Saturday 30 September 2006

Biomimetism the nature link for sustainable development

Janine Benyus: The Thought Leader Interview
by Amy Bernstein

The biomimicry pioneer is teaching executives that the solutions to their most challenging problems lie in nature.

Photograph by Vern Evans
Within the current wave of corporate environmentalism, inspired by the threat of global climate change, large-scale thinkers are prominent. Many proclaim a new role for companies: to move beyond compliance with regulations to a leadership stance in the green, energy-efficient economy of the future. But in the long run, the most effective thinkers in this arena may well be those who start small, just as nature does. By emulating the patterns and designs and strategies in plants, animals, and ecosystems, they argue, corporations can become cleaner, leaner, and more consistently innovative. For the past decade, one of the most influential voices in this school of thought has been that of Janine Benyus.

Ms. Benyus was the first to identify the nascent discipline, which she dubbed “biomimicry” and galvanized with her groundbreaking 1997 book of the same name. Biomimicry, writes Ms. Benyus, is “the conscious emulation of life’s genius.” To practice biomimicry, a technologist must turn away from conventional “heat, beat, and treat” industrial processes, and study “what works in the natural world, and more important, what lasts.” For example, ceramic manufacturing could emulate the self-assembly of abalone shells; adhesive tape could be patterned after geckos’ feet; and computer chips could be designed to assemble themselves through crystallization, just as microscopic algae called diatoms assemble their shells. More important, each of these innovations (and many more) could be produced with a fraction of the environmental liability — and in many cases the cost — of conventional industrial processes. In nature’s innovation and resilience, Ms. Benyus sees the keys to achieving sustainability, which former Norwegian President Gro Harlem Brundtland defined as the capacity of society and industry to “meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

A biologist by training, Ms. Benyus never set out to become a guru of sustainable business. In the course of writing several books on wildlife and animal behavior, she came to appreciate “the exquisite ways that organisms are adapted to their places and to each other.” The observation led her to a profound realization: “In seeing how seamlessly animals fit into their homes, I began to see how separate we managers had become from ours,” she writes. She set out to identify the people “who know that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved the problems we are struggling to solve.”

What she found was like-minded individuals “working at the edges of their disciplines, in the fertile crescents between intellectual habitats.” Sensing that there were broader applications at the intersection of ecology, commerce, technology, and materials science, she cofounded the Biomimicry Guild in 1998 and developed models for applying biomimicry to industrial design and systems. Among her growing list of clients are Levi Strauss, NASA, Nike, Patagonia, Procter & Gamble, S.C. Johnson, and General Electric.

When she wrote her book a decade ago, she noted that there was no formal biomimicry movement as yet, but that people responded to the idea with enthusiasm. “Biomimicry has the earmarks of a successful meme; that is, an idea that will spread like an adaptive gene throughout our culture,” she says.

Ms. Benyus met with strategy+business at her house at the foot of the Bitterroot Mountains in western Montana, surrounded by the largest contiguous wilderness in the lower 48 states. Warmed by a stove burning wood pellets on a frigid February morning, Ms. Benyus explained why biomimicry is catching on with business and where it’s going.

S+B: You say that there has been no formal biomimicry movement until now. Do you see one taking shape?
BENYUS: Absolutely. When I started working on the book in 1990, my source material was all small scientific journals. Very obscure. None of the people doing this kind of work knew each other, and they all had different terms for the same concepts and different ways of describing their work. But now, when they write grant proposals and research papers, they all talk about doing “biomimicry” or “biomimetic research.” It’s now a known term.


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This article is from Autumn 2006
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Wednesday 27 September 2006

NASA Study Finds World Warmth Edging Ancient Levels (12000 years ago)

NASA Study Finds World Warmth Edging Ancient Levels

Sep. 25, 2006

A new study by NASA scientists finds that the world's temperature is reaching a level that has not been seen in thousands of years.

The study, led by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, N.Y., along with scientists from other organizations concludes that, because of a rapid warming trend over the past 30 years, the Earth is now reaching and passing through the warmest levels in the current interglacial period, which has lasted nearly 12,000 years. An "interglacial period" is a time in the Earth's history when the area of Earth covered by glaciers was similar or smaller than at the present time. Recent warming is forcing species of plants and animals to move toward the north and south poles.

This color-coded map shows average temperatures from 2001-2005 compared to a base period of temperatures from 1951-1980. Dark red indicates the greatest warming and purple indicates the greatest cooling. Image right: Because of a rapid warming trend over the past 30 years, the Earth is now reaching and passing through the warmest levels seen in the last 12,000 years. This color-coded map shows average temperatures from 2001-2005 compared to a base period of temperatures from 1951-1980. Dark red indicates the greatest warming and purple indicates the greatest cooling. Click image to enlarge. Credit: NASA

The study used temperatures around the world taken during the last century. Scientists concluded that these data showed the Earth has been warming at the remarkably rapid rate of approximately 0.36° Fahrenheit (0.2° Celsius) per decade for the past 30 years.

"This evidence implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution," said Hansen. In recent decades, human-made greenhouse gases have become the largest climate change factor. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere and warm the surface. Some greenhouse gases, which include water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone, occur naturally, while others are due to human activities.

This color coded map shows a progression of changing global surface temperatures from 1880 to 2005, the warmest ranked year on record. Image left: Because of a rapid warming trend over the past 30 years, the Earth is now reaching and passing through the warmest levels seen in the last 12,000 years. This color-coded map shows a progression of changing global surface temperatures from 1880 to 2005, the warmest ranked year on record. Dark red indicates the greatest warming and dark blue indicates the greatest cooling. Click image to view animation. Credit: NASA

The study notes that the world's warming is greatest at high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, and it is larger over land than over ocean areas. The enhanced warming at high latitudes is attributed to effects of ice and snow. As the Earth warms, snow and ice melt, uncovering darker surfaces that absorb more sunlight and increase warming, a process called a positive feedback. Warming is less over ocean than over land because of the great heat capacity of the deep-mixing ocean, which causes warming to occur more slowly there.

Hansen and his colleagues in New York collaborated with David Lea and Martin Medina-Elizade of UCSB to obtain comparisons of recent temperatures with the history of the Earth over the past million years. The California researchers obtained a record of tropical ocean surface temperatures from the magnesium content in the shells of microscopic sea surface animals, as recorded in ocean sediments.

Chart showing data from this study which reveals that the Earth has been warming approximately 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade for the past 30 years. Image left: Data from this study reveal that the Earth has been warming approximately 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 Fahrenheit) per decade for the past 30 years. This rapid warming has brought global temperature to within about one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of the maximum estimated temperature during the past million years. Credit: NASA

One of the findings from this collaboration is that the Western Equatorial Pacific and Indian Oceans are now as warm as, or warmer than, at any prior time in the Holocene. The Holocene is the relatively warm period that has existed for almost 12,000 years, since the end of the last major ice age. The Western Pacific and Indian Oceans are important because, as these researchers show, temperature change there is indicative of global temperature change. Therefore, by inference, the world as a whole is now as warm as, or warmer than, at any time in the Holocene.

According to Lea, "The Western Pacific is important for another reason, too: it is a major source of heat for the world's oceans and for the global atmosphere."

Chart showing the greenhouse effect Image right: The "greenhouse effect" is the warming of climate that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from Earth toward space. Certain gases in the atmosphere resemble glass in a greenhouse, allowing sunlight to pass into the "greenhouse," but blocking Earth's heat from escaping into space. The gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect include water vapor, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxides, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Credit: U.S. EPA

In contrast to the Western Pacific, the researchers find that the Eastern Pacific Ocean has not shown an equal magnitude of warming. They explain the lesser warming in the East Pacific Ocean, near South America, as being due to the fact this region is kept cool by upwelling, rising of deeper colder water to shallower depths. The deep ocean layers have not yet been affected much by human-made warming.

Hansen and his colleagues suggest that the increased temperature difference between the Western and Eastern Pacific may boost the likelihood of strong El Ninos, such as those of 1983 and 1998. An El Nino is an event that typically occurs every several years when the warm surface waters in the West Pacific slosh eastward toward South America, in the process altering weather patterns around the world.

Still from animation showing white, snow covered terrain acting as a giant reflector that bounces incoming solar radiation back into space. Image left: This study notes that the greatest warming is occurring at high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Here, white, snow-covered terrain acts a giant reflector that bounces incoming solar radiation back into space. As the snow cover melts, the percentage of sunlight reflected, or "albedo", decreases. Instead, the darker ocean and exposed ground can absorb the light and heat-up, thus adding more energy for continued melting. Click image to view animation. Credit: NASA

The most important result found by these researchers is that the warming in recent decades has brought global temperature to a level within about one degree Celsius (1.8°F) of the maximum temperature of the past million years. According to Hansen, "That means that further global warming of 1 degree Celsius defines a critical level. If warming is kept less than that, effects of global warming may be relatively manageable. During the warmest interglacial periods the Earth was reasonably similar to today. But if further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about three million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today."

Global warming is already beginning to have noticeable effects in nature. Plants and animals can survive only within certain climatic zones, so with the warming of recent decades many of them are beginning to migrate poleward. A study that appeared in Nature Magazine in 2003 found that 1700 plant, animal and insect species moved poleward at an average rate of 6 kilometers (about 4 miles) per decade in the last half of the 20th century.

That migration rate is not fast enough to keep up with the current rate of movement of a given temperature zone, which has reached about 40 kilometers (about 25 miles) per decade in the period 1975 to 2005. "Rapid movement of climatic zones is going to be another stress on wildlife," according to Hansen. "It adds to the stress of habitat loss due to human developments. If we do not slow down the rate of global warming, many species are likely to become extinct. In effect we are pushing them off the planet."

Monday 18 September 2006

World's leading companies lack plan on climate change

By Saeed Shah
Published: 18 September 2006
Most of the world's 500 biggest companies have no programme in place, with explicit targets, to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases, despite mounting evidence that the earth is heading towards environmental catastrophe.

The most comprehensive study of the environmental behaviour of the world's biggest corporations, by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), found that emissions from these businesses are rising at an alarming rate and most are not acting to tackle the issue.

Among the worst performers in the research, which rates companies on a scoring system, were Pepsi, the soft drinks giant, Nintendo, the computer gaming group, and the financial services giant American Express. Among the 33 British companies, the company doing the least, by far, to address the issue is BAE Systems, the arms manufacturer that employs thousands of people in this country.

Even more worrying for the researchers was the 140 companies that did not provide any data, suggesting an even lower level of concern about the environment. Among these were Honda, Bridgestone, Apple Computers, Goldman Sachs, Kellogg, Philips, Google and Yahoo!.

More at the following address:

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article1616722.ece

Sunday 17 September 2006

The sixth mass extinction on Earth ?

All the creatures we share the Earth with are important in some way, however unprepossessing or insignificant they may appear. They and we are all part of the web of life.

From the dawn of time, extinction has usually progressed at what scientists call a natural or background rate. Today the tempo is far faster.

Many scientists believe this is the sixth great wave - the sixth mass extinction to affect life on Earth.

We were not here for any of the previous mass extinctions, but this time our sheer preponderance is driving the slide to oblivion.
If you want no more click :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3667300.stm

Saturday 16 September 2006

Massive surge in disappearance of Arctic sea ice sparks global warning

Massive surge in disappearance of Arctic sea ice sparks global warning
Arctic meltdown is speeding up... sea ice is vanishing faster than ever before... polar bears face extinction... and America's top climate scientist warns we only have a decade to save the planet
By Michael McCarthy and David Usborne
The Independent : 15 September 2006

The melting of the sea ice in the Arctic, the clearest sign so far of global warming, has taken a sudden and enormous leap forward, in one of the most ominous developments yet in the onset of climate change.
Two separate studies by Nasa, using different satellite monitoring technologies, both show a great surge in the disappearance of Arctic ice cover in the last two years.
One, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, shows that Arctic perennial sea ice, which normally survives the summer melt season and remains year-round, shrank by 14 per cent in just 12 months between 2004 and 2005.
The overall decrease in the ice cover was 720,000 sq km (280,000 sq miles) - an area almost the size of Turkey, gone in a single year.
The other study, from the Goddard Space Flight Centre, in Maryland, shows that the perennial ice melting rate, which has averaged 0.15 per cent a year since satellite observations began in 1979, has suddenly accelerated hugely. In the past two winters the rate has increased to six per cent a year - that is, it has got more than 30 times faster.
The changes are alarming scientists and environmentalists, because they far exceed the rate at which supercomputer models of climate change predict the Arctic ice will melt under the influence of global warming - which is rapid enough.
If climate change is not checked, the Arctic ice will all be gone by 2070, and people will be able to sail to the North Pole. But if these new rates of melting are maintained, the Arctic ice will all be gone decades before that.
The implications are colossal. It will mean extinction in the wild - in the lifetime of children alive today - for one of the world's most majestic creatures, the polar bear, which needs the ice to hunt seals.
It means the possibility of a lethal "feedback" mechanism speeding up global warming, because the dark surface of the open Arctic ocean will absorb the sun's heat, rather than reflect it as the ice cover does now - and so the world will get even hotter.
But most of all, the new developments add to the growing concern that climate change as a process is starting to happen much faster than scientists considered it would, even five years ago when the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its last report.
"These are the latest in a long series of recent studies, all telling us that climate change is faster and nastier than we thought," said Tom Burke, a former government green adviser and now a visiting professor at Imperial College London. "An abyss is opening up between the speed at which the climate is changing and the speed at which governments are responding.
"We must stop thinking that this is just another environmental problem, to be dealt with when time and resources allow, and realise that this is an increasingly urgent threat to our security and prosperity."
Yesterday, Jim Hansen, the leading climatologist and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York, issued a now-or-never warning to governments around the world, including his own, telling them they must take radical action to avert a planetary environmental catastrophe. He said it was no longer viable for nations to adopt a "business as usual" stance on fossil-fuel consumption.
"I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change ... no longer than a decade, at the most," he said.
Early in his first term, President George Bush pulled the US out of the Kyoto Treaty that is meant to bind nations to lower emissions of warming gases. However, opinion in the US is starting to change, as evidenced by the huge success of the documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, narrated by the former US vice-president Senator Al Gore.
The two Nasa Arctic studies, released simultaneously, break fresh ground in dealing with the perennial, or "multi-winter" ice, rather than the "seasonal" ice at the edge of the icefield, which melts every summer.
Concern about the melting rate has hitherto focused on the seasonal ice, whose summer disappearance and retreat from the landmasses of Arctic Canada and Siberia is increasingly obvious. In September 2005, it retreated to the lowest level recorded. Such rapid shrinkage of the perennial ice has not been shown before. "It is alarming," said Joey Camiso, who led the Goddard study. "We've witnessed sea ice reduction at 6 per cent per year over just the last two winters, most likely a result of warming due to greenhouse gases."
Dr Son Nghiem, who led the team which carried out the Jet Propulsion Laboratory study, said that in previous years there had some variability in the extent of perennial Arctic ice. "But it is much smaller and regional," he said. "However, the change we see between 2004 and 2005 is enormous." Britain's Professor Julian Dowdeswell, the director of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, agreed the changes shown in the American studies were "huge", adding: "It remains to be seen whether the rate of change is maintained in future years."
The melting of the Arctic ice will not itself contribute to global sea-level rise, as the ice floating in the sea is already displacing its own mass in the water. When the ice cube melts in your gin and tonic, the liquid in your glass does not rise.
There are great volumes of land-based ice - the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, and mountain glaciers - which are subject to exactly the same temperature rises as the Arctic ice, and which have also started to melt. They will add to sea levels. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet would, if it were to collapse, raise sea levels around the world by 16ft (5m), submerging large parts of Bangladesh and Egypt - and London.

Scientist who refused to be silenced

Scientist who refused to be silenced
By Andrew Gumbel
The Independent: 15 September 2006

Two things about Jim Hansen have remained near-constant for the past 30 years. He has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the science of global warming, issuing warning after warning about the consequences for the planet if we do nothing to stop the creation of greenhouse gases. And he has run up against a wall of resistance from politicians and policy-makers who simply don't want to believe what they hear from him.
Under the current Bush administration, he has accused political appointees in the public affairs department at NASA, the space agency where he works, of deliberately blocking his access to the media and censoring the published fruits of his research. When the Reagan administration took office in 1981, they responded to his warnings about climate change by paring his staff to the bone and cutting his funding.
Hansen is the very picture of reasonableness: a 65-year-old gentleman from Iowa who insists on presenting scientific fact without political spin. That has made him a menace in the eyes of the energy industry. His first testimony before Congress in 1988 drew considerable ire because he said he was only "99 per cent certain" of some of his claims - falling short of the absolute certainty expected of academic scientists.
Hansen, in turn, accused his adversaries of misrepresenting his testimony - whether it is congressional staffers seeking to minimise the impact of global warming or Michael Crichton, the novelist and global warming sceptic, picking holes in his claims in his novel State of Fear. "Some 'greenhouse sceptics'," he wrote in 2004, "subvert the scientific process, ceasing to act as objective scientists, rather presenting only one side, as if they were lawyers hired to defend a viewpoint."
According to Hansen: "Human-made forces, especially greenhouse gases, soot and other small particles, now exceed natural forces, and the world has begun to warm at a rate predicted by climate models."

From Alaska to Australia, the world is changing in front of us

From Alaska to Australia, the world is changing in front of us
By Daniel Howden, Andrew Buncombe in Washington and Justin Huggler in Delhi
Published: 15 September 2006

Europe
In Greenland the barley is growing for the first time since the Middle Ages. In Britain gardeners were warned this week that the English country garden will be a thing of the past within the next 20 years. In Italy skiers were told yesterday that melting glaciers will mean an end to their pastime unless they can get above 2,000 metres.
Even those enjoying the warmer temperatures in unpredictable bursts by venturing into the sea have been confronted by swarms of jellyfish, who have flourished in record numbers in Europe in the warmer waters. Those same waters are rising in Venice, prompting arguments over costly plans to seal off the lagoon from the sea.
The prospect of flooded squares on the scale of Venice's Piazza San Marco is driving plans to expand and reinforce the Thames flood barrier. In Holland the battle has been lost and 500,000 hectares, an area more than twice the size of greater London, will be strategically flooded instead and people will move to floating homes.
Last summer Spain and Portugal experienced cauldron-like temperatures and prolonged drought. This summer that drought has expanded into central and northern Europe.
Africa
The poorest continent has inevitably found itself on the frontline of climate change. Natural disasters, extreme weather floods and droughts have always been common in southern Africa but the severity of the wet and dry periods is intensifying with disastrous results.
A barrage of meteorological studies have found a pattern of increasing climatic variability and unpredictability. Throughout the Horn of Africa debilitating droughts this year have culled the region's wildlife and disrupted the migrations across the Masai Mara and the Serengeti.
Human populations have been devastated by the soaring temperatures and freak dry seasons. Herdsmen in the north of Kenya have been driven to war over the few cattle that have survived the drought.
The breaking of the drought has seen torrential flooding wreak havoc in Ethiopia's Omo Valley, home to numerous indigenous tribes. More than 800 people were killed last month and tens of thousands more made homeless after weeks of heavy rain following prolonged drought, which caused a number of rivers to burst their banks.
North America
In Alaska there has been millions of dollars of damage to buildings and roads caused by melting permafrost. The region has been blighted by the world's largest outbreak of spruce bark beetles, normally confined to warmer climes. Rising sea levels have forced the relocation of Inuit villages and polar bears have been drowning because of shrinking sea ice. The caribou population is in steep decline due to earlier spring and the west is suffering one of the worst droughts for 500 years.
In Louisiana about 1 million acres of wetlands have been lost to sea-level rise. In the north-west there has been dramatic shrinkage of glaciers in Glacier National Park and the South Cascade Glacier in Washington is at smallest size ever in the last 6,000 years. In the Rockies there has been a 16 per cent reduction in snowpack. Spring snow melt begins nine days earlier.
Hawaii has seen first large-scale coral bleaching. And scientists now believe that the strength of hurricanes that strike the south-east and the Caribbean is linked to climate change.
South America
Few images have offered such stark evidence of the advance of climate change as those of the dry bed of the Amazon river. Last year, the largest river in the world was reduced to a trickle by an unprecedented drought. This year sand banks have already appeared in the deltas of the Amazon and fears are rising that a drought cycle that was previously measured in multiples of decades may now be an annual event.
As the most important carbon sink in the world, the Amazon's impact on global patterns of rainfall is only now beginning to be fully understood and scientists warned in July that this extraordinary planetary air conditioner could be malfunctioning critically. The drying of the world's most biologically diverse forest has already been instrumental in a 1,000-fold increase in the extinction rate of plant and animal species, according to leading botanist Sir Ghillean Prance.
In the Peruvian Andes the alpacas that have for centuries provided indigenous farmers with a means of survival have died in cold snaps where temperatures plummeted to -30C. In the summer, melted glaciers revealed rock faces burnt red by their first contact with direct sunlight.
Australia
Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, twice singles out Australia for lagging behind the rest of the world on climate change. It has, along with the US, refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol. The Industry Minister, Ian Macfarlane, dismissed as "just entertainment" Mr Gore's film, which documents the scientific consensus that climate change in Australia has increased the duration and intensity of cyclones, and prompted a drop in rainfall in agricultural areas.
All around the region further evidence of climate change is to be found in the rising sea levels already starting to inundate Pacific islands, where the people, agricultural land, tourist resorts and infrastructure are concentrated on the coast. Temperature increases in the Pacific are killing off coral reefs. Some scientists say it is already too late to prevent their destruction.
Asia
Some of the most visible effects of climate change are in Asia. From the frozen wastes of Afghanistan, where the river bed in Kabul has become a dry rubbish tip, to south India, where thousands of farmers have killed themselves after successive years of drought wrecked their crops, global warming is a problem.
Most ominous of all, environmentalists are warning of disaster in the Himalayas, where glaciers are melting. Several glacier lakes have already burst in Nepal and Bhutan. The disappearance of the glaciers could dry up major rivers as far away as China, India and Vietnam.