a collection of articles about possible futures: (not by me.)
"When we try to imagine the future, we tend to look to the past for clues and extrapolate forwards. But we are living at a time of planetary change. Over the past century, humans have utterly transformed the planet on such a scale that many believe we are entering a new geological era, the Anthropocene. In recent decades we have been polluting the atmosphere and changing global climates, reducing biodiversity, re-plumbing rivers and other waterways, raising sea levels and acidifying the oceans, depleting the world's mineral and natural resources, among many other things.
Will we continue on this trajectory? Or will something happen to shift us onto a new course?
We’ve experienced similar moments before. In 1700, no one could have predicted the impact that James Watt's steam engine would have on industry, broader society and the global environment. Similarly, who would have foretold how transformative Thomas Edison's inventions, such as a commercially practical electric light bulb, would prove to be?
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to pinpoint global transformers that shifted the trajectory of this human planet, for example by spurring globalisation or city building, or by increasing the human population. I'm thinking of things like World Wars I and II, the creation of the Suez Canal, the invention of elevators, air travel, reinforced concrete, the internet, antibiotics, etc.
In August 1859, Edwin Drake, a railroad conductor-turned oil prospector, drilled into ground near Titusville, Pennsylvania, and struck black gold. It was a discovery that would change the world. The crude oil was refined primarily into clean lamp oil, which spelled the death of the highly lucrative international whaling industry – just in time to prevent extinction in a number of species. It wouldn't be long before petroleum and countless other products were made from the subterranean deposits.
Crude oil dramatically changed the way we manufacture things, transport them and generate energy. Just one gallon (3.79 litres) of crude oil contains the same energy as would take a man eight days of labour to produce. Burning oil became one of the main drivers of the international economy. It transformed desert settlements of Bedouin tribes into some of the richest cities on the planet, with sky-high buildings of marble, steel and glass, and fountains that defy the sands. Oil sped up the human world. Cars replaced horses, and planes replaced sails. Plastics allowed food and other goods to be transported and kept good for longer. But their indestructible nature means that our planet is now littered with the stuff. And burning oil releases global warming gases. Burning it on such a prodigious scale is changing the world's climate, altering monsoon patterns, melting glaciers, and acidifying the oceans. Drake could never have imagined his find would transform the world in such ways.
Giant leaps for mankind
Another example is the process invented in Germany at the beginning of the 20th Century by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. The pair came up with a way of artificially “fixing” nitrogen from the air to make ammonia. Before the Haber-Bosch process, nitrogen could only be fixed by bacteria that live in soils and the roots of plants. Because nitrogen is an essential component in all living cells, this meant that all plants and animals on Earth were limited by what could be recycled from waste organic material, or what could be taken up by plants from the bacteria. Humans experienced periodic famines and 19th-Century scientists looked far afield for precious useable nitrogen. An entire industry was set up to harvest guano – bird poo – from the coastal fringes of the Atacama Desert in South America.
In 1909, Haber worked out a way of making liquid ammonia, and the era of artificial fertilisers was born. The effect on crop production and hence population growth was immediate. The number of humans that could be fed from a hectare of land rose from 1.9 to 4.3. Half of the protein in our bodies now comes from ammonia made in the Haber process. The amount of reactive nitrogen on the planet has been increased by 120%. Great swathes of global land surface have been given over to food production and the extra people the planet now supports are transforming the world in new and unpredictable ways, far beyond what Haber and Bosch could have imagined.
But it is worth remembering that not all events or innovations turn out to be as globally transformative as predicted at the time. In 1969, Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, a “giant step” for our species. Many predicted the dawning of a new Space Age in which humans would colonise the Moon and even Mars, commuter trips would be made to extraterrestrial locations, other planets would be mined for mineral resources and Earth would be relieved of the pressures of our massive population. Yet the Space Age failed to meet those predictions. There were just six manned moon landings, the last in 1972, and it’s only in recent years that we’ve begun to see real interest in missions going back to the Moon, and beyond.
Humans proved so clever and successful that we were able to overcome almost all the environmental limitations that restricted other species to their ecological niches. The Industrial Revolution began a march towards control of the planet and its resources, which, over the past 50 years, has become truly global. Our population soared from around 10,000 individuals at the start of the Holocene, 10,000 years ago, to 7 billiontoday. It is estimated that it will pass a colossal 9 billion by 2050.
So, any watching aliens are now looking at a radically changed Earth, on which the land surface, oceanic and atmospheric chemistry, ecology and biology have been transformed by humans. (Human) scientists say Earth has entered the Anthropocene epoch – the Age of Man – because we have become the dominant geological force on our planet.
We have changed the composition of the atmosphere – which now contains more carbon dioxide molecules – and the oceans, which are more acidic because more of that carbon dioxide is dissolving into them. And, because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, we are changing the climate by melting glaciers and raising sea levels. Our atmospheric tinkering means that scientists think we have indefinitely delayed the next Ice Age.
We have changed the covering of the planet by chopping down trees (currently we fell 130,000 sq km per year, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations), rerouting rivers (we manage more than half of the planet's available freshwater) and constructing highways and cities. More than half of the world’s populationnow lives in urban areas. At least 75% of the world's land surface has been modified by humans, according to Erle Ellis, an ecologist at the University of Maryland.
Rock and toll
We are also reshaping the planet's rocky material – mining and other excavation shifts four times the amount moved naturally by glaciers and rivers. We are changing the numbers and abundance of other living species –some believe we are at the start of the world’s sixth great extinction – and the way they are distributed around our planet, by introducing invasive species and favouring some species over others. There are now more trees on farmland than in forests, for example, and if we were to weigh all of Earth’s land vertebrates, 90% of the total would be made up of humans and the animals we have domesticated, according to Prof Vaclav Smil in his book The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change.
Some of our changes are geologically profound – deforestation and the elimination and distribution of species, for example, are scarring the rocks to leave telltale evidence of our human influence for geologists to discover many thousands of years into the future. Others are immediately obvious to anyone who has looked down at our continents from the window of a aircraft and seen the patchwork of farmland monocultures where there used to be wild savannah, or the islands we have grown out of the sea off Dubai, or the mountain tops we have removed in our quest for coal. But some are more subtle and harder to see directly – the way we are changing the climate, or interfering in the nitrogen cycle, or selecting some metals but not others from the Earth's crust, for example.
We are pretty resourceful and innovative, which is why we have managed to “geoengineer” our planet to produce ever more food, to double human life expectancy in much of the world, and control freshwater sources and most other species. However, we are now faced with some planetary limitations that threaten our survival. If we are going to accommodate 9 billion humans in the next 35 years, and if those people are going to live in comfort, with enough food, water, energy and other important trappings of a liveable existence, then we are going to have to recognise these limitations and come up with innovative ways to overcome them.
In most cases, whether it is about 'peak soil', peak timber', 'peak silver', 'peak fish', 'peak oil' or 'peak freshwater', the problem is that we are using the resource faster than it can be replenished through natural processes – sometimes by a factor of thousands. The solution may be to assist the replenishment or to use less of the resource. Either way, the solution calls for a combination of clever engineering, technology and social tools.
I have spent the past few years visiting the places, wildlife and people that are experiencing the impacts of many of our planetary changes, and I have seen some incredible examples of how we humans can use our ingenuity to overcome almost any challenge.
In this column, I am going to identify the planetary limitations currently threatening us, and find out what we are doing to solve the crisis. Welcome to the frontline of the Anthropocene." http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120209-welcome-to-the-age-of-modern-man
"Backed by Texas’ top environmental officials, some of the country’s biggest industries are working against a possible crackdown on ozone, the air pollutant that afflicts North Texas.
Among their main targets is a nationwide study published in 2009 that for the first time linked long-term ozone exposure to an increased risk of premature death from respiratory causes.
Related research focusing on California, published last year, found a similar association between long-term exposure and death from ischemic heart disease, a far more widespread killer.
Numerous other studies over decades already associate short-term exposures with hospitalization or death, plus a range of lesser health effects.
“What we see with ozone is very convincing,” said Michael Jerrett, lead author of both long-term studies. He is a professor and chair of environmental health sciences at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Public Health.
The expanding evidence has serious implications for people in smoggy places like Dallas-Fort Worth. Many studies report harm at levels far below those the region sees each summer.
Only Southern California, Houston and Baltimore had worse ozone during the latest official three-year averaging period, Environmental Protection Agency figures show.
The EPA made the 2009 study a key factor in its latest assessment of ozone’s health effects, part of the run-up to a possible new national ozone standard late next year.
Industries such as coal-burning utilities, oil, gas and chemicals, manufacturers and automakers, have urged the EPA’s external scientific advisers to disregard such research." from http://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-news/20140408-industries-tceq-fight-study-linking-death-ozone.ece
"Ozone in the ozone layer filters out sunlight wavelengths from about 200 nm UV rays to 315 nm, with ozone peak absorption at about 250 nm. This ozone UV absorption is important to life, since it extends the absorption of UV by ordinary oxygen and nitrogen in air (which absorb all wavelengths < 200 nm) through the lower UV-C (200–280 nm) and the entire UV-B band (280–315 nm). The small unabsorbed part that remains of UV-B after passage through ozone causes sunburn in humans, and direct DNA damage in living tissues in both plants and animals. Ozone's effect on mid-range UV-B rays is illustrated by its effect on UV-B at 290 nm, which has a radiation intensity 350 million times as powerful at the top of the atmosphere as at the surface. Nevertheless, enough of UV-B radiation at similar frequency reaches the ground to cause some sunburn, and these same wavelengths are also among those responsible for the production ofvitamin D in humans." (wiki)
"Although ozone was present at ground level before the Industrial Revolution, peak concentrations are now far higher than the pre-industrial levels, and even background concentrations well away from sources of pollution are substantially higher. Ozone acts as a greenhouse gas, absorbing some of the infrared energy emitted by the earth. Quantifying the greenhouse gas potency of ozone is difficult because it is not present in uniform concentrations across the globe. However, the most widely accepted scientific assessments relating to climate change (e.g. the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report) suggest that the radiative forcing of tropospheric ozone is about 25% that ofcarbon dioxide." (wiki)
"There is a great deal of evidence to show that ground level ozone can harm lung function and irritate the respiratory system. Exposure to ozone and the pollutants that produce it is linked to premature death, asthma, bronchitis, heart attack, and other cardiopulmonary problems.
Long-term exposure to ozone has been shown to increase risk of death fromrespiratory illness. A study of 450,000 people living in United States cities showed a significant correlation between ozone levels and respiratory illness over the 18-year follow-up period. The study revealed that people living in cities with high ozone levels such as Houston or Los Angeles had an over 30% increased risk of dying from lung disease.
"Ozone production rises during heat waves, because plants absorb less ozone. It is estimated that curtailed ozone absorption by plants is responsible for the loss of 460 lives in the UK in the hot summer of 2006. A similar investigation to assess the joint effects of ozone and heat during the European heat waves in 2003, concluded that these appear to be additive.
"In recent decades the amount of ozone in the stratosphere has been declining mostly because of emissions of CFCs and similar chlorinated and brominated organic molecules, which have increased the concentration of ozone-depleting catalysts above the natural background." (wiki)