This is how wars start

Humans live in tribes where people may, for example, look similar or speak the same language. These tribes have got really big and occupy large pieces of land. These enormous groups of related peoples and the land they live in have a name: ‘states’ or ‘nations’.

The United States of America, the People’s Republic of China and Russia are three really big nations The trouble with nations is that they act selfishly in what they think is their own best interests. Although all the nations of the world have formed an organisation called the United Nations, this has little power to act in everyone’s interests. So rich nations tend to grab much more than their fair share of everything and pour out much more than their share of pollution into everybody’s air. Selfish or what? Because everyone suffers, especially the poor. It’s very rare for nations to act together to fix global problems. But it has happened and has to happen much more.

If everyone were to be united, you humans could fix all the damage you have caused to our planet

And that’s the reason for the scientists getting together to try and show that the planet’s nine ‘lives’ and their limits are every nation’s problem but no nation can solve them alone. The problems are really big but they can be fixed if only all nations work together to do it.

Planet Earth’s nine ‘lives’: what are they?

If you’ve looked at some of my other guides, you’ll already know something about what humans are doing which affects our planet. Most of the nine planetary ‘lives’ are still okay but three of them are not. Bad news, you might think. But the good news is that you people can fix them if you have the will. You and your fellow humans, acting together, have so much power if you choose to use it wisely. It may take you some time but you can do it!

The scientists now know there are nine planetary boundaries (‘lives’). Think of the white line which marks out a tennis court If you hit a ball which lands outside the boundary, you lose a point. Everyone can see where boundary lines are so the game works. But what if you didn’t know where the boundaries were? How could you know if the ball was ‘in’ or ‘out’? Humans have been ‘playing’ with our planet’s resources without even thinking that there might be boundaries. But now, thanks to science, the boundary lines are clear. No-one will now be able to claim that they didn’t know about these limits, though some people will be sure to ignore them and claim they don’t believe the evidence.

Here’s another way of looking at this. Imagine you’re driving a car about in the desert It’s dark and the headlights go out and you know there are cliffs which plunge down to a canyon somewhere nearby. Do you carry on driving and hope for the best? Or do you wait till daybreak so you can see clearly where those cliffs (boundaries) are? I think I’d wait till daybreak, wouldn’t you?
The nine planetary boundaries:

1. Climate change: the planet is heating up and could soon do so much faster
2. Acid oceans: the seas are becoming hostile to animals with shells
   1. Ozone depletion: the ozone layer which protects us is damaged
3. aerosol loading: soot and smoke from burning fuels and forests
4. nitrogen and phosphorus
5. Fresh water: most fresh water on or under the land (aquifers)is now being used by humans. Many rivers don’t even reach the sea any more
6. Land use: there’s a limit to how much land humans can farm
7. Biodiversity loss: life itself is in danger as extinction looms for many animals and plants. Whole ecosystems are threatened and yet people depend on them utterly
8. Chemical pollution: artificial chemicals used around the world harm humans and wildlife

Sounds boring? Or too complicated? Big sciency words can be off-putting, I know. That’s why I’ve written this guide for you: to explain the scientists’ new understanding of how our planet works; a basic book of rules for running planet Earth safely. Because now, you people with your powerful technologies, are almost like gods. You have the power to change the planet for good or for ill. Use your power wisely… and soon!

Natural underground water stores, which can be vast, are called aquifers

The planet is heating up and could soon do so much faster

Hot planet

You probably know a good deal about climate change, especially if you’ve read my guide. Climate change is often called ‘global warming’ which gives the impression that everywhere on the planet is getting hotter. This isn’t quite true. Overall, our planet is heating up, but some parts – like the polar regions – are warming much faster than others.

Sometimes changing weather systems can channel cold air away from the Arctic, giving other parts, like northern Europe or eastern North America, very cold winters. People get mixed up thinking that a cold winter means the climate is getting colder, not warmer. So you often hear people say, “I don’t believe in global warming. This winter is so cold. Global warming is a big hoax.” That sort of stuff. You can see why they say it, but it really just shows that they don’t understand (or don’t want to know about) what climate change means. There’s all kinds of scientific evidence which shows without doubt that the planet as a whole is getting hotter.

We know why the climate is changing. It’s because humans burn gigantic amounts of carbon-based fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas. Burning these produces energy for industry (like electric power stations ) and transport (cars , trucks , planes , ships). Most of the waste-gases from this burning are made up of carbon dioxide (CO2) and go straight into the air.

CO2 is the main greenhouse gas. Without it the planet would freeze, because it acts like a blanket, trapping some of the sun’s heat in our atmosphere. So too much CO2 is bad because it’s like piling on too many blankets. And there is already too much. CO2 levels have shot up by one third in just 200 years. Today it’s rising faster than ever, as more people use more and more energy.

There are many other greenhouse gases which human industry and farming produce, often by accident. The best known of these is methane, which is around 25 times more powerful than CO2 in its warming effects.

Scientists know that natural systems like climate tend to change quite suddenly from one stable state to another. We’ve been very lucky since the end of the last ice age (about 11,500 years ago) because the climate has been quite stable: just right for humans (and penguins too). But the extra burden of greenhouse gases that people are unintentionally pumping into the atmosphere is ‘forcing’ the climate towards another, hotter, stable state.

This is happening more rapidly than expected because of something called feedback. One important example of feedback is happening right now in the Arctic. Until recently, the Arctic Ocean has been mostly covered by a blanket of floating ice. This ice, being white, reflects almost all the sun’s heat back into space. When it melts away, we are left with dark ocean water which, because it is so dark, obsorbs most of the suns heat. So the water gets warmer and more ice melts, so the water gets warmer still. And because the warmer water is exposed to the air, some of it evaporates as water vapour, which is itself a powerful greenhouse gas. So warming increases yet more. This is another feedback.

Tackling climate change: Right now, climate change is the most important planetary boundary because we’re already over the limit for CO2. The limit the scientists suggest is 350 parts per million of CO2 in the air. It’s just passed 420ppm (end 2022) and continues upwards faster than ever. There are two ways people can fix this. The best way would be to quit using fossil fuels almost totally. This is unlikely to happen fast enough even though world nations are coming together regularly to try to find ways to do it. But, like it or not, there are alternative ways to bring down greenhouse gas levels in the air:

• Generate electric power using a mix of renewables like wind, solar and nuclear power
• Geoengineering is a big topic and there are many reasons why some schemes might neither work nor be a good idea. Environmentalists don’t like it, partly because they (probably rightly) think that once people start using it, the pressure to solve the real problem – burning too much fossil fuel – will be forgotten. Geoengineering could seem an easy option to avoid having to stop using fossil fuels. Though really, it’s a sort of emergency toolbox for people to use if things get desperate. So it makes good sense that scientists are already doing lots of experiments to find out what could work and how safe and easy it is to do.

Humans are the cleverest creature to have ever lived on planet Earth. You can fix climate change, the biggest problem of all. You just have to agree to all pull together and do what needs to be done. And there’s a bonus: if climate change really is sorted, several of the other nine planetary boundaries will also be largely sorted too. But single countries can’t do this on their own. The whole world needs to unite and agree how to fix it and then do it! This happened successfully with the ozone treaty. And in December 2015 at a huge meeting of the the leaders of the world’s nations in Paris (France), everyone agreed on a fair deal to tackle climate change. More on this…

That is from the start of the Industrial Revolution, which is when people started burning coal big time

This period of time is known as the Holocene. Some scientists suggest we are now entering a new period called the Anthropocene: a period in which the climate is now becoming unstable due to human influence. ‘Anthropo’ means ‘people’ so anthropology means the study of people

I’ll be looking at this later in the guide

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Acid oceans and seabed-mining: the seas are becoming hostile to animals with shells

CO2 dissolves in sea-waterand forms a weak acid,carbonic acid

You know what acid is, don’t you? Vinegar is a weak acid but it burns your throat if you take a swig of it! Maybe you’ve heard that the oceans are getting more acid. Most people probably haven’t and so don’t know why it’s happening or why it’s important.

Carbon dioxide from the air dissolves in seawater and makes it more acid. With ever more CO2 in the air, more dissolves in the oceans so the more acid they become.

What does it matter if the oceans get a bit more acidic? There are 3 reasons

• shellfish
• corals
• certain plankton

Shellfish and corals are animals which build their shells or skeletons out of calcium carbonate. The animals make this by using calcium and CO2 both dissolved in the seawater. If the seas get too acid the sea creatures can’t build their shells and skeletons and they will die. So these zillions of tiny creatures are providing us with a free means of getting carbon out of both the atmosphere and the sea and locking it away safely into what will become limestone rock (mostly calcium carbonate). The shell-building plankton whose tiny bodies sink to the bottom of the sea when they die also become another type of limestone rock.

The acidity of surface ocean waters – which is where all the plankton and corals live – has increased by one third since humans started burning fossil fuels on a grand scale. Scientists reckon things will be critical in some oceans by mid-century. We are getting close to the boundary but we’re not there yet. There’s still time to stop the damage from happening. How? By quitting burning fossil fuels and getting the energy you need from other sources like renewables and nuclear power.

The shell-building plankton whose tiny bodies sink to the bottom of the sea when they die also become another type of limestone rock. Most are different types of algae: diatoms, dinoflagellates, coccolithophores (which form chalk rock)

Vast numbers of these make England’s famous White Cliffs of Dover and all the chalk rock to be found in northern Europe

Aerosol loading – smoke, dust and soot

Pollution, polution,,pollution

An aerosol is a spray can that you use, right? Yes but it’s also smoke and dust that affects people’s health and pollutes the air. Not nice, huh? Humans make a big mess wherever they go, churning out masses of smoke or dust aerosols from

• car, truck, ship and aircraft engines,
• fires from cooking, heating, burning forests
• industry – burning fuels like coal

This is the brown cloud over the
Ganges delta which results from pollution (satellite photograph)

This smoke and dust is made up of very tiny particles, which are so light that they get wafted up into the atmosphere where they stay for weeks or months. They are called aerosols and they affect the climate and people’s health. Soot particles – a major part of these aerosols – cause the climate to warm up because they are black and absorb heat from the sun. Sulphate particles (from burning coal mostly, and also from large volcanoes occasionally erupting) can cause local cooling. A brown haze of smoke sits permanently over India and is called the Asian brown cloud. It seems that this not only causes warming but also partly blocks the life-giving monsoon rains which Indian farmers depend on for growing food.
Nobody knows what limits should be set for the dusty haze of smoke, soot and sulphate particles humans are making.

A massive rise in skin cancers had begun more or less everywhere where people work outside, but especially in Australia where lots of humans spend time sunbathing or surfing at the beach.  And above that huge sun-drenched continent, an even huger hole in the ozone layer formed each Spring. “Slip, slop, slap” became a slogan intended to warn people of the real danger of going  out in the sun without high SPF (sun protection factor) clothing, including a hat and, of course, sun cream and a song!

The ozone hole occurs when most of the ozone has been destroyed by ozone-eating chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs, HCFCs, halons etc.) You’ve probably heard of some of them. Many were invented by Thomas Midgley Jr. (1) who was looking for a suitable refrigerant gas to replace the dangerous and explosive  hydrocarbons used in the earliest refrigerators.  It gets worse: it turns out that CFCs are powerful greenhouse gases. They also have long lives during which they release some of the chlorine they contain. The chlorine can continue to destroy more of the CFCs and so gets to do its dirty work many times over. This is called catalysis.

Eventually, the CFC pollution became so obvious because of careful monitoring work by scientists that the alarm was raised.  Representatives from all the world’s countries gathered in Montreal (Canada) in 1987 and agreed the Montreal Protocol; CFCs would be phased out.  So, this rather grim story has a happy ending.  Nations can get on with other nations when it is obvious that everyone lives and breathes the same air.  Sadly, some nations haven’t yet grasped this truth when it comes to the climate crisis.  Many wonderful women and men are still trying hard to get the message over to the political boneheads who rule you humans.

(1)[Midgley also invented tetraethyl-lead to make car engines run smoothly. The leaded gasoline (petrol) had a horrifying effect on kids who lived in heavily polluted cities. Lead is a highly toxic heavy metal and many kids became violent. It’s a horrible story and I’m not going to say more about it.

Too much of a good thing

Nitrogen gas on its own is inert It makes up most of the air we breathe and is vital for life. But there’s a big problem because humans are using enormous amounts of artificial nitrogen fertilisers for growing crops. People can do this because clever chemistry means that nitrogen gas can be 'fixed' from the air and made into a form which plants can use to grow big and fast. A good thing, you might think, because it means more people can be fed.

But all this extra nitrogen is beginning to cause major pollution problems, damaging the natural nitrogen (N) cycle by massive overload. Nature has always ‘fixed’ N too but the natural nitrogen cycle is now overwhelmed by all the artificial N fertilisers farmers use.

Scientists reckon that people can safely make around 35 million tons of nitrogen fertilisers each year and not overload the system. At present, people are making four times that amount and nature can’t cope with it. Farmers use so much N fertiliser, often unnecessarily, that it makes the soil acid and kills wildlife. Because it’s soluble, it dissolves in rain and runs off into rivers, lakes and the sea where it causes havoc by making 'dead zones' where all the oxygen in the water gets used up and nothing can live. Fish and coral reefs die. The best known ‘dead zone’ is in the Gulf of Mexico though there are many others around the planet caused by this over-fertilisation.

Phosphorus is another element which plants need to grow and once again, humans are overdoing it and this adds to the problems of dead zones. People are using twice as much as they can safely use, say the scientists.

Over 400 at the last count in 2008

Fresh Water: something we take for granted

Without fresh water, no people could live. Happily, there’s plenty of it about… but only in some places. In deserts, there’s no water. Humans waste a lot of water without even realising it. In hotter countries, where climate change is starting to take effect, there is not much water. What there is may be dirty and can carry diseases. But people are taking so much water that they’re creating more deserts. You might wonder how that can be.

All fresh water comes from rain. The rain falls on the land and makes big rivers and lakes. Much more of it sinks into the ground and gets stored there. These natural underground stores of water are called aquifers or, simply, groundwater.

As you know, people need fresh clean water to drink and wash. But that’s only a small amount of the vast amount of water that humans take for things like farming and industry. A lot more goes on watering lawns and golf courses in dry regions.

One famous example of people seriously damaging a whole region by taking too much water is the Aral Sea in central Asia (look left at the image). So much water gets used for growing water-hungry cotton that the once-large inland sea has almost dried up. Fishing boats rust in the middle of what is now desert. This has even changed the climate in the region, making it hotter in summer and colder in winter.

Scientists reckon that people can safely take about one third of the water from rivers (but not from those in remote areas). That limit hasn’t been reached yet and, with care, it won’t be.

Land: not enough for everyone

Planet Earth: the blue planet

Most of our planet is covered by the seas and oceans. Only about one third is land, and much of that is either desert or covered in ice. Think of Greenland and almost the entire continent of Antarctica. That doesn’t leave a lot for all the land-living animals – including humans.

Before people started farming about 10,000 years ago, most of the land was either forest or grassland. Today, it’s very different. Most of the forests have been cut down or burned to make space for growing crops or raising animals. Roads and cities take up yet more land. The animals that used to live there are now either extinct or in big trouble, because people need ever more land for food as numbers continue to increase

There’s obviously a limit and the scientists reckon that humans can use at most about 15 per cent of land which isn't covered in ice. Right now, people are farming around 12 per cent and this is still going up. But people are clever and are getting better at growing more food on the same amount of land. This is because farmers and scientists have a better understanding of things like how to breed better food plants and animals (genetics), soil fertility, water needs and so on.

There are now 7 billion humans and the figure increases by about 80 million every year. More humans want more resources and poor people, not surprisingly, want decent living standards like people already have in richer countries.

Breeding can be conventional in which plant breeders select the best crop plant or animal – like evolution speeded up. Or it can employ genetic engineering

Life in Danger – Biodiversity

The world is full of animals and plants. There are millions of them. You see them all the time in wonderful wildlife programmes on the TV so how can there possibly be a problem?

In fact there are two problems:

• Problem 1: animals and plants are going extinct very much faster than normal. I’ll explain why shortly. You will probably have heard of many creatures which are on the edge of becoming extinct. The well known ones are usually pretty, cuddly or large with big teeth. These are the ‘charismatic’ species and get lots of publicity; the celebs of the natural world..The other uninteresting or tiny ones, which are just as important, get ignored or forgotten or people simply don’t yet know they exist.
• Problem 2: all species tend to be part of webs of life, called ecosystems. If part of the web is damaged, then the whole thing can come tumbling down. The importance of these ecosystems is that they provide life-supporting services for people. There are many examples and humans are only just becoming aware of them and their importance – just as many are being damaged or destroyed.

One of the easiest ecosystem services to understand is pollination, mostly done by bees. Wild bees pollinate most of the world’s food crops. No bees, much less food for people – and bees are in serious trouble.

“The annual monetary value of pollination services in global agriculture could be as high as $200 billion” FAO

This is why I wrote a guide called Life in Danger – because much of Life IS in danger. Species are becoming extinct so fast that it’s like a sixth version of the five well-known mass extinctions. I’m sure you’ll know about the last big extinction: it killed off the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, probably because of an asteroid hitting the planet. But this sixth extinction is not natural: it’s being caused by humans and, unlike an asteroid impact, humans should be able to stop it.

Nobody is doing it on purpose – it’s just that people are only just beginning to realise how powerful they are and what terrible things they do to other life without thinking about it. So why’s it happening?

• People are taking over more and more land for farming, roads and cities
• People are cutting down natural forests, destroying not just the trees but all the myriads of living things which live there (think orangutans, gorillas and lemurs to name just three ‘cuddly charismatics’)
• People have brought in alien species (think rats – everywhere, even on remote islands, cane toads and rabbits in Australia and kudzu vine in the USA) which kill or swamp (outcompete) native creatures
• People are poisoning species on land and in water (think coral reefs, sometimes called the rainforests of the oceans) with pollution and chemicals used in farming
• People are hunting all kinds of creatures for food or sport (this especially applies to fishing)
• People are changing the climate so that many species of plants and animals can no longer live where they used to. There’s nowhere for them to go so they die

Species are always dying out and becoming extinct. This has been true since life began. Scientists reckon that the normal rate of extinction is around 10 extinctions every year for every million species.

If everyone were to be united, you humans could fix all the damage you have caused to our planet

Since humans have started their damaging practices, the extinction rate has shot up to 100 times that rate and seems to be increasing even more. The scientists suggest that people need to bring down this rate to something like between 10 to 100 extinctions for every million species each year. This would be a planetary boundary.

That’s still a lot, you might think, but better than what’s happening now. People can do something about this sixth extinction by reversing as many of the bad things as possible on that list I’ve just given you (above). Not easy, I agree, but it can be done by you clever humans, working together for the good of yourselves as well as all life.

Dead zones caused by excess nitrogen are an example which I’ve mentioned in my ‘Nitrogen overload’ page

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Pollution is now such a big thing that it affects people and the animals, plants and complex web of life that humans depend on over the whole planet. For example, when people burn coal, mercury forms a small part of the waste gasses which pour out of smoke stacks into the air. It then drifts around the planet, blown by the wind and eventually comes back to earth in rainfall, so it pollutes lakes and even the oceans. Like POPs, mercury bioaccumulates. Amounts of mercury in large predator fish can be over a million times that of the water they swim in. Not good for the fish or for people who may eat them. More on mercury.

Radioactive pollution is another concern, as some radioactive elements produced by nuclear power remain radioactive for thousands of years, though there are possible ways of dealing with these.

Pollution also affects other planetary boundaries… for the worse. The aerosol boundary is tightly linked to pollution, both because aerosols are themselves pollutants and because they carry pollution like mercury far and wide. And as some creatures have already been driven close to extinction because people have destroyed their homes, they will already be weakened. More pollution and more extreme climate events could tip them over the edge. And climate change means that more crop pests and diseases will migrate so farmers will end up using more pesticides… more pollution.

So how do the scientists decide how much pollution is too much? It’s such a complicated subject that there is no simple way of setting up a planetary boundary. It may not be easy to tackle climate change but at least people know what the limits are for greenhouse gases. With chemical pollution, all that scientists can do is monitor what's happening to living things.
You can do your bit to help cut pollution. Have you read my Pollution Guide? There’s some ideas for action at the end of it.

Mostly the greenhouse gas CO2

Aerosols can make you sickSmoky aerosols like car and truck exhausts can cause asthma

Try my Nine Lives Crossword Puzzle All the answers are in this guide…

The planet’s nine lives: the planetary boundaries in one image.

This wonderful image comes from Johan Rockström and his team at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm, Sweden. They first published the idea of planetary boundaries in 2009. In this image, the green area in the centre is the safe area. Any human activities which lie inside are fine though of course they must stay there. The red areas flag up danger; the more red, the more danger. You can immediately spot the three problem systems because they’re way over the limit. So biodiversity is in really serious trouble. Nitrogen overload isn’t much better and neither is climate change. For now, the other systems are inside the safe green zone.

In this video, Johan Rockström explains all about planetary boundaries.

Sir David Attenborough Presents: Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet

Introduction to the Planetary Boundaries

Let the environment guide our development | Johan Rockstrom

The Nine Planetary Boundaries: Finessing the Anthropocene | Mark Lynas Here’s another important video (2012) featuring award-winning environmental writer Mark Lynas. He explains about planetary boundaries and, importantly, what people can do to make things better. He recently wrote a book titled ‘The God Species’. In it (and in this video), he points out that humans now have such power over the planet and its systems that they can and must use this power to change the planet for the better, just as if they were all-powerful gods. This will mean, among other things, using new nuclear technologies (like fast nuclear reactors which can “burn” nuclear waste), geoengineering and genetic engineering.

Tim Flannery. Is Mass Extinction of Life on Earth Inevitable?

Do we need a new law to save the planet?

And some links:

Tipping towards the unknown The original source of the critical planetary boundaries idea. Crossing the boundaries could be catastrophic, say the researchers. But there is hope.

A safe operating space for humanity The original Nature (2009) paper on the principles of planetary boundaries by Rockström and 28 other scientists from around the world. You can see it at Ecology and Society

The nine planetary boundaries Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden, and where it all began

James Hansen. Why I must speak out about climate change

The End
Good luck!

Unlike past occasions, when a single species or group of species has fundamentally altered the biosphere—the oxygenation of the oceans, the laying down of the coal swamps— our species is in the unusual position of control over the outcome We know that change is occurring, we know that we are responsible, we know what will happen if it continues, we know that we can stop it, and we know how. The question is whether we will try.

qoute from Otherlands. A World in the Making. Thomas Halliday, 2022 .