Mission

The Earth Policy Institute (EPI) was founded in 2001 by Lester Brown, the founder and former president of the Worldwatch Institute, to provide a plan of a sustainable future along with a roadmap of how to get from here to there. EPI works at the global level simply because no country can fully implement a Plan B economy in isolation.

EPI’s goals are (1) to provide a global plan (Plan B) for moving the world onto an environmentally and economically sustainable path, (2) to provide examples demonstrating how the plan would work, and (3) to keep the media, policymakers, academics, environmentalists, and other decision-makers focused on the process of building a Plan B economy.

Activities

People change behavior either in response to new information or new experiences. Earth Policy Institute disseminates new information to guide the process of change via its plan of a sustainable future as outlined in its Updates, Indicators, and books, the most recent of which is Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.
You can also download our Annual Report, which outlines EPI’s major accomplishments.

Books

EPI publishes its basic research in book form simply because there is a worldwide network of book publishers in all the major languages, a network that does not exist for monographs or magazines. Having books available in the world’s leading languages broadens the dissemination of its research findings. The Institute has published 7 books.

Updates, Indicators, and Book Bytes

Plan B Updates are original, four-page analyses of environmental issues ranging from worldwide advances in renewable energy to deaths from heat waves to new flows of environmental refugees.

Eco-Economy Indicators consist of the 12 trends EPI uses to measure progress toward building a Plan B world.

Book Bytes are highlights and adaptations from EPI’s books and research.

All are released electronically on EPI’s listserv and are posted on its website along with supporting data and sources for additional information.”

Source: http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/about_epi/

Barack Obama. Al Gore. John Kerry. These are the names of some of the most frequent and forceful advocates for climate action. But because of their political affiliations, all three have baggage and so their message can fall upon deaf ears when it reaches those who question the reality of climate change. Would those same climate deniers listen and change their beliefs if the messenger was not a politician but instead a member of the military, perhaps the most revered institution in the country?

I would wager that many would. Climate deniers, and those who wish to convert them, would do well to read John Broder’s New York Times article today, “Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security.” In it, Broder reports that for some time the military has been factoring in climate change into their war game scenarios. They expect that in the decades to come, global warming will cause population displacement, mass drought, and food shortages that will provide the U.S. will significant national security threats.

Writes Broder:

Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.An exercise last December at the National Defense University, an educational institute that is overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. “It gets real complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.

Changing the Frame
Climate activists have shifted their messages over the years to reflect what they viewed the American public wanted to hear a the time. The message has gone from one about far away places (“Save the Polar Bears”, “Save the Arctic”) to an economic one (“Green Jobs Now”). Sadly, no message, issue report, or organizing push has been strong enough to overcome the myriad reasons that those who oppose strong climate action put forward.

Skeptics don’t believe in the science and probably don’t spend much time sitting around reading IPCC reports. Climate change is a slow process and its invisible causes–methane, CO2, and HFC gases–don’t stir the public to take immediate action.

The time might be right for a national security message, delivered by the right spokespeople–the military. Imagine if General David Petraeus addressed the Congress on climate change. As the commander of the United States Central Command, he has the authority and position to bring great weight to the fact that we need action now. Think Limbaugh has the guts to shout him down? Think Glenn Beck would dismiss him as a loon? I doubt it. Business has come over to the side of climate action. Maybe it’s time some smart green group start to work with the national security crowd to amplify a message that must be heard now.

Source: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/08/climate-action-military.php

Scientists Refute Argument Of Climate Skeptics

ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2009) — Scientists at the GKSS Research Centre of Geesthacht and the University of Bern have investigated the frequency of warmer than average years between 1880 and 2006 for the first time. The result: the observed increase of warm years after 1990 is not a statistical accident.

Between 1880 and 2006 the average global annual temperature was about 15°C. However, in the years after 1990 the frequency of years when this average value was exceeded increased.

The GKSS Research Centre asks: is it an accident that the warmest 13 years were observed after 1990, or does this increased frequency indicate an external influence?

Calculating the likelihood

With the help of the so called “Monte-Carlo-Simulation“ the coastal researchers Dr. Eduardo Zorita and Professor Hans von Storch at the GKSS-Research Centre together with Professor Thomas Stocker from the University of Bern estimated that it is extremely unlikely that the frequency of warm record years after 1990 could be an accident and concluded that it is rather influenced by a external driver.

The fact that the 13 warmest years since 1880 could have occurred by accident after 1990 corresponds to a likelihood of no more than 1:10,000.

These likelihood can be illustrated by using the game of chance “heads or tails”: the likelihood is the same as flipping a coin and getting 14 heads in a row.

Climate is more complicated than a game

“In order to understand and statistically analyse the climate system and its interaction between the ocean, land, atmosphere and human activity, the comparison with a game of chance is no longer sufficient.

The natural sequence of warm and cold years no longer functions according to the simple principle of ‘zero or one,’” explains the GKSS scientist Dr. Eduardo Zorita about the challenges of his calculations, because the climate system possesses some inertia.

An example: After a warm year milder years tend to follow, since the oceans have stored some heat. This natural inertia must also be included in the calculations.

“Our study is pure statistical nature and can not attribute the increase of warm years to individual factors, but is in full agreement with the results of the IPCC that the increased emission of greenhouse gases is mainly responsible for the most recent global warming“, says Zorita in summary.

Sydney, Nov 6 (AFP) Powerful climate change skeptics were “holding the world to ransom”, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said today as he warned of fear campaigns designed to derail global talks.

Rudd said naysayers were active in every country as the world approached the United Nations’ climate summit in Copenhagen in December.

“They are a minority. They are powerful. And invariably they are driven by vested interests,” he said.

Rudd said it was difficult to move towards a global agreement in the face of those who denied climate change was caused by human activity, those who refused to act on the evidence, or who wanted other countries to act first.

“As we approach Copenhagen, these three groups of climate skeptics are quite literally holding the world to ransom,” he told policy think-tank the Lowy Institute in Sydney.

“La Niña conditions are favorable for hurricanes because they lead to less wind shear in the tropical Atlantic,” said Michael E. Mann, professor of meteorology, Penn State. “When combined with warm tropical Atlantic ocean temperatures, a requirement for hurricanes to form, conditions become ideal for high levels of activity.”

During an El Niño, the more familiar half of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), there is more wind shear in the Caribbean and fewer hurricanes. The low Atlantic hurricane activity so far during this current season is likely related to the mitigating effects of an emerging El Niño event.

“Hurricane activity since the mid-1990s is the highest in the historical record, but that only goes back a little more than a century and is most accurate since the advent of air travel and satellites in recent decades,” said Mann. “It is therefore difficult to assess if the recent increase in hurricane activity is in fact unusual.”

Mann, working with Jonathan D. Woodruff, assistant professor of geosciences, University of Massachusetts; Jeffrey P. Donnelly, associate scientist, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Zhihua Zhang, postdoctoral assistant, Penn State, reconstructed the past 1,500 years of hurricanes using two independent methods. They report their results in the Aug. 13 issue of Nature.

One estimate of hurricane numbers is based on sediment deposited during landfall hurricanes. The researchers looked for coastal areas where water breached the normal boundaries of the beaches and overwashed into protected basins. Samples from Puerto Rico, the U.S. Gulf coast, the Southern U.S. coast, the mid-Atlantic coast and the southeastern New England coast were radiocarbon dated and combined to form a history of landfall hurricanes.

The other method used a previously developed statistical model for predicting hurricane activity based on climate variables. They applied the model to paleoclimate reconstructions of tropical Atlantic sea surface temperature, the history of ENSO and another climate pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which is related to the year-to-year fluctuations of the jet stream. Warm waters are necessary for hurricane development, ENSO influences the wind shear and the NAO controls the path of storms, determining whether or not they encounter favorable conditions for development.

The researchers compared the results of both hurricane estimates, taking into account that the sediment measurements only record landfall hurricanes, but that the relationship between landfall hurricanes and storms that form and dissipate without ever hitting land can be estimated.

Both hurricane reconstructions indicate similar overall patterns and both indicate a high period of hurricane activity during the Medieval Climate Anomaly around AD 900 to 1100.

“We are at levels now that are about as high as anything we have seen in the past 1,000 years,” said Mann.

The two estimates of hurricane numbers do not match identically. The researchers note that they do not know the exact force of a storm that will breach the beach area and deposit sediments. They are also aware that the relationship between landfalling hurricanes and those that remain at sea is not uniform through all time periods. However, they believe that key features like the medieval peak and subsequent lull are real and help to validate our current understanding of the factors governing long-term changes in Atlantic hurricane activity.

One thing the estimates show is that long periods of warm Atlantic ocean conditions produce greater Atlantic hurricane activity.

“It seems that the paleodata support the contention that greenhouse warming may increase the frequency of Atlantic tropical storms,” said Mann. “It may not be just that the storms are stronger, but that there are there may be more of them as well.”

The National Science Foundation and the Bermuda Institute for Ocean Sciences supported this work.

Source: http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/research/Nature09psu.html

Caribbean coral reefs are dying from disease at an alarming rate, according to scientists who monitor the ocean ecosystems.

Researchers say they have yet to gauge the full extent of the die-off. But at monitoring sites in the U.S. Virgin Islands more than 90 percent of the coral suffered bleaching.

Caribbean coral was weakened by unprecedented bleaching events following record warm water temperatures last year.

Bleaching occurs when heat stress causes corals to expel their symbiotic, food-producing algae known as zooxanthellae, turning the reef’s skeleton ghostly white.

While coral can recover from bleaching events, many weakened Caribbean reefs are now succumbing to a fatal coral disease known as white plague.

Average water temperatures in the eastern Caribbean last September were the highest they have been in a century, said Mark Eakin of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Coral reefs in the Caribbean experienced more heat stress in 2005 than the past 20 years combined, said Eakin, who coordinates NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch satellite monitoring program.

“This was the most devastating bleaching event that we’ve seen in the Caribbean,” he said.

Record Bleaching

Jeff Miller, a National Park Service fisheries biologist based at Virgin Islands National Park in St. John, says the bleaching episode is the most extensive he’s seen in 21 years of marine studies.

In Panama 70 percent of the corals at monitoring sites showed signs of bleaching, according to NOAA.

In Mexico 40 percent showed bleaching, while in Texas coral bleaching at sample sites ranged from 35 to 100 percent.

Reefs along the Florida Keys were mostly spared, thanks to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which circulated cooler waters into the area, Eakins says.

But reefs in the eastern Caribbean, including the U.S. and British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, were the most severely affected.

Last fall marine biologists in Puerto Rico reported that 42 coral species on some reefs had bleached.

More recently, Miller says, colleagues there have seen coral colonies more than 800 years old die in a matter of weeks.

Miller says a colleague diving on a reef 10 miles (16 kilometers) from St. John was surprised to see die-offs caused by the disease occurring as far down as 90 feet (27 meters).

“This mortality is occurring on many different species there, the very slow-growing, major reef-building species,” he said. “And that’s what makes it so dramatic and so alarming.”

Caroline Rogers is a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) marine ecologist who has spent 22 years on St. John.

She said she recently dove near a 5-foot (1.5-meter) coral colony in Mayo Bay only to discover that “it is entirely dead now.”

The sight was shocking, she says. “That coral has undoubtedly been there for hundreds of years, and it died over the course of several weeks.”

“Corals live really close to their upper thermal limit, so small increases in temperature can have very devastating consequences,” she said.

Rogers says the rapid die-off is particularly distressing, because some reef-building corals grow only the width of a dime in a year.

Declining Coral

Biologists fear the die-offs will further degrade coral reefs in the Caribbean, a region that by one estimate has already lost 80 percent of its coral cover over the last three decades.

“You’re down to the point where you really can’t afford to lose that much [more],” NOAA’s Eakin said.

Miller, the Park Service fisheries biologist, said that “the trickle-down effect of this [bleaching and die-off] is pretty devastating.”

The loss of living coral reefs, which act as nurseries for countless fish and marine species, will adversely impact fisheries and biodiversity, Miller says.

“If the reefs go away, these fish populations are irrevocably changed.”

“[The reefs'] state of health is not good,” said Nancy Knowlton, a marine biology professor at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

“Reefs have collapsed catastrophically just in the three decades that I’ve been studying them in many places,” she said.

Knowlton, who also directs the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps, says different factors negatively impact reefs in different places.

In addition to large-scale threats such as coral disease, reefs suffer localized threats such as pollution runoff and damage caused by dynamite, boat anchors, and recreational divers.

Miller and other resource managers say local impacts are highly destructive and that regulating them may offer the best hope for protecting the world’s remaining coral reefs in the near future.

Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0406_060406_coral_2.html

Tainted African Dust Clouds Harm U.S., Caribbean Reefs

Coral reefs in the United States and the Caribbean may be under siege—from a surprising source half a world away.

Scientists say tons of dust from Africa‘s arid Sahara and Sahel regions could be polluting oceans in the Caribbean and southeastern U.S.

The dusty clouds carry contaminants like metals, pesticides and microorganisms—potentially disastrous news for coral reefs and other marine animals already stressed by warming waters.

“We’re trying to actually look at what is in these African dust air masses when the get over to the Caribbean,” said Virginia “Ginger” Garrison, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in St. Petersburg, Florida, who studies how the dust travels.

“We’re at the baby-step stages of trying to see how this dust and this stew of things may be affecting organisms—including humans—in downwind areas.”

Something in the Air

Air-quality data from a network of sampling sites have revealed intriguing results, Garrison and colleagues said recently at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

For instance, Caribbean air samples during African dust events may hold two to three times as many microorganisms, such as bacteria and fungi, as samples taken from the same spot during other periods.

In Florida the Africa-influenced air conditions sometimes deteriorate below U.S. air-quality standards.

Air-quality testing in Mali, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Trinidad and Tobago has also revealed traces of pesticides, including DDE—a breakdown product of DDT, which is still used as an insecticide in some African countries.

Pesticides are of particular concern to coral reefs because they can interfere with the tiny animals’ reproduction, fertilization, or immune function.

These contaminants were highest in Mali and lower in the downwind areas of the Americas. Six pesticides were found at each one of the test sites, Garrison said.

“And there’s been very, very little work that has been done on the concentrations of any of these pesticides or PCBs [and how] that would impair coral or coral reef organisms,” she added.

Andrew Negri, of the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, co-authored one of the few previous studies on pesticides and coral.

“The pesticides associated with African dust are primarily insecticides. These can affect the coral host directly,” Negri said.

“We have found that two of the identified insecticides, chlorpyrifos and endosulfan, can reduce the settlement and attachment of coral larvae to the ocean floor at very low concentrations.

“I would be particularly concerned if storms containing insecticide-contaminated dust were to occur upwind of coral reefs around spawning time,” he said.

Winds of Change

Atmospheric systems such as the Africa-Americas pathway have functioned for thousands of years.

A similar system delivers Asian dust to the western United States, where it accounts for up to an estimated 40 percent of local air particles.

In recent times, however, humans have caused some significant changes.

Desertification and changing land-use patterns can put more dust into the air. Industrialization, pesticide use, waste burning, and other practices have produced air pollutants that ride with that dust to far-flung locales.

But the question of just where air “originates” is tricky, experts say. Traceable substances such as pollen can provide clues to where contaminants come from.

But in Garrison’s view, mass mixing around the globe means that we all experience a single, large air system.

“I can watch a dust air mass [via] satellite coming out of Africa, across the Caribbean, and into the eastern U.S., and all of a sudden it peters out,” she explained.

“But the air mass is still moving with some dust into the northeast[ern] U.S., where it mixes with a pollution cloud. Then it goes over the North Atlantic to Europe, picks up a bit of their pollution cloud, and then goes back to Africa. So where did this stuff come from?”

Garrison believes that while certain contaminants may be linked to specific areas, such as the African pesticides, no one region is entirely to blame for air-quality issues.

“We’re all responsible,” she said. “We all have to watch what we’re putting into the air.”

Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/07/080714-africa-clouds_2.html

Summary: Desertification, exacerbated by global warming, has the power to ruin the domiciles and livelihoods of millions. Rising rates of infant mortality, agricultural destruction, and even the spread of infectious diseases are some of the lovely complications we can look forward to thanks to the climate crises.

Date: 17-Jun-05
Country: NORWAY
Author: Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

“Desertification has emerged as a global problem affecting everyone,” said Zafar Adeel, assistant director of the UN University’s water academy and a lead author of a report drawing on the work of 1,360 scientists in 95 nations.

Two billion people live in drylands vulnerable to desertification, ranging from northern Africa to swathes of central Asia, he told Reuters. And storms can lift dust from the Sahara Desert, for instance, and cause respiratory problems for people as far away as North America.

Over-grazing and over-planting of crops, swelling human populations and misuse of irrigation were contributing to desertification, the report said. It estimated that 10-20 percent of drylands were already degraded.

Global warming, widely blamed on human emissions of heat-trapping gases from cars, factories and power plants, was likely to exacerbate the problems in coming decades by triggering more floods, droughts and heatwaves.

“Growing desertification worldwide threatens to swell by millions the number of poor forced to seek new homes and livelihoods,” according to the report, part of a Millennium Ecosystem Assessment led by UN agencies and other groups.

“Desertification is potentially the most threatening ecosystem change impacting livelihoods of the poor,” it said.

The report said 41 percent of the world’s land area was dryland, including most of Australia, the western part of North America and much of the Andean region of South America.

DUST WORSENS POVERTY

Desertification meant increasing health problems linked to dust, reduced farm production and poverty.

Infant mortality in drylands in developing nations averaged 54 children per 1,000 live births in 2000, double the rate in other poor regions and 10 times the rate in industrial nations.

“An increase in desertification-related dust storms is widely considered to be a cause of ill-health — fever, coughing, sore eyes — during the dry season,” it said.

And dust from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia could affect people as far away as Japan or Hawaii. Some scientists estimate that a billion tonnes of dust can be lifted from the Sahara region into the atmosphere every year.

Dust particles can also carry bacteria and fungi. Dust-borne microrganisms from Africa were believed to have damaged coral reefs in the Caribbean, said Uriel Safriel, another of the report’s lead authors.

“Bedouins in Israel are known to be infected by spores of fungi and bacteria transported by dust,” he told Reuters. Some dust carries toxins like pesticides from around the Aral Sea.

And dust storms from Africa can damage plants’ ability to grow as far away as Florida by muting the sunlight. African dust, however, can also carry nutrients and is credited with helping forests to survive in the Amazon.

The report said that better management of crops, more careful irrigation and strategies to provide non-farming jobs for people living in drylands could help mute problems. But it was easier to prevent desertification than to reverse it.

The United States, for instance, failed fully to solve the 1930s Dust Bowl — caused by a combination of intensive farming and drought in states including Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma. The problems resurfaced in the 1950s.

© Thomson Reuters 2005 All rights reserved

Source: http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/31278/story.htm

Millions at risk in expanding dust bowls

NICHOLAS SCHOON, Environment Correspondent