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Posted: 07/26/2013 3:36 pm EDT  |  Updated: 07/26/2013 3:40 pm EDT

R583 trillion Arctic time bomb

July 27 2013 at 12:19pm
By STEVE CONNOR

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The average thickness of sea ice has fallen by a half, and further melting risks the release of methane gas.

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The sudden release from the melting Arctic of vast quantities of methane – a greenhouse gas at least 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – is an “economic time bomb” that could explode at a cost of $60 trillion (R583 trillion) to the global economy, a study has concluded.

A scientific assessment of the costs associated with the release of Arctic methane into the atmosphere has found that the financial consequences to the world would almost equal the entire global economic output for a single year.

Scientists and economists said that the release of the methane, trapped for thousands of years beneath the frozen permafrost of the Arctic, is one of the most dangerous possible “feedback” consequences of global warming, a process which has seen sea ice diminish by more than a third since the 1970s.

Using the same computer models employed by the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, the researchers found that the effects on the global climate of a relatively sudden methane release over a decade or so could be catastrophic in terms of rising sea levels, coastal flooding, extreme weather and drought effects on crops.

“This is an economic time bomb that at this stage has not been recognised,” said Professor Gail Whiteman of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, who said researchers worked from “an incredibly compelling set of data”.

“Global leaders and the World Economic Forum and International Monetary Fund need to pay much more attention to this. The mean impacts of just this one effect approaches the $70 trillion value of the world economy in 2012,” said Whiteman, lead author of the study published in Nature.

The study used an economic model of the effects of climate change to evaluate the costs of the extra greenhouse gas emissions on sea level, temperature, flood risk, health and extreme weather. The researchers ran the model 10 000 times and came to the average cost of $60 trillion, mostly borne over this century but also the next.

Estimates of how much methane could be released from the North Pole were based on joint Russian-American expeditions to the East Siberian Sea, where scientists have measured vast plumes of methane bubbling to the sea surface from underground deposits trapped beneath permafrost which extends under the sea because the continental shelf here is relatively shallow.

Russian scientists have calculated that there may be as much as 50 billion tons of methane locked away beneath the permafrost of the East Siberian Sea.

The scientists say methane is about 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period, and its sudden release could change the global climate significantly faster than current predictions.

For instance, a massive pulse of methane could bring forward, by between 15 and 35 years, the date by which average temperatures exceed the “safe” limit of 2ºC above pre-industrial levels. This limit would be reached by 2035 if nothing is done to curb greenhouse gas or 2040 if emissions are lowered, the study found.

“We calculate that the costs of a melting Arctic will be huge, because the region is pivotal to the functioning of Earth systems such as oceans and the climate,” the researchers said.

“Much of the cost will be borne by developing countries, which will face extreme weather, poorer health and lower agricultural production as Arctic warming affects climate. All nations will be affected, not just those in the far north, and all should be concerned about changes.”

The Independent revealed in 2008 that millions of tons of methane are being emitted each summer in the East Siberian Sea where the ice has receded. As the sea ice retreats, the water beneath begins to warm and the seabed permafrost melts, said Professor Peter Wadhams, an Arctic ice specialist at Cambridge University who was part of the study. “We are looking at a big effect, possibly a catastrophic effect on global climate that has been a consequence of the extremely fast sea ice retreat we’ve seen in recent years,” Wadhams said.

“We have an area of the world that used to be covered with sea ice all the year round but which is now, in the summer months, becoming ice free,” he said.

“As long as sea ice was around in the summer the ocean underneath was kept to a temperature of 0ºC or less… but as soon as the ice is removed it exposes the ocean to intense radiation and the water warms up.”

METHANE MELTDOWN

THE CAUSES…

Sea ice

Satellites have recorded a dramatic decline in the extent of the floating sea ice in the Arctic, where the loss has accelerated rapidly in recent years. Submarine measurements suggest that the average thickness of sea ice has fallen by a half. A rapid break up of sea ice in the summer months could occur within the next decade.

Permafrost

The permanently frozen tundra of the Arctic is melting rapidly. During summer months, vast areas of the Siberian permafrost become open pools of bog and water. As permafrost melts, methane is released from deeper layers, especially from the sub-seabed permafrost of the East Siberian Sea.

Greenland ice sheet

The ice sheet covering Greenland is 3km thick in places and it will take many centuries before it disappears. But last year Nasa recorded temporary summer melting over about 97 percent of the ice sheet’s surface; and melting ice is less reflective, leading to more heat absorption and therefore more melting.

…AND THE CONSEQUENCES

Extreme weather

Superstorm Sandy, the recent floods in Germany and the extreme heat-waves in France in 2003 and in Moscow in 2010 are all examples of the sort of weather extremes that are predicted to increase in frequency in a warmer world. The economic and health costs of extreme weather are incalculable. Costs from superstorm Sandy are estimated to be in the range of $25bn (R243bn), second only to the estimated costs of Hurricane Katrina, which produced the most expensive storm damage in recent history.

Sea levels

The rate of average sea-level rise has increased in recent years, mostly as a result of thermal expansion caused by warmer oceans, but also because of melting mountain glaciers and polar ice sheets.

About 10 million people a year are affected by coastal flooding, and that figure is likely to triple, even without further rises in sea level, as more people migrate to coastal megacities, such as Dhaka in Bangladesh.

Sea-level rise is one of the most important economic issues of the modern era given that in Europe alone some 70 million people live near the coastline, where assets are worth between £500bn and £1 000bn.

Desertification

Many areas of the developing world, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa such as the semi-arid Sahel, are already under extreme water stress, making crop cultivation extremely precarious.

In a warmer world, scientists expect these dry areas to become drier, making farming impossible and causing the mass migration of people who cannot grow their own food or raise their own livestock. – The Independent

You’re heading to Berlin. It’s a short city-break, so no business hotel. You fancy getting off the beaten track, but where to stay? No problem: just log on and browse the listings. From Airbnb and VRBO to Love Home Swap and HouseTrip, there’s been an explosion in peer-to-peer rental services over recent years. “Sunny Studio in Prenzlauer Berg, £42 per night”. Click, book, sorted.

Only, now the regulator wants in on the game. Berlin’s lawmakers are currently weighing up a bill that would outlaw short-term rentals, which are blamed for pushing up living costs. New York is one step ahead. Recent rule changes ban residents from renting rooms for less than 30 days. This ‘illegal hotels law’ gained prominence in May when an Airbnb host was fined $2,400 for renting out his extra room to a Russian visitor.

The eye of the regulator is homing in on other areas of the so-called ‘sharing economy’ too. In the UK, for instance, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) is currently looking to set rules for peer-to-peer lenders such as Zopa, Funding Circle and RateSetter. Job outsourcing outfits such as TaskRabbit are gaining the attention of labour regulators as well.

‘Collaborative businesses’ (as they are also know) have enjoyed a relatively easy ride from lawmakers so far. The fleet-of-foot entrepreneurs who are driving the sector insist this is helping them to experiment, to innovate and, ultimately, to grow. That could be about to change.

Regulatory radar

Why the regulators’ sudden interest? Three main reasons. First is scale. The rule enforcers are beginning to twig just how big the collaborative marketplace is becoming.

Ryan Levitt, PR director at online holiday rental service HouseTrip, recalls how owners of holiday flats used to post ads in their local supermarket. “This [the sharing economy] isn’t new … but it’s exploded. It’s no longer the supermarket wall anymore. It has global reach”, he observes.

Rhydian Lewis, chief executive of RateSetter, concurs. In January 2012, his industry approached the FSA to discuss setting up a potential regulatory framework. The financial regulator wasn’t interested, he explains: “They said we were too small.” RateSetter is now issuing 8m new loans every month. “Now they’ve seen the growth and say, ‘yes, we do think it needs to be regulated.”

Another reason is cash. As collaborative start-ups begin to monetise, governments smell taxable revenue. It all boils down to money for the public purse, argues HouseTrip’s Levitt. .”

Last but not least, there’s the consumer to consider. Peer-to-peer platforms essentially provide a means for people to exchange services between themselves. But what if the Prenzlauer Berg’s studio turns out to be infested with cockroaches? Their contractual standing may be fragile, but consumers still need an element of legal protection, regulators say.

“Politicians are terrified of weakening the existing bricks and mortar-type regulation in a way that allows cowboys or fraudsters …to get at consumers currently protected by regulation”, notes Kevin Barrow, a partner at law firm Osbourne Clarke.

It’s not just consumers either. The freewheeling nature of peer-to-peer transactions mean the provider is often as exposed as the consumer. Back to the Prenzlauer Berg studio: what if the guest smashes the window? Suddenly the sharing economy looks slightly less sunny.

Reticence for rules

The industry’s response is predictably cautious. Like the typical go-getting entrepreneurs that they are, none want burdensome regulation.

The real purists in the movement argue that true collaborative firms operate primarily through bartering and exchange, with little or no money passing hands. In short, there’s not a whole lot to tax.

A good example is BlaBla. The lift-sharing service connects private car owners with passengers who are travelling to the same destination. The passenger gives money towards the fuel costs, but no profit is generated.

“The government is saying, ‘we want a share of the cake’, but there is no cake. It’s just that passengers and drivers are helping each other with the cake”, explains Vivian Schick, BlaBla’s head of community.

Regarding consumer protection, industry leaders maintain that a combination of verification and reviews weed out the worst examples of poor service and malpractice.

Take the house exchange service Love Home Swap. All users have to provide a range of personal data, which is then independently verified. Internet-based video messaging service Skype is also embedded within the company’s website, so participants can “look into the whites of each other’s eyes” before agreeing to any transaction.

Reviews play a similar role. The success or failure of collaborative businesses revolves around endorsements from users. That goes for negative reviews too, says HouseTrip’s Levitt. “It has to stay up there otherwise you completely lose the trust of users”, he says, adding that people must have stayed in the property to review it (unlike with TripAdviser).

He admits that the process isn’t “fail safe”. Consumers are naturally quicker to complain rather than compliment, for example. Furthermore, some review systems are “riddled with gaming”, he notes. The Prenzlauer Berg studio might have been great in reality, for instance, but the renter could post a bad review to prompt a price reduction.

A final argument against regulatory interference centres on market entrance. The beauty of online collaborative marketplaces is that they cost very little to set up. Peer-to-peer lenders probably need the most up-front investment, largely due to the loan guarantees required. RateSetter’s Lewis puts the figure at around £1m. That’s peanuts compared to a traditional bank, where a typical guarantee is likely to be closer to, say, £1bn. Changing the rules could shrink this “seismic” difference, he fears.

The trust test

Not all disagree that regulation is a necessarily bad thing. Many collaborative companies are currently operating in legal grey zones. “Internet-age businesses in bricks-and-mortar regulation” is how John Davidson-Kelly, a commercial partner with Osbourne Clarke, puts it. Potentially, this could leave their businesses caught unintentionally, but harmfully, within an existing law.

Davidson-Kelly’s is for collaborative start-ups to engage early with regulators to design appropriate rules and frameworks now, as the market is taking shape. That’s precisely the tack being adopted by the peer-to-peer lending sector. The Peer-to-Peer Finance Association, the sector’s nascent trade body, has proposed an eight-point framework, with requirements such as having provisions for bankruptcy.

In the final analysis, the sharing economy rests on trust. Regulation can help, but it’ll never be the whole answer. The formula for winning real trust, according to Lewis, is in fact far simpler: “Say what you’re going to do, and then do it.” That’s beyond any regulator, however savvy.

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Few environmentalists feel any fondness for the oil palm, with its connections to deforestation in the tropics. But the waxy orange pods the tree sprouts in vivid bunches generate 45 percent of the globe’s edible oil, and consuming this incredibly versatile product is almost unavoidable, for it goes into everything from chocolate and peanut butter, to biscuits and cereal. The debate over how to turn palm oil into a sustainable crop has consequently been a priority for some time.

Now, a duo of papers just published in Nature moves a step in that direction, suggesting that breeders could further boost oil palm yields, and in that way significantly reduce the competition between rainforests and palm oil plantations around the world.

In one of the two papers, the research team has made a fully sequenced palm oil genome available to the public for the very first time. But it’s the second, linked, paper that has sparked the most interest with its more specific discovery of a gene, called SHELL, that gives rise to the most productive and commercially valuable kinds of oil palm fruits.

Environmental concern motivated the research, says Rajinder Singh, an author on the paper and leader of the genomics group for the Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB), the government entity that oversees the industry in Malaysia and which funded the research. “The first thing was to try and produce more oil palms with existing land,” he says. “The idea is not to encroach in new areas.”

Singh explains that the discovery equips farmers in the tropics with the ability to identify and plant only the most productive seeds, in turn reducing the pressure to expand into virgin rainforest. “It has implications in three continents.”

The African oil palm is the primary source of palm oil globally, and its domestication in Southeast Asia, South America, and West Africa now drives the industry. The trees produce three kinds of fruit—dura, pisifera, and tenera, the latter being the perfect hybrid of the other two, because it yields the most oil.

These plump ochre rounds are a farmer’s gold, producing 30 percent more oil than other types. Breeders try to control the output of tenera-yielding seeds by manually cross-pollinating the most suitable dura and pisifera plants. But getting a field that teems with tenera is still a challenge, because natural pollinators intervene.

Wind, birds, and insects can result in uncontrolled ‘contamination’—which just means that a dura plant’s pollen gets crossed with another dura for instance, and gives rise to plants that won’t produce the much sought-after tenera fruits. So while manual crossover works for the most part, “there’s an error rate associated with it that varies a lot, but it’s pretty high,’ says Robert Martienssen, a plant geneticist and author on the paper, who lectures at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

Usually, farmers have to wait upwards of five years until palm oil plants bear fruiting bunches to figure out if they’re going to yield the desired tenera pods. Knowing the SHELL gene that triggers the production of these fruits, however, gives breeders a way to test things first.

“If you screen at the nursery stage you can select what you want to field plant,” Singh explains. Screening would work much the same way as a genetic test on a human. “Immediately with our tools you can check which are the seeds of the type you want,” adds Ravigadevi Sambanthamurthi, head of the Advanced Biotechnology and Breeding Center at the MPOB.

These fruits of the oil palm shows the Dura fruit on the left and the Tenera fruit on the right. Tenera fruits yield 30 percent more oil per fruit than Dura fruits. Photograph: Malaysian Palm Oil BoardThat puts years back on the clock, and gives farmers a sure way to increase production. “Now with proper quality control we might have contamination of less than ten percent,” Sambanthamurthi says. Currently, plantations in Malaysia yield four tons of oil per hectare per year. The research could go some way toward achieving the goal of six tons by 2020.

But talk of palm oil expansion raises hackles. Many people hear the phrase and mentally switch to the iconic orangutan, and for good reason, since forest clearance for plantations in Indonesia especially has resulted in death and displacement in orangutan populations.

Palm oil has become synonymous with illegal logging, and slash and burn tactics that leave virgin forest devastated. There are also allegations of worker abuse on plantations, and the destruction of indigenous peoples’ livelihoods.

Viewing the entire palm oil industry as one ungoverned force, however, springs from “misinformation,” says Choo Yuen May, the director general of the MPOB. In Malaysia “more than 50 percent of the land is [still] under forest cover,” she says. The government there has held a pledge since 1992 to maintain that 50 percent, and plantations are only supposed to expand onto land that had previously been cleared for crops like cocoa or rubber.

Plantations also generate income for thousands of workers. “It’s an avenue for poverty reduction…we cannot forget that there are people out there who are hungry,” Sambanthamurthi argues.

And ultimately, palm oil crops only use up five percent of total land area farmed for oil crops globally—yet they produce almost half of the world’s edible oil. But when they do infringe on natural habitat, it happens to be tropical rainforest, symbolic of the globe’s diversity and a plethora of charismatic species.

Palm oil remains contentious, yet its advance is inevitable. And mapping the genome is not going to solve the problem absolutely. “Our ultimate goal was to reduce the rainforest footprint; the damage that is done by these plantations,” says Martienssen. “But biology can only do so much. Policy has to be a big part of the equation.”

Speaking from the World Resources Institute (WRI) in a statement via email, Nigel Sizer, the Institute’s Global Forest Initiative director, said, “Increasing the productivity of existing oil palm plantations through better plants is promising, but the real issue is that we need better protections for forests and better alternatives for producers to grow their businesses.” Future standards should require that palm oil plantations only expand onto land that is already degraded instead of into untouched forest, he went on to say.

For Martienssen, the solution lies in tightening regulations, but also in motivating farmers with the practical solutions that this new research affords.

In the future, governments “will be able to offer farmers, and especially small holders, seeds that have much more predictable yields. The way I think about that is that that would be a strong incentive for those farmers to obey the law,” he says. “As much as possible you want the farmer to voluntarily take up those policies.”

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