[✔️] Jan 5, 2024 Global Warming News | Asia not prepared, Not rogue wave, Grief extinctions, Bacon and eggs, Livestock industry, Voles, Evolution stops humans, 2000 Al Gore

[Richard Pauli]

/*January*//*5, 2024*/

/[ CNBC - news of Asia ]/
*Climate change has forced millions to flee their homes — and Asia is 
‘not prepared’*
PUBLISHED WED, JAN 3 2024
Chelsea Ong
*KEY POINTS*

      * As the number of climate disasters increase, more people are
        also being forced to flee their homes, especially in Asia.
      * A record 32.6 million internal displacements were associated
        with disasters in 2022 — more than the 28.3 million displaced by
        conflict and violence that same year.
      * Four of the top five countries with the highest number of new
        internal displacements due to disasters in 2022 were in Asia.

As the number of climate disasters increase, more people are being 
forced to flee their homes, especially in Asia.

A record 32.6 million internal displacements were associated with 
disasters in 2022 — that’s 41% higher than the annual average of the 
past decade, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. 
It was far more than the 28.3 million people displaced by conflict and 
violence that same year.

In particular, four of the top five countries with the highest number of 
new internal displacements due to disasters in 2022 were in Asia, said 
the IDMC. Pakistan had the highest number at 8.2 million, followed by 
the Philippines at 5.5 million and China at 3.6 million.

The situation is set to get worse.

According to a 2021 World Bank report, climate change could force 216 
million people across six regions to move within their countries by 2050.
*South Asia most at risk*
In the region, South Asia is likely to have the most people displaced by 
climate change due to the density of its populations and its 
vulnerability to the effects of climate change, he added. In particular, 
he noted that Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan are likely to be the 
most affected.

According to the World Economic Forum, 10% to 18% of South Asia’s GDP is 
at risk due to climate disasters. This is at about thrice the risk North 
America faces and 10 times more than Europe.

Climate change driven internal displacement has severe economic 
repercussions for the host country, said Thomas.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/04/climate-change-has-displaced-millions-in-pakistan-china-and-india.html 




/[No, it was NOT a rogue wave -- it was the new changes to our ocean 
waves ]/
*Did a rogue wave actually hit California? | About That*
CBC News
Jan 3, 2024
A massive wave slammed Ventura Beach in California last week, sending 
eight people to hospital. But was it actually a rogue wave? About That 
producer Lauren Bird breaks down the science of rogue waves and why 
they’re so unpredictable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcL2iMO8HiU



/[ Sad warning: extinct and endangered species  ]/
*‘Grief is a rational response’: the 21 US species declared extinct this 
year*
Hawaii hardest hit by loss of eight birds, with an Ohio catfish, a 
Pacific fruit bat and eight freshwater mussels also disappearing

Maanvi Singh
@maanvissingh
Fri 29 Dec 2023
Hawaii hardest hit by loss of eight birds, with an Ohio catfish, a 
Pacific fruit bat and eight freshwater mussels also disappearing

The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, a small black and yellow bird with glossy feathers and 
a haunting song, was the last surviving member of the Hawaiian 
honeyeaters. This year, it was officially declared extinct.

The ōʻō was one of 21 species that the US Fish and Wildlife Service 
removed from the endangered species list in 2023 because they had 
vanished from the wild. Gone is the little Mariana fruit bat – also 
known as the Guam flying fox – and the bridled white-eye, which was once 
one of the most common birds on that island. So too, are the Scioto 
madtom, a diminutive, whiskered catfish that lived in Ohio, and the 
Bachman’s warbler, which summered in the US south and wintered in Cuba. 
Eight freshwater mussels in the south-east are officially extinct, as 
are eight Hawaiian birds.
The delisting, which was finalised in November after two years of study 
and consideration, came as no surprise to biologists and 
conservationists. Many of these species had not been seen in decades. 
But the announcement was a sobering reminder that the climate crisis and 
habitat destruction are accelerating an extinction crisis that threatens 
2 million species globally.

For the scientists and environmentalists who have been working to 
protect these species, the delisting has been a moment to mourn – and to 
galvanise. “It’s a horrible tragedy,” said the ecologist and author Carl 
Safina. “And I think it is a breach of our moral guardrails.”...
- -
Global heating has also fueled extreme weather, exacerbated drought and 
wildfire risk, further imperilling the islands’ forest birds. This year, 
the devastating blaze that destroyed the town of Lahaina nearly engulfed 
a conservation centre for some of the world’s rarest birds, including 
the ‘akikiki, a species of honeycreeper that is considered the most 
endangered bird in the US. The fire came within about 150 feet of the 
property before conservationists were able to fight it off.
- -
She also thought about how she could honour their memory. “It’s 
important to make space for grief, because grief is a rational response 
to what is happening to the planet,” Curry said. “But it’s also 
important to not dwell there. As I lit the candles for each extinct 
species, I also focused on what I could do to save the ones that are 
still here.”...
- -
When the Fish and Wildlife Services finalised its decision to declare 
the species extinct this year, Curry resolved to advocate for more 
conservation funding and a strengthening of the Endangered Species Act. 
This year has put renewed scrutiny on the landmark legislation and 
whether it is enough to fight the staggering rate of biodiversity loss.

In many cases, Curry said, the species that were declared extinct this 
year had been listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) too late. 
The flat pigtoe mussel, for example, only gained ESA protections in 1987 
– seven years after it was last seen in the wild, and more than a decade 
after construction began on a dam that experts agreed would imperil its 
population.

In other cases, species are protected – but scientists lack the funding 
and resources needed to recover them. A 2016 study by CBD found that 
Congress only provides about 3.5% of the funding that the Fish and 
Wildlife Service’s own scientists estimate is needed to recover species.

The Endangered Species Act has helped bring some species – such as the 
bald eagle – back from the brink. “But in some ways, the ESA is like 
having an emergency room and intensive care unit, without providing 
regular immunizations and check-ups,” said Safina.

The scope of the extinction crisis, he said, “is completely overwhelming 
to the capacity of the human mind to actually know and understand”.

Amid a worsening climate crisis and rapid deforestation and habitat 
loss, nearly all of nature needs urgent action and protection. It is 
nearly impossible for us to fathom how quickly, how many species are 
disappearing, Safina added. “And so the endeavour of stopping this 
crisis becomes more of a religious kind of experience than a scientific 
one, in a sense, more moral than practical.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/29/us-animals-birds-extinct-this-year


/[ Burgers and scrambled eggs ]/
*The meat and dairy industry is not ‘climate neutral’, despite some 
eye-catching claims*
Published: January 2, 2024
Imagine a house is on fire, and someone is actively pouring gas on the 
fire. They then pour a little less gas and want credit for doing so, 
despite still feeding the fire. Perhaps they claim they are now “fire 
neutral”.

We’d rightly be very sceptical of such claims. Yet that is more or less 
what some influential supporters of the livestock industry have done.

I’m referring to eye-catching and influential recent studies published 
in peer-reviewed livestock science journals which claim that the meat 
and dairy industries are or can easily be “climate neutral”.

For example, one study claims that the US dairy industry could reach 
climate neutrality by 2050 through reducing its annual methane emissions 
by just 1%-1.5%. Another declares that some US livestock sectors are 
“already part of a climate solution” and that the Californian dairy 
industry could “induce cooling” under annual methane reductions above 1%.
Several industry bodies have recently adopted and widely publicised 
goals based on these reports. For example, the National Cattlemen’s Beef 
Association in the US has stated its ambition to reach climate 
neutrality by 2040, while consumers in Australia are told that their 
lamb has a neutral, or even negative, climate footprint.

The claims are especially striking because methane is a potent 
greenhouse gas that accounts for 0.5°C of global warming so far, and we 
know that livestock production accounts for about one-third of 
human-caused emissions. That methane is a product of the digestion 
processes in cattle, sheep, and other ruminants, emitted when they belch.
So these claims certainly deserve scrutiny. In a paper now published in 
the journal Environmental Research Letters, my co-author Donal 
Murphy-Bokern and I argue that these claims represent a distorted 
understanding of the science. There’s a risk that they could be used for 
greenwashing and undermining confidence in this area of climate science.

We show how easily subtle shifts in definitions, combined with 
overlooking key facts, can distort understanding to the point where 
significant emitters of greenhouse gases are presented as “climate neutral”.

Changing definitions and climate metrics
The term “climate neutral” was first coined by policy makers to refer to 
net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases. These gases were measured using 
a long-established scale that represents their warming effect over a 
100-year period, expressed in CO₂ equivalents – this is the so-called 
“global warming potential” or GWP100 and it was used in the preparation 
of the Paris agreement.

But GWP100 is still imperfect because while most methane is in the 
atmosphere for only a couple of decades, carbon dioxide can linger for 
centuries. That’s why in 2018 some academics introduced a new metric 
called GWP* to better represent the warming impact over time.

But the reports we examine have used GWP* to subtly shift the meaning of 
the term climate neutral from net-zero emissions to net-zero additional 
warming, where “additional” refers to warming on top of that already 
caused by the livestock sector, not warming compared to if the sector 
stopped entirely. This means a historically high emitter such as the 
beef industry can get off easily.

Using GWP*, a livestock sector with high but declining methane emissions 
can claim to be climate neutral since it adds less additional methane to 
the atmosphere – and therefore less additional warming – each year. This 
is referred to in some of these studies as a “cooling effect”, which is 
misleading since it’s not cooling the atmosphere, only warming it 
slightly less.

These studies also fail to make clear that, like methane itself, this 
“cooling” effect of methane reductions is temporary. And the level at 
which they stabilise will likely still be high enough to cause 
significant warming.

GWP* certainly has merit when applied at the global level. However, even 
the scientists who developed it agree it shouldn’t be used to assess a 
particular region or sector such as livestock.

Our investigation shows how its use here could be used to support 
greenwashing. This risks undermining climate science by confusing 
businesses, consumers and policy makers. These recent climate neutral 
claims distract us from the urgent challenge of reducing emissions of 
all greenhouse gases from all sectors, including agriculture.

    The Conversation put the key arguments in this article to Frank
    Mitloehner, corresponding author on two studies mentioned in the
    third paragraph. He told The Conversation:

    “Reaching climate neutrality is a good goal to have, but it doesn’t
    have to be the last goal. Efforts to reduce environmental impacts is
    a journey, not a destination. I’m proud to be on the journey with
    producers and farmers, helping them reduce their environmental
    impact – there’s no other way to do the job. At the end of the day,
    we will need more funding from both the public and private sectors
    to improve sustainability across the board.

    "We will continue using GWP100, but we can do so alongside with GWP*
    to better understand the impact methane emissions have on warming.”

https://theconversation.com/the-meat-and-dairy-industry-is-not-climate-neutral-despite-some-eye-catching-claims-219369 


- -

/[ from DeSmogBlog ]/
*The Livestock Industry’s “Climate Neutral” Claims Are Too Good To Be True*
New research shows how a slew of recent climate pledges are based on 
incomplete accounting, which downplays the scope of methane pollution by 
the meat and dairy industries.
By Joe FassleronDec 14, 2023
Recent findings from some peer-reviewed academic papers in agricultural 
journals sound like fodder for optimism: The United States cattle 
industry has helped to cool the climate almost every year since 1986. 
European dairy goats and sheep have caused no additional warming since 
1990. Australian sheep meat is a “climate-neutral” product.

But these findings are highly misleading, according to a new study in 
Environmental Research Letters. The study found that an alternative 
method of quantifying the impact of methane emissions has led to a raft 
of industry-friendly findings that the livestock sector seems to be  
using to claim climate neutrality as they continue to pollute.

While virtually everyone agrees that anthropogenic methane emissions 
play a huge role in climate change, different approaches to measuring 
that impact can result in dramatically different narratives. For 
decades, scientists have relied on a standard metric called GWP100, 
which measures the global warming potential of greenhouse gasses 
relative to carbon dioxide over a timeframe of 100 years. This approach 
makes methane’s potency clear: A pound of methane warms the climate 30 
times more than a pound of CO2.

But unlike carbon dioxide, which can linger in the atmosphere for 
millennia, methane is a relatively transient greenhouse gas. Since 
methane’s lifespan in the atmosphere is only about 12 years, GWP100’s 
critics tend to feel it’s inaccurate to compare it to carbon dioxide.

That’s why some experts have proposed an alternative approach called 
GWP* for talking about methane. Instead of measuring absolute emissions, 
GWP* helps to model how management decisions impact the overall rate of 
warming. The scientists who develop the approach say this makes for a 
more accurate way of tracking methane’s real-world consequences — though 
those findings shouldn’t be taken in isolation.

“We have consistently said we are not advocating the replacement of 
GWP100 with GWP*,” said Myles Allen, an Oxford University geosystems 
scientist who helped to develop the framework. “It was proposed as a way 
of using the information provided by GWP100 to work out warming impacts, 
and that remains what it is for. It’s a supplement, it’s additional 
information.”

However, the new study, co-authored by Caspar Donnison of the University 
of California, Davis and independent researcher Donal Murphy-Bokern, 
shows that some academic researchers are indeed using GWP* as an 
alternative metric. This is opening the door for the livestock industry 
to minimize the warming impact of their historical and continued 
production by shifting the focus away from total emissions and onto 
current trends.

Ryan Katz-Rosene, a University of Ottawa political studies professor 
whose research focuses on climate policy debates, explained by email 
that this focus on trends creates a “key loophole.”

“GWP* prioritizes the trend over the last 20 years. If your CH4 
emissions trajectory over that time is steady or even negative you come 
out looking real good,” Katz-Rosene said, using the chemical formula for 
methane. “But that completely erases the historical legacy of CH4 
emissions growth before that (which is what occurred in most 
industrialized economies). GWP* essentially allows those industrialized 
economies to start with an unfair hand.

“The second loophole is of course the way it could​ disincentivize 
greater CH4 cuts. ‘We’re already climate compliant, why should we cut 
CH4 further?’”

Donnison and Murphy-Bokern’s findings suggest that both loopholes are 
already being exploited, with selective use of GWP* giving rise to 
problematic “climate neutral” claims in the peer-reviewed literature. 
Their study calls attention to six journal articles that use GWP* to 
suggest stabilized methane emissions are the same as climate neutrality 
— even if a given sector’s total emissions are still sky-high.

That’s an “imprudent and misleading use of this metric,” says Donnison, 
an environmental scientist at the University of California, Davis.
In their study, he and Murphy-Boker highlighted a 2021 paper that used 
GWP* to measure the climate impact of sheep farming in Australia. That 
research found that the sector’s methane emissions had stabilized in 
2020, meaning that domestic sheep production was no longer causing new 
warming beyond what it already had —  making the Australian sheep sector 
“climate neutral” — a finding that was then recirculated by industry 
groups and trade publications.

While it was true that the sector didn’t cause any additional warming in 
2020 compared to 2019, the term “climate neutral” makes it sound like 
Australian sheep no longer impact the climate, which isn’t accurate. 
Whether those emissions are holding steady or even falling, Australia’s 
sheep are still locking up a whole lot of climate-intensive methane in 
the atmosphere. The sector has only improved relative to its past 
performance — a far cry from “neutral.”

“The climate neutrality cited in these reports is defined as having no 
additional warming over time,” explained Michelle Cain, one of the 
Oxford scientists who developed GWP*. “For industries which have a large 
component of methane emissions, this is not the same as the industry not 
existing at all. Obviously, stopping the methane emissions entirely 
would lead to even lower temperatures than reducing the methane 
emissions by a fraction.”

Oxford’s Allen said GWP* wasn’t designed to be used so selectively.

“If you’re trying to use [GWP*] to say what the responsibilities of a 
sector are, without consideration of anything else — like the history of 
a sector, the wealth of a sector, and the other impacts that sector 
might have had on the environment — then I think that’s inappropriate,” 
he said.

The author of the Australian sheep meat study — Brad Ridoutt, a 
principal research scientist with Australia’s national research agency, 
CSIRO — did not respond to a request for comment.

In their new study, Donnison and Murphy-Bokern also highlighted a 2022 
paper in The Journal of Dairy Science that used GWP* to show the U.S. 
dairy cattle industry becoming “climate neutral” in less than two 
decades. By steadily reducing methane emissions, and getting each 
individual cow to produce more than 30 percent more milk, U.S. dairy 
could produce “no additional warming” as soon as 2041, according to this 
research. But overall warming from the dairy industry would only 
continue to increase for the next 19 years. Under the scenario described 
as “climate neutral,” U.S. dairy would actually be warming the world in 
2041 much more than it is today.

Industry groups leaped on the report, which was co-authored by 
University of California, Davis professor of livestock sciences Frank 
Mitloehner, who has received scrutiny and criticism for close ties to 
the livestock sector. His co-author was Sara Place, a Colorado State 
University associate professor of feedlot systems, who had been the 
chief sustainability officer at a global animal health company until 2022.

In an emailed response to DeSmog’s request for comment, Mitloehner did 
not directly address the issue of whether his use of “climate neutral” 
was misleading, but conceded that absolute emissions should still play 
an important role in conversations around climate action.

“We will absolutely need to continue using GWP100 as it tells us things 
other metrics can’t, but we can do so in tandem with GWP* to get a more 
accurate picture of the impact methane emissions have on our climate,” 
Mitloehner said.

It’s not just that industry groups are using GWP* to divert attention 
away from the sheer volume of their emissions. The term “climate 
neutral” also suggests a level of sustained equilibrium that doesn’t 
really exist. Donnison said only ongoing,  aggressive cuts in methane 
can make up for other continued emissions from the livestock sector, 
which also contributes longer-lived greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, 
like nitrous oxide and CO2. Claiming neutrality when continued cuts will 
be needed indefinitely, the authors write, is “an oxymoron.”

More significantly, Donnison said, drastic cuts are necessary because 
methane continues to rapidly drive climate change, enough to contribute 
half a degree of warming on its own. Agriculture is responsible for 
about 40 percent of that footprint, mostly due to the production of 
ruminant livestock like cattle and sheep, which belch up methane in 
large quantities as part of their digestive process. A single cow can 
produce over 200 pounds of methane emissions per year, according to an 
Environmental Protection Agency analysis of Our World in Data estimates.

Scientists say we can’t achieve the big-picture goal of the Paris 
Agreement — limiting the rise in average global temperature to 1.5 
degrees Celsius — without cutting methane now.

With that in mind, Donnison said, the livestock industry’s claims of 
future “climate neutrality” give a false impression. The situation is 
more like a house on fire, he said, and someone who’s actively pouring 
gas on the fire wants credit for pouring a little less.

“You can say, ‘Well, I’m not going to add further to the fire anymore,’” 
said Donnison. “But what about all the existing damage you’ve caused up 
until that point?”
https://www.desmog.com/2023/12/14/the-livestock-industrys-climate-neutral-claims-are-too-good-to-be-true/



/[ pity the tiny vole  ]/
*A Major Climate Force Has Been Ignored for Decades*
Small mammals play an outsize role in shaping the world around them.
By Bathsheba Demuth

JANUARY 4, 2024, 7:30 AM ET

Finding a vole on Alaska’s North Slope takes practice. The open plain 
pulls the eye upward, toward grand things: the horizon line, the distant 
shimmer of snow in the mountains. The nearest tree is more than 50 miles 
away. The low shrubs and sedges toss and wave in the wind. It’s a place 
where a 600-pound musk ox can look dog-size.

In this landscape, even a very large vole—weighing less than three 
ounces and no more than nine inches long—is easy to miss. But Nick Patel 
knows what to look for. Last August, Patel pointed my attention toward a 
depression worn into the moss, a path that disappeared into a yellowed 
tuft of sedge. Voles are creatures of habit, scurrying so often over the 
same route that they wear trails—runways—into the soil. Once you know to 
look for them, the tundra is laced through with vole runways.

Patel is a field tech with Team Vole, a group of some 20 researchers 
studying Alaska’s voles and lemmings. Despite their size, these 
creatures are a force on the tundra. Caribou migrate. So do the geese, 
ducks, swans, and sandhill cranes that come north by the hundreds of 
thousands each summer. But voles and lemmings stay put. Unlike many 
Arctic animals, they don’t hibernate. And as Team Vole is finding, this 
means that these small mammals—which live throughout the circumpolar 
north—fundamentally shape the ecosystem around them. In their tiny paws 
rests a crucial part of the climate’s future: whether the world’s tundra 
will help pull carbon from the atmosphere, or instead emit more.

Once Patel showed me how to spot voles, I couldn’t stop seeing signs of 
their work. One day at Toolik Lake Field Station, a science hub 370 
miles north of Fairbanks, I watched a pair of them emerge from a knot of 
grassy fronds. They paused and stood, delicately fingered paws hanging 
over buff bellies. “Those two are always together,” Audrey Fatone, a 
field tech with Team Vole, told me. “Although we can’t tell them apart 
exactly...
- -
People, too, are a variable in the carbon equation. The degree to which 
global emissions fall or rise is an aggregate of human politics, of what 
we choose to build. That’s especially apparent in Alaska. The Toolik 
Lake Field Station sits at mile 284 on the Dalton Highway, built for the 
construction and maintenance of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s. 
On the short drive between the vole pens and Toolik Lake, you can see 
the pipeline curling like a silver jump rope thrown over the plush 
hills. To the west of the Toolik Lake vole pens, in the National 
Petroleum Reserve, a cluster of new wells approved by the Biden 
administration in 2023 could, once completed, pump some 600 million 
barrels of crude over the next three decades. Burning that oil will add 
more carbon to the atmosphere—provoking warming that, in part because of 
the voles, could make the tundra a carbon source.

Historically, climate modelers have focused on how human projects 
interact with the most obvious components of the carbon cycle: oceans, 
forests, sea ice, atmosphere, all the grand parts of the global 
landscape. Recently, helped by more computing power, models have begun 
to consider variables such as the difference between plant growth in the 
tundra and the tropics. And yet, much like me before I learned to see 
how vole trails shape the tundra, researchers still tend to overlook the 
role of herbivores in the carbon cycle. “Small mammals matter. They 
punch above their weight,” McLaren said. That means standard climate 
models, many of which don’t consider how animals rework the world around 
them, underestimate the scope and consequences of ecosystem change.

Adding animals into the equation requires knowing, in detail, what 
different species do—even the tiny ones that get lost in the grasses. 
Team Vole might not yet be able to say definitively what kind of tundra 
voles will build in the coming decades. What is clear, however, is that 
voles’ eating and scampering are consequential, part of shaping each of 
our futures. For all that human beings transform the land and 
atmosphere, even two-ounce animals reshape the world around us as they 
make it home.

Bathsheba Demuth is the author of Floating Coast: An Environmental 
History of the Bering Strait. She teaches history and environmental 
studies at Brown University.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/01/alaska-arctic-voles-carbon-source-climate-change/677014/


/[ from Phys.Org]/
*Evolution might stop humans from solving climate change, researchers say*
by Marcus Wolf, University of Maine
JANUARY 2, 2024

https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2024/evolution-might-stop-h-1.jpg
Central features of human evolution may stop our species from resolving 
global environmental problems like climate change, says a recent study 
led by the University of Maine.

Humans have come to dominate the planet with tools and systems to 
exploit natural resources that were refined over thousands of years 
through the process of cultural adaptation to the environment. 
University of Maine evolutionary biologist Tim Waring wanted to know how 
this process of cultural adaptation to the environment might influence 
the goal of solving global environmental problems. What he found was 
counterintuitive.

The project sought to understand three core questions: how human 
evolution has operated in the context of environmental resources, how 
human evolution has contributed to the multiple global environmental 
crises, and how global environmental limits might change the outcomes of 
human evolution in the future.

Waring's team outlined their findings in a new paper published in 
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Other authors of the 
study include Zach Wood, UMaine alumni, and Eörs Szathmáry, a professor 
at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary.

*Human expansion*
The study explored how human societies' use of the environment changed 
over our evolutionary history. The research team investigated changes in 
the ecological niche of human populations, including factors such as the 
natural resources they used, how intensively they were used, what 
systems and methods emerged to use those resources and the environmental 
impacts that resulted from their usage.
This effort revealed a set of common patterns. Over the last 100,000 
years, human groups have progressively used more types of resources, 
with more intensity, at greater scales and with greater environmental 
impacts. Those groups often then spread to new environments with new 
resources.

The global human expansion was facilitated by the process of cultural 
adaptation to the environment. This leads to the accumulation of 
adaptive cultural traits—social systems and technology to help exploit 
and control environmental resources such as agricultural practices, 
fishing methods, irrigation infrastructure, energy technology and social 
systems for managing each of these.

"Human evolution is mostly driven by cultural change, which is faster 
than genetic evolution. That greater speed of adaptation has made it 
possible for humans to colonize all habitable land worldwide," says 
Waring, associate professor with the UMaine Senator George J. Mitchell 
Center for Sustainability Solutions and the School of Economics.

Moreover, this process accelerates because of a positive feedback 
process: as groups get larger, they accumulate adaptive cultural traits 
more rapidly, which provides more resources and enables faster growth.

"For the last 100,000 years, this has been good news for our species as 
a whole." Waring says, "but this expansion has depended on large amounts 
of available resources and space."

Today, humans have also run out of space. We have reached the physical 
limits of the biosphere and laid claim to most of the resources it has 
to offer. Our expansion also is catching up with us. Our cultural 
adaptations, particularly the industrial use of fossil fuels, have 
created dangerous global environmental problems that jeopardize our 
safety and access to future resources.
*
Global limits*
To see what these findings mean for solving global challenges like 
climate change, the research team looked at when and how sustainable 
human systems emerged in the past. Waring and his colleagues found two 
general patterns. First, sustainable systems tend to grow and spread 
only after groups have struggled or failed to maintain their resources 
in the first place.

For example, the U.S. regulated industrial sulfur and nitrogen dioxide 
emissions in 1990, but only after we had determined that they caused 
acid rain and acidified many water bodies in the Northeast. This delayed 
action presents a major problem today as we threaten other global 
limits. For climate change, humans need to solve the problem before we 
cause a crash.

Second, researchers also found evidence that strong systems of 
environmental protection tend to address problems within existing 
societies, not between them. For example, managing regional water 
systems requires regional cooperation, regional infrastructure and 
technology, and these arise through regional cultural evolution. The 
presence of societies of the right scale is therefore a critical 
limiting factor.

Tackling the climate crisis effectively will probably require new 
worldwide regulatory, economic and social systems—ones that generate 
greater cooperation and authority than existing systems like the Paris 
Agreement. To establish and operate those systems, humans need a 
functional social system for the planet, which we don't have.

"One problem is that we don't have a coordinated global society which 
could implement these systems," says Waring, "We only have sub-global 
groups, which probably won't suffice. But you can imagine cooperative 
treaties to address these shared challenges. So, that's the easy problem."

The other problem is much worse, Waring says. In a world filled with 
sub-global groups, cultural evolution among these groups will tend to 
solve the wrong problems, benefiting the interests of nations and 
corporations and delaying action on shared priorities. Cultural 
evolution among groups would tend to exacerbate resource competition and 
could lead to direct conflict between groups and even global human dieback.

"This means global challenges like climate change are much harder to 
solve than previously considered," says Waring. "It's not just that they 
are the hardest thing our species has ever done. They absolutely are. 
The bigger problem is that central features in human evolution are 
likely working against our ability to solve them. To solve global 
collective challenges we have to swim upstream."

*Looking forward*
Waring and his colleagues think that their analysis can help navigate 
the future of human evolution on a limited Earth. Their paper is the 
first to propose that human evolution may oppose the emergence of 
collective global problems and further research is needed to develop and 
test this theory.

Waring's team proposes several applied research efforts to better 
understand the drivers of cultural evolution and search for ways to 
reduce global environmental competition, given how human evolution 
works. For example, research is needed to document the patterns and 
strength of human cultural evolution in the past and present. Studies 
could focus on the past processes that lead to the human domination of 
the biosphere, and on the ways cultural adaptation to the environment is 
occurring today.

But if the general outline proves to be correct, and human evolution 
tends to oppose collective solutions to global environmental problems, 
as the authors suggest, then some very pressing questions need to be 
answered. This includes whether we can use this knowledge to improve the 
global response to climate change.

"There is hope, of course, that humans may solve climate change. We have 
built cooperative governance before, although never like this: in a rush 
at a global scale," Waring says.

The growth of international environmental policy provides some hope. 
Successful examples include the Montreal Protocol to limit 
ozone-depleting gases and the global moratorium on commercial whaling.

New efforts should include fostering more intentional, peaceful and 
ethical systems of mutual self-limitation, particularly through market 
regulations and enforceable treaties, that bind human groups across the 
planet together ever more tightly into a functional unit.

But that model may not work for climate change.

"Our paper explains why and how building cooperative governance at the 
global scale is different, and helps researchers and policymakers be 
more clear-headed about how to work toward global solutions," says Waring.

This new research could lead to a novel policy mechanism to address the 
climate crisis: Modifying the process of adaptive change among 
corporations and nations may be a powerful way to address global 
environmental risks.

As for whether humans can continue to survive on a limited planet, 
Waring says, "We don't have any solutions for this idea of a long-term 
evolutionary trap, as we barely understand the problem. If our 
conclusions are even close to being correct, we need to study this much 
more carefully."

More information: Timothy M. Waring et al, Characteristic processes of 
human evolution caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global 
solutions, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological 
Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2022.0259

Journal information: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
Provided by University of Maine
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-evolution-humans-climate.html



/[The news archive - video clip from 2000 - check 29 mins in  ]/
/*January 5, 2000 */
January 5, 2000: During a Democratic Presidential debate with former New 
Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, Vice President Al Gore notes that as a 
Congressman, "...I decided to take on the issue of global warming and 
make it a national issue, when everybody was saying 'You know, you're 
going to run a lot of risk there. People are going to think that that's 
kind of off the edge there.' Well, now more and more people say, 'Yes, 
it is real,' and the next president has to be willing to take it on."

(29:28-29-50)
http://c-spanvideo.org/program/DemocraticCandidatesDebate10



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