. When several of their models agree, scientists can state with what level of confidence – statistically speaking – they can be sure their model is correct in its predictions. Where more models agree, there’s more certainty.

Among the most certain repercussions of a warming climate is that extremely hot days will become more frequent. So when the Tasmanian emergency services minister reassured Hobart residents that the bushfires of 2013 were the result of catastrophic weather conditions that occur “once in a generation”, he was making an assertion that may not still be true 50 years from now.

In climate terms, 50 years isn’t that far into the future. Chris Field, founding director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science in California, says much of the change we can expect over the next five decades is already in train.

“We’re looking now at consequences of things that have already been baked into the system, consequences of emissions that have already occurred,” he says. “Even if we started tomorrow with aggressive emissions reductions, it would only mean a few per cent difference the first year and a few more for the second year and so on.” Some of the consequences of today’s emissions won’t even have kicked in by mid century, he adds.

IN THE MIDDLE OF a hot spell in Sydney in the southern summer, when temperatures in the mid 40s have forced many folks into shopping malls and cinemas for relief, I call Lisa Alexander, an expert in extreme weather events at the Climate Change Research Centre at the UNSW, to discuss what ramifications global warming could have over the next 50 years.

“What we consider today to be an extreme of temperature, that’s going to become the norm by the middle of the century,” she says. “The sort of temperatures we’ve had in Sydney this week, rather than happening once in a summer, will start to occur a lot more often.”

In November 2011, consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers Australia compiled a report for the Australian Government, looking specifically at the question of extreme events. “By 2050, an extreme heat event in Melbourne alone could typically kill over one thousand people in a few days if we don’t improve the way we forecast, prepare for and manage these events,” it warned. For Victorian residents who lived through the ‘Black Saturday’ fires in 2009, when drought and temperatures over 45°C led to 173 people dying in bushfires, these are alarming words.

It’s not only Australia that will see these kinds of extreme events more often. By the middle of the century, extreme highs will become more common across the globe, according to a special report released by the IPCC in March 2012. Temperatures historically hit once every 20 years could become 10 times more common in some places. Nearly everywhere on the planet will be hit by heatwaves, says Alexander. Europeans learned the impact such events could have in 2003, when an estimated 70,000 people died during the hottest summer on record since 1540.

AS THE TEMPERATURE rises, it will disrupt patterns of rainfall and snowfall, making heavy downfalls more common on a global scale. Trying to predict what will happen to rainfall at a regional level in the next 50 years is harder. “Broadly, we could say the wet places will get wetter and the dry places will get drier,” Alexander says. “But there are quite a few places where we’re not getting the majority of models agreeing on what will happen in individual regions.” Other areas could change from wet to dry, or vice versa, she says.

In China, for example, “data indicate that some of the traditionally dry areas will actually become slightly wetter, and in some of the relatively wet areas, the precipitation will be reduced,” says Yiqi Luo, co-director of the Fudan Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Shanghai.

Heavy downpours could mean an increased risk of flooding in some areas, perhaps similar to the floods that turned three quarters of the Australian state of Queensland into a disaster zone in 2010. On the other hand, changing rainfall patterns could also lead to an increased risk of drought. The climate change report for the World Bank estimated that a 2°C increase in global average temperatures could cut annual runoff by 20% to 40% in vital river basins such as the Amazon, the Mississippi and the Murray–Darling, while increasing runoff by around 20% in the Nile and the Ganges.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, changes in rainfall patterns and temperatures will also have an impact on the risk of forest fires by 2063, scientists say. In Amazonia, for example, the World Bank report estimates that forest fires could as much as double by 2050 with warming of approximately 1.5°C to 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

Meanwhile, rising temperatures are also expected to raise sea levels, by melting glaciers and polar ice caps and causing ocean water to expand. The oceans have an enormous capacity to absorb the warming caused by rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, and the rise in sea levels is expected to happen slowly, explains John Church, a lead IPCC author from Australia’s national research agency CSIRO. “By 2063, there would be a growing but at this time relatively small impact on sea level change,” he says. He estimates a rise of about 20 to 50 cm from the sea level in 2000.

It’s long been postulated that climate change will also cause more severe storms. “It’s really the intensity of the cyclone that’s the problem, rather than the frequency,” says Alexander. “If you get low-category cyclones, they’re much less of a problem than if you get the large, intense cyclones.”

The costs of such an increase could be enormous. In 2012, the costliest natural catastrophe for the U.S. insurance industry was Hurricane Sandy, which caused overall losses that giant insurer Munich Re put at US$50 billion including in excess of US$25 billion in insured losses. And as Munich Re pointed out in January 2013, recent years have already seen a “strong upward trend in insured losses” related to thunderstorms in the USA.

Yet the cost of Hurricane Sandy could pale in comparison to the trillions of dollars required for coastal defences to protect cities from rising sea levels. “If there is half a metre of sea level rise, followed by 1 m, then, for sure, most of China’s major cities along the coast regions will be affected,” says Luo. “In China, 80% of people live in relatively low elevation areas in coastal regions.”

FOR ALMOST TWO DECADES, Nick Rowley has had a ringside seat to the bruising politics of climate change. In recent years, the British policy consultant has advised companies and governments on sustainability. Before that, he was a climate advisor to New South Wales premier Bob Carr, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Over that time, Rowley says, he has watched climate experts become resigned to the inevitability of dangerous climate change. “When I was working with Tony Blair seven years ago, there was a level of energy and focus among scientists, advocates and policy professionals addressing the problem.”

Today, that enthusiasm and motivation has been lost, he says. “Their tone is one of accepting that this world is going to change fundamentally over the coming 50 years because of the climate problem.”

Rowley is far from alone in that dismal assessment. David Karoly, a senior climate change researcher at the University of Melbourne, worries that meaningful political action will come about only when the gradual accumulation of disaster upon disaster – floods on fires on ‘Frankenstorms’ – make it impossible for the status quo to continue.

“For there to be a switch from political inaction to political action, there will have to be some very, very major climate-related disasters,” he says. “Many people will call those cataclysmic.” Karoly’s guess is that political change will start happening around 15 years from now. “But my view is that emissions won’t start to fall until 2050.”

An important part of that delay is the economic commitments countries are making right now to build coal-fired power stations. “It’s a kind of inertia that’s really important for the global economy,” says Field. “If we have to start retiring power plants that are only half their retirement age, or 10% of their retirement age, then we’re imposing both the early retirement costs and the extra costs of the renewables. And that’s when it starts getting really expensive.”

IN THIS VERSION OF 2063’s climate, “survival and adaptation would be the name of the game”, says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “It would be a world on the edge of despair… but people would still feel they can adapt. A world that would be manageable, but there would still be heavy losses.”

Adaptation would be one priority: adjusting the way we organise our lives, cities and industries to cope with the changed conditions. Another would be fighting to minimise more disruptive change. By 2063, simply cutting emissions may not be enough to achieve this. Indeed, by the middle of the century the world may well have already dabbled with various technological fixes to try to cool the Earth and strip carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

“I think the key point is that we will face continuing impacts and will face even worse impacts after we’ve realised that the problem needs to be solved,” says Field. There are profound issues with the gamut of geoengineering concepts aiming to mitigate climate change, he says. “If we want to know how well any of those things are going to work, and especially how well they are going to scale, we should be studying them real hard, right now.”

The kind of radical schemes that can garner headlines – shielding the Earth from sunlight with giant mirrors in space, or with reflective aerosols in the upper atmosphere – may have been tested at smaller scales, but most have failed or been banned because they are too expensive or risky, says Schellnhuber. “Solar radiation management is dangerous nonsense.”

Field, Schellnhuber, Karoly and others are more optimistic that over the next 50 years we will get better at capturing carbon dioxide emissions from power stations, or from the atmosphere itself. Some of the most promising approaches are a return to natural mechanisms, says Schellnhuber. “I would say the natural method of geoengineering would be best: planting trees.” Maintenance of tropical forests and bans on land clearing would also help reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.

Others think these natural approaches will not be enough and that new technologies will also be needed, some of which may already be on the horizon. In Queensland, for example, a pilot scheme by Australian energy company MBD Energy uses algae to capture carbon dioxide emissions from a power station in the town of Tarong, northwest of Brisbane, and grow feedstock. And in July 2012, global tech company Panasonic said it had developed a relatively efficient artificial photosynthesis system to convert carbon dioxide into fuels.

Fifty years from now, humanity is bound to have tools at its disposal that are just as unimaginable as smartphones and the Internet were in 1963. In predicting the future of climate change, “I think one of the weaknesses we often see is an expectation that in 50 years people are going to be using the same technology we have now,” says Field. “It’s interesting, when you look at 1963, some things have not really changed at all… but other things have changed drastically.”

IF THE CLIMATE OF 2063 does change substantially, it is unlikely to yet be enough to threaten civilisation, or usher in widespread ecosystem destruction. It is likely, however, that both temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations will keep rising for another 50 years or more. “We could go to a 3°C increase over current levels by 2100,” says Schellnhuber.

By this time, seas could be a metre higher than they were before the industrial revolution, says Karoly. By 2150, a 2 m rise is possible. If this comes to pass, hundreds of millions of people could be displaced.

The scientists I spoke with worry that the citizens of 2063 will rue our failure to act on climate change today. “Sadly, in 2063 people are likely to look back at this generation and be damning of it,” says Rowley. “They will say that on the basis of the evidence presented to you, by the very best minds who have devoted their lives to understanding this complexity, you as societies were not willing to make the decisions and implement the policies to reduce the climate risks and costs that we now endure.”

After a couple of hours chatting with Pitman, our conversation takes a turn in the same direction. In 2063, he points out, it will be our children and grandchildren left to deal with the consequences of climate change. “I think they will look back and curse the current generation of political leaders. One of the cruel realities is that every one of those leaders will be dead, and not be held accountable.”

Stephen Pincock is a science journalist, editor and author and a regular COSMOS contributor.

The post Another day in paradise appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

Credit: iStockphoto

PARIS: Earth was cooling until the end of the 19th century and a hundred years later, the planet’s surface was on average warmer than at any time in the previous 1,400 years, according to climate records presented on Sunday.

In a study spanning two millennia published in Nature Geoscience, scientists said a “long-term cooling trend” around the world swung into reverse in the late 19th century.

In the 20th century, the average global temperature was 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than that of the previous 500 years, with only Antarctica bucking the trend.

From 1971–2000, the planet was warmer than at any other time in nearly 1,400 years.

This measure is a global average, and some regions did experience warmer periods than that – but only for a time. Europe, for instance, was probably warmer in the first century AD than at the end of the 20th century.

The investigation is the first attempt to reconstruct temperatures over the last 2,000 years for individual continents.

It seeks to shed light on a fiercely-contested aspect in the global-warming debate.

Sceptics have claimed bouts of cooling or warming before the Industrial Revolution – including two episodes in Europe called the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age – are proof that climate variations are natural, not man-made.

The new study points to two planetary trends. The first is a clear, prolonged period of cooling. It may have been caused by a combination of factors, including an increase in volcanic activity, with stratospheric ashes reflecting the sunlight, or a decrease in solar activity or tiny changes in Earth’s orbit, both of which would diminish sunlight falling on the planet.

The cooling – between 0.1-0.3 C (0.2-0.6 F) per thousand years, depending on the region – went into reverse towards the end of the 19th century, and was followed by an intensifying period of warming in the 20th, the paper said.

Beneath this global trend over 2,000 years were episodes of continental cooling or warming, some of which were quite long.

And some continents lagged the overall planetary trend, but with the exception of Antarctica, all followed it.

“Distinctive periods, such as the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age stand out, but do not show a globally uniform pattern on multi-decadal time scales,” said Heinz Wanner of the University of Bern in Switzerland, one of 78 researchers from 24 countries who took part in the project.

“There are things that are common to all the regions of the planet – long-term cooling, until the 19th century, followed by warming on all continents, except for Antarctica, where it is less clear, but also strong variations from one region to another,” Hugues Goosse, a climatologist at Belgium’s Catholic University of Leuven, said.

Previous research into climate change has pointed to a warming spurt in the 20th century and attributed it to the rise of heat-trapping carbon gases emitted by burning coal, oil and gas.

The warming trend shifted up a gear in the middle of the 1970s, in line with record-breaking levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), according to this past research.

2012 saw the 36th straight year that global temperatures were above average since 1880, when scientifically acceptable records were first kept, and was the ninth or 10th warmest on record, U.S. scientists said in January.

The temperature reconstruction published on Sunday was coordinated by a scientific initiative called the Past Global Changes (PAGES) 2K Network.

It brings together weather data as well as telltales of temperature variation from tree rings, pollen, corals, lake and marine sediments, ice cores and stalagmites garnered at 511 locations across seven continental-scale regions.

Climate records for Africa, though, were sparse, the researchers cautioned.

The post Late 20th century warmest in 1,400 years appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

“Most of the intensification of melting has happened since the mid-20th century.” Credit: Ben Holt/NASA

SYDNEY: Summer ice in the Antarctic is melting 10 times quicker than it was 600 years ago, with the most rapid melt occurring in the last 50 years, according to a joint Australian–British study.

A research team from the Australian National University and the British Antarctic Survey drilled a 364-metre (1,194 feet)-long ice core from James Ross Island in the continent’s north to measure past temperatures in the area.

Visible layers in the ice core indicated periods when summer snow on the ice cap thawed and then refroze.

By measuring the thickness of these melt layers, the scientists were able to examine how the history of melting compared with changes in temperature at the ice core site over the last 1,000 years.

“We found that the coolest conditions on the Antarctic peninsula and the lowest amount of summer melt occurred around 600 years ago,” said lead author Nerilie Abram of the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.

“At that time, temperatures were around 1.6 degrees Celsius lower than those recorded in the late 20th century and the amount of annual snowfall that melted and refroze was about 0.5%.

“Today, we see almost 10 times as much of the annual snowfall melting each year.

“Whilst temperatures at this site increased gradually in phases over many hundreds of years, most of the intensification of melting has happened since the mid-20th century,” she added.

The research, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, is only the second reconstruction of past ice melt on the Antarctic continent.

Abram said it helped scientists gain more accurate projections about the direct and indirect contribution of Antarctica’s ice shelves and glaciers to global sea level rise.

“What it means is that the Antarctic peninsula has warmed to a level where even small increases in temperature can now lead to a big increase in summer ice melt,” she said.

“This has important implications for ice instability and sea level rise in a warming climate.”

Robert Mulvaney, from the British Antarctic Survey, led the ice core drilling expedition and co-authored the paper.

“Having a record of previous melt intensity for the peninsula is particularly important because of the glacier retreat and ice shelf loss we are now seeing in the area,” he said.

“Summer ice melt is a key process that is thought to have weakened ice shelves along the Antarctic peninsula leading to a succession of dramatic collapses, as well as speeding up glacier ice loss across the region over the last 50 years.”

The post Antarctic summer ice melting 10 times faster appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

But Prabhjit’s next morning ritual is different. Moving into the living room, she passes her henna-tattooed hand over a picture of her 15-year-old daughter. Apoorva’s image dissolves and eight farm grids sprout onto the screen, their colours every bit as vivid as Prabhjit’s sari. Her practised eye homes in on the scarlet dots – in-field sensors, sitting among the crops like tiny one-eyed metal scarecrows – that alert her to two patches on the northwest corner that are in distress. They’ll need a little more water. Then she zooms out to scan the satellite data from the entire area of Odisha state in eastern India. Some other farms have already begun their harvest; Prabjit begins ruminating about the implications. But the sound of an alarm clock pushes these thoughts to the back of her mind. Time for Apoorva to get ready for school.

IT’S 8 AM, AND PRABHJIT is sitting in front of her data screen in the small office to the side of her living room. Her husband has taken their daughter to the village high school, and himself to the office; he is the chief hydraulic engineer at Ganjam city council. Prabhjit calls her foreman to tell him to increase the flow rate in the drippers for fields NW1 and NW2. He also needs to service the rice harvester ahead of next weeks’ harvest, and while he’s at it, the rice-transplanter and tractors, to ready them for leasing to her neighbours. She arranges to meet him for an onsite visit at 11 am.

There’s a knock at her door. It’s expected – the two-monthly visit from Anil, her ‘ag-service’ provider. She puts on a pot of chai and asks politely about Anil’s family before they move on to some local gossip. Who’s planting what, what are the pests like, and what’s his take on the market? Then she steers the conversation to rice. Anil confirms what she already knows. Some farmers have started to harvest a bumper crop. But her crop needs another week to reach its peak. With plenty of rice on offer, will she get still get a good price? Or should she store her rice? Prabhjit weighs Anil’s opinions, and decides to silo her harvest in the village granary and wait for the price to rise.

Then they chat about vegetables. Prabhjit’s three-year contract for lentils and eggplants with the Bhubaneshwar grocery store is about to run out. Again, she gently questions Anil to find out what sorts of deals are being made. She decides to renew her contract, but on Anil’s advice will try the latest variety of Ganesh BT+ eggplant, with its promise of a four-week shelf life.

Anil taps his briefcase, prompting a holographic display of the latest upgrade for satellite and field data. Prabjit can’t resist and signs up. At 10.30 am, she heads to her meeting with the foreman. As she emerges from the cool of her rice husk-cement composite home, the Sun is beating down hard. She unplugs her car from the socket and eases herself into the drivers’ seat… just in time to receive a call from her mother. After inquiring whether Apoorva remembered her morning prayers, Prabjit’s mother reminds her that tomorrow is the anniversary of her grandmother’s death – she and Apoorva should light a special incense stick. Prabhjit signs off a little abruptly. Yes mother – I need to meet with the foreman now. Talk to you later.

Prabhjit had intended to spend the 10-minute trip planning her conversation with the foreman. But as she cruises down the paved road, an unbidden image projects itself onto the swaying green fields on either side of the car. Shin-deep in a muddy paddy, Grandmother and Mother (then just 12 years old) are bent over, shuffling backwards. They are in the Punjab, far from home, labourers in a team of women who spend day after day poking rice seedlings into the mud. Weeks later they will make their way back home, exhausted, huddled under blankets waiting at the foggy, smoke-filled train station in Ludhiana.

Another image replaces this one. Grandmother and Mother are transplanting rice again, but this time it is their own paddy. And this time it is a special crop; it will change their future.

GRANDMOTHER MAY NOT have been able to read, but she could sense the winds of change. Her husband had long ago left the farm to work at a brick factory: the tiny payment the government broker provided for their rice harvest wasn’t enough to make ends meet. Yet, the government was urging farmers in Odisha to plant more rice because the wells of the Punjab, as everyone knew, were running dry. Odisha was usually blessed with ample rain, but there could be drought. Or floods. Both had struck in the year before Grandfather left.

One year, Grandmother was given some seeds when she attended a meeting at the village. The government woman in her fine blue silk sari had explained that the seeds, which had been developed in the Philippines and were called Sub1, were very strong. If a drought came, the seedlings would not shrivel up. And if the floods came, they would extend their tips, reaching up like tiny mouths above the water to breathe.

As Grandmother and Mother transplanted each seedling, they held it as tenderly as if it were a leaf of gold. Their efforts paid off: that first year, the floodwaters covered their crop for two weeks, but the crop had not drowned and, unlike many of the other farmers in Odisha, they had made a nice profit. Three years later, Grandmother went to another meeting. This time, the lady in the fine sari introduced her to a new type of rice – she said it was the daughter of Sub1. But this daughter was ‘smarter’ than her mother, so they called it Super Sub1. Not only would this plant survive drought and flood, but it could also extract phosphate from the soil, so Grandmother would not have to spend so much on costly fertiliser.

Grandmother’s profit rose steadily each year. She decided that, just as Super Sub1 was smarter than its predecessor, her daughter would be smarter than her. She could have put the profits toward her daughter’s dowry as her husband and his family had told her to. But she didn’t. Against their thundering disapproval she used the money to send her daughter to the agricultural college in Bhubaneshawar – the first of her family ever to finish high school, was now being sent for a college degree! Grandmother simply closed her ears to the cries that her daughter would never marry.

They were wrong. Mother married a man she met at the college. While looking after her babies, she also managed the farm accounts and read farming journals, sharing the latest news with father while the family feasted on her delicious curry and chapati. Prabhjit grew up hearing the story of the smart rice that had paid for Mother to go to college.

In Prabhjit’s teens, the winds of fortune brought more changes. One was the land reform. A new law allowed the formation of small farming corporations, up to 40 hectares in size. Prabhjit’s father took his two hectares and joined up with Grandmother’s two. It wasn’t hard to rent more blocks – many of the families had moved to the city, leaving their old folk to work the paddies. It took years to finalise the negotiations; Prabhjit recalled Father tearing his hair and moaning: “It’s just molasses, this Indian bureaucracy.” By the time she graduated from college, Father left the running of the farm to her. She took a loan on microcredit to build up the farm to its present 24 hectares – and took the wheel.

THE OTHER REVOLUTION for Prabhjit was the genetically modified seed that allowed rice to ‘fix’ its own nitrogen from the Earth. She recalled her parents’ eyes glowing as they told her about it. Like Super Sub1, this was a very clever seed. A worldwide project, funded by the legendary Lord Bill and Lady Melinda Gates, had taken nearly 50 years to develop it. As Mother loved telling the wide-eyed young Prabhjit, “these rice grains are the children of Lord Lakshmi, benevolent goddess of light, and Vishnu, the restorer”. When Prabhjit reached high school, her mother gave her the scientific explanation. The rice plants had been genetically engineered to carry the powerful photosynthetic engine of a corn plant. But they also carried the nitrogen-fixing genes of a legume. Truly magical plants, they produced rice grains that were double the size using half the amount of fertiliser.

Vegetable seeds improved too: eggplants, cauliflowers, cabbages like the family had never seen. Best of all, they could throw away the most toxic pesticides because these seeds produced their own pesticides borrowed from the genes of a species of bacteria known as Bacillus thuringiensis, or BT for short. These vegetables were so powerful at resisting pests and raising profits, they earned the name ‘Ganesh’ after the elephant-headed son of Shiva, who was also the god of good fortune. Mother said they could have had Ganesh seeds years before. She never understood why the government delayed them; BT cotton had already saved millions of cotton farmers from pesticide poisoning and raised their yields. And BT was so safe, it was the stock-in-trade for organic farmers who sprayed the bacteria directly on their plants.

Prabhjit never forgot that gleam in her parents’ eyes. And she never forgot Grandmother. She passed away when Prabhjit was 20; a shrunken 57-year-old. Now, not so far from that age herself, the realisation shook her. Grandmother withered from the backbreaking work planting rice and spraying pesticides from a perforated spout of two tin cans yoked across her neck, barefoot. She had told Prabhjit how they would come back from the spraying, sick with headaches and shakes. In her final years, she still suffered from them. Lying on pillows on the cot, she told Prabhjit her stories; the ending was always the same. Prabhjit clearly heard Grandmother’s voice: “You will be like the rice grains that grow smarter in each generation.” Grandmother, I will light the incense stick for you tomorrow and I will tell you how smart I have become, Prabhjit answered silently.

* * * * * * * *
YOU MIGHT SAY Prabhjit’s story is a dream. And you’d be right. It is the dream of plant pathologist Robert Zeigler, director of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Philippines. It’s a dream that he has spent the best part of his career trying to turn into a reality. Many of Prabhjit’s farming tools are in the development pipeline, and some have already emerged.

The flood- and drought-tolerant rice variety (named Swarna Sub1 by IRRI researchers) is already available. The variety that can mine its own phosphate from the soil (referred to as Super Swarna Sub1) is due for release in the next couple of years. It carries a gene called PSTOL1, which IRRI breeders managed to isolate from a traditional Indian rice variety that performs well in soils with low phosphate levels. Both these new rice varieties were developed through a 20-year process of shuffling genes from semi-wild or old-fashioned farmers’ rice varieties into modern high-yielding ones by conventional breeding techniques.

The next cabs off the rank will take longer. Rice that can double its production by using the supercharged photosynthetic engine that naturally belongs to a corn plant is a tough ask – but one that’s on the cards, and known as the C4 rice project. It involves retrofitting a whole assembly line of corn genes and redesigning the infrastructure of the rice plant to accept them. Another very tough ask is to ferry the genes of a legume into a cereal grass such as rice, maize or wheat, enabling the plant to ‘fix’ its own nitrogen. A crop like this would truly usher in the next Green Revolution; doubling yields but using far less fertiliser than today’s rice requires. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, enamoured of bold challenges, is funding both projects.

What’s the chance of success? I ask Zeigler. “Undoubted,” he says. “When I proposed the flood- and drought-tolerant rice project 20 years ago, I was laughed off the stage. The tools we have now for genetically tweaking plants are vastly superior.”

Not all the tools that might be available to someone like Prabhjit come from the whiteboards of IRRI. The satellite from which she downloads data traces its origin to European Space Agency Sentinel satellites, the first of which is scheduled to launch in 2013, and whose microwave beams penetrate through clouds, meaning they can provide data about rice crops in Asia throughout the cloudy monsoon season. But IRRI is developing the software to enable farmers like Prabhjit to benefit. And it won’t just enable individual farmers to maximise their market opportunities – this type of data could help prevent a food price spike, says Zeigler. “With time to adjust to a shortage, they can import ahead of time, avoiding a panic.”

Prabhjit also uses drippers to irrigate and fertilise her fields. Punching tiny holes in tubing to deliver water and fertiliser at a slow rate more than halves a crop’s water requirements. Israeli inventor Daniel Hillel won the 2012 World Food Prize for developing it. Outside water-starved Israel, the fastest adopters to date have been China and India, countries that have increased their usage around 100-fold in the past 20 years.

In 2063, Prabhjit’s world is a happy place. By and large, the Malthusian spectre that haunted the world 50 years before – that the population would outgrow its food supply – failed to materialise. The challenge, then, was to feed an anticipated extra two billion mouths using existing agricultural lands. And it’s quite a challenge. In 2013, 38% of the world’s ice-free surface area is already under the yoke of agriculture, about a third of it for cropping, the rest for grazing. This land is also being lost to erosion and salty soils, smothered by roads, houses and golf courses; and chunks of it are being carved off to grow biofuels rather than food. Add to that the threats to agriculture from climate change, declining water supplies, flattening yields for wheat and rice, dwindling sources of phosphate, rising costs of nitrogen fertiliser, poor commercial incentives for farmers – and it’s clear why many are worried that the mid-21st century will be an age of mass famine.

But in Prabhjit’s world, mass starvation has been averted – and the ecological health of the planet is improving. In 2013, agriculture is the planet’s biggest polluter. Clearing chunks of the Amazon for farming (and losing carbon sinks), burning fossil fuels to make fertiliser (using up to 1% of the world’s energy); methane released by microbes fermenting in rice paddies and belching cows; and the nitrous oxide released by overuse of fertiliser, account for 35% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The same fertiliser running off fields into waterways causes algal overgrowths, sucking oxygen out of the mouths of the world’s major rivers and creating ‘dead zones’ for fish. This and overfishing threaten the imminent collapse of the world’s fisheries.

So can we address and remediate these problems? In October 2011, scientists led by Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, published a manifesto in Nature entitled ‘Solutions for a cultivated planet’. Foley’s group offered a five-point plan to feed the planet without destroying it (see ‘Saving the world‘).

As Foley concluded in an article in Scientific American published in November 2011: “Feeding nine billion people in a truly sustainable way will be one of the greatest challenges our civilisation has ever faced. It will require the imagination, determination and hard work of countless people from all over the world. There is no time to lose.”

IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN the insight of farmers like Prabhjit’s grandmother to bring this vision to a reality. In the scenario painted here, Prabhjit is environmentally aware and government incentives encourage her to employ ‘best-practice’ techniques. For instance, she drains her fields at the midpoint of the growing season rather than the end because (as IRRI research shows) this dramatically reduces methane emissions. For her trouble, she receives a carbon credit.

Elsewhere, highly mechanised and automated megafarms are the order of the day. For a taste of what’s to come, take a look at the rain-fed wheat farms of Western Australia (WA), which stretch over tens of thousands of hectares. Here today, 500 horsepower, GPS-guided harvesters cut 25 m swathes of wheat, measuring the yield in each square metre as they go, and informing next season’s fertiliser requirements. Unskilled drivers simply need to tell the harvester to turn around when it gets to the end of the field. But it’s not hard to see an end to that requirement, says Mick Keogh, executive director of the Australian Farm Institute. Like the three-storey-high robot trucks that remotely mine the iron ore of WA, in 2063, robotic harvesters will dutifully bring in the wheat harvest.

Further north, like other countries with vast rangelands, Australia sports thriving cattle farms – because here, the beef and dairy cows graze on lands useless for cropping. Here again, genetic resources could herald a revolution. In 50 years’ time, the cows roaming the vast outback stations of Australia’s northwest won’t look terribly different, except for the tiny chips embedded in their necks to monitor their health and movements. But genetically they will be a breed apart. Improved methods of marking genes and the mapping of the cow genome will lead to breeds that easily withstand heat stress, thrive on grass and belch less methane. Meanwhile, pampered in their barns, healthy herds of dairy cows, freed of mastitis and other diseases of the past, are milked robotically, produce 50% more milk, and deliver a calf each year without birth complications.

Yes indeed, this version of 2063 is a happy place. But there is also a nightmare scenario that many experts fear is equally likely (see ‘The dark side’). Let’s hope the world instead follows Foley’s prescription. There is, indeed, no time to lose.

Elizabeth Finkel is the associate editor of COSMOS Magazine.

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SAVING THE WORLD
In 2011, a group of scientists published a bold five-point plan to meet the world’s future food security and sustainability needs.

1 Stop expanding agriculture
Land that is now covered in tropical rainforest, which is being cleared at a rate of around 5–10 million hectares annually, offers little yield when converted to agriculture. Protecting this crucial carbon sink from slash and burn agriculture for quick gains requires economic incentives such as carbon credits and market certification.

2 Close the yield gap
By bringing under-performing farms in Central America, Africa, Asia and Europe up to speed with judicious use of fertiliser, irrigation and improved seed, Foley estimates that the yield of the world’s top 16 food crops could be increased by 58%.

3 Use resources more efficiently
Employ technologies such as drippers and so-called ‘precision agriculture’ where water and fertiliser are meted out in response to the day-to-day needs of the crop.

4 Eat less grain-fed beef
Thirty-five per cent of crops are grown to feed animals, but when it comes to beef this is a terribly wasteful use of food: every kilogram of deboned steak comes at the expense of 30 kg of grain.

5 Reduce waste
Roughly 30% of food is wasted. In affluent countries, it’s mostly left uneaten on the dinner plate; in poorer countries, food spoils in the fields or in silos. The solution is to reduce portion sizes and improve storage and distribution systems. Smartphones could also help farmers reduce losses. In the past, with their crop in danger of rotting in the field, farmers were hostage to middlemen. With smartphones, they’re free to search out the best price.

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THE DARK SIDE

Overuse of fertilisers and pesticides can wreak havoc on nearby ecosystems. Credit: iStockphoto

MANY EXPERTS think food production will keep pace with population growth. What they fear is what will be done to the environment to achieve it.

The worst-case scenario sees large chunks of existing farmlands lost to erosion, salinity and urban development. The Amazon Rainforest will be lost to agriculture, accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases. Farmers will be forced to use ever-higher levels of pesticides to control disease and pest outbreaks worsened by a cooking climate. Waterways polluted by fertiliser and pesticides will cause the collapse of fisheries.

There are plenty of factors conspiring towards this scenario. Despite rising food prices, farmers continue to operate on very slim margins, holding out for that fortunate year when they reap both a bumper crop and a good price. That means they need to keep their costs as low as possible, which means shortcuts. Richard Roush, dean of land and environment at the University of Melbourne frames this problem as “the tragedy of the commons”. Farmers focus on short-term individual gain rather than the long-term common good. It’s a predicament exacerbated by low food prices. Roush and colleagues at the University of California at Davis calculated that if farmers could charge just 10% more, they could afford to use the best environmental practices.

Fixing the economic settings for farmers is a global challenge. Take Australia’s biggest grain farmer, John Nicoletti – long an icon as a successful farmer–entrepreneur. In 2011, he owned 180,000 hectares. In January 2013, it was down to 142,000 hectares and he was angling to sell a further 81,000. “There’s just not enough money in the farming game anymore,” he told Farm Weekly.

Another source of alarm is the declining investment in public sector research – the driving force for technologies that would enable a small-scale farmer like Prabhjit to farm more productively with a smaller environmental footprint. Philip Pardey, agricultural economist and director of the International Science and Technology Practices and Policy Centre at the University of Minnesota, St Paul, is worried that countries such as the U.S. and Australia have cut spending on research and development. “Australia is in trouble,” he says. “Fifty years ago it ranked eighth in the world for R&D spending; now it’s 16th.” Pardy points out that it was the investments of 50 years ago that gave us the Green Revolution and averted the widespread famine predicted in the 1960s by ecologists like Paul Ehrlich. His research shows that 50 years is about the lag time before the investment in agricultural R&D fully delivers. In 2063, when climate change and bursting populations will make dire demands of agriculture, he worries we will not have “primed the knowledge pump”. The signs are the pump is already running dry. “For years we saw rice and wheat yields rising,” he says. “Surprise, surprise; now they have almost stopped.”

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