Heliophage

The Observer brings a conservation story that strikes a chord — complaints over the plan to let Cuckmere Haven, on the Sussex coast, flood. This is a national story because pictures of the Seven Sisters from Cuckmere are iconic (see above) and because a landowner who is to be inconvenienced is a major figure in publishing, which is the sort of connection that can help a story. It is a news story thanks to the fact that one of the little cottages overlooking the haven from the west is the setting for some of Atonement, which is probably not going to win many (any?) oscars tonight (my suspicion is that it has no real chance in any big category and that the craft stuff it might win for will mostly be taken by Sweeney Todd, though Keira Knightley’s modelling may secure a win in the costumes category; more in this vein below).

The flooding plan would allow the haven to revert to wetlands by ceasing to make efforts to control the ingress of the sea. This will mean that the current rather managed feel of the area will be lost (and that people walking from Eastbourne to Seaford at low tide, as I did a few years ago, will no longer be able to take a short cut by wading across the mouth of the river and so will have to walk a mile or so inland to Exceat and back out, which could, I’ll admit, be a drag). At the same time it will improve the area for wildlife and save a bunch of money.

It will also, according to Nigel Newton of Bloomsbury, who owns one of them, endanger the three Atonement-linked coastguard cottages that stand to the west. They are, frankly, not as pretty in real life as they can be made in photos, but if I owned one I’ll admit that the thought of it being undercut by erosion would not be welcome to me.

That said: you buy cottages on clifftops with certain risks attached. If there weren’t any erosion going on there wouldn’t be a cliff. And I imagine there is some sort of compensation in place (if there weren’t, surely the article would have mentioned it). And there’s a chance the erosion won’t do the cottages in. More generally, the point of conservation is not — or should not be — simply to keep things as they were. Conservation in the current world must also be about maximising potential and managing change. If one is to take seriously the idea that diminishing wetlands are bad for the environment, then saving money by getting one re-established makes a lot of sense; if we do this sort of thing enough maybe Britain’s overpowerful bird-watcher lobby will be more amenable to seeing sense on matters such as the Severn Barrage.

Cuckmere was the way it was, and we have lots of pictures and (if we are lucky) memories to prove it. It will be the way it will be, and we will build up images and memories of the process by which it changes. More than one set of images of the place seems to me to be a plus, not a minus, for those of us lucky enough to see the transition. In some ways I’d love there to be more change. I sometimes feel genuinely, though I’ll admit also absurdly, sorry that I will not live to see another ice age, in part because I would love to see the sea cliffs of the downs from the lowlands that would then be beneath them. He know nothing who only the Holocene knows…

What’s all this got to do with Eating the Sun? Well the South Downs play a role in the book (at some time I’ll get round to posting the chapter they’re in online as a sample). And I’m getting down that way next week for the Brighton Science Festival’s Big Science Sunday, (where Jim Endersby and Richard Fortey are speaking too, as it happens…). But also just because, the more distant I get from having written Eating the Sun, the clearer its central message is to me: processes trump things. Think of energy in terms of flows, not in terms of stocks of fuel. Think of nature the same way. Appreciate places — including peculiarly lovely ones, like Cuckmere — as the intersection of a skein of processes. Expect them to change and appreciate it. Don’t be fatalistic — there’s bad change as well as good. But don’t overvalue the static, even when you love it.

Postscript: after that burst of sunday afternoon preaching, some secular prognostication. In order — No Country For Old Men, Daniel Day Lewis, Julie Christie (though Ellen Page would suit me fine), Javier Bardem, Tilda Swinton (on the basis that the Blanchett vote splits, plus she was amazing), The Coen Brothers, Tony Gilroy or Diablo Cody, Coens again. Deakins for cinematography, and then editing is a tough call. Can it really be the Coens yet again? Personally I’d like to see it go to Christopher Rouse, just for the Waterloo sequnce in the Bourne film. But maybe when I get back from There Will be Blood, which I’m just off to, I’ll be all about Dylan Tichenor. And fingers crossed of course for Kevin O’Connell…

Pictures on a creative commons licence from SteveMcN and Abridgeover

I wish I was finding time to write here, but I’m not — however kind Sean has sent me some more trees, rather inspiring ones, and they are as good a post in and of themselves as anything I’m likely to write at the moment.

And since Sean has I’m inspired me to the pictorial, here’s another London snapshot. Those of you not in London (as I am not, at the moment) may not appreciate that though what you see in Sean’s pic looks like a clear winter day, it was in fact a clear very springlike day in the season formerly known as winter. These magnolias camellias [yes I'm a moron] of Nancy’s make the point.

This week the International editions of Time are doing their annual “celebrating heroes” thing, praising people making a difference, and this year the chosen people are heroes of the environment. (Not available in the US print edition, I’m afraid — but hey, you get a J-Lo interview that we miss out on…) It’s a slightly odd list to my eye, satisfyingly broad-based (it has many people on it about whom most of us will know little or anything, but for whom there’s a good case to be made) but with some people on it that I wouldn’t choose and some omissions that I would have liked to see filled (and since they asked me for advice and I didn’t give as much as I should have, I really shouldn’t complain). It’s particularly weird, the week after the Nobel prize, not to see anyone associated with the IPCC singled out — or for that matter the IPCC itself. It’s also odd not to see much about farming and new farming approaches: we get the Prince of Wales (about whose troubling beliefs I wrote disobligingly for Time’s rivals Newsweek back in 1999, but the piece seems lost to the web Update: now found) and Jose Goldemberg, Brazilian biofuels pioneer, and that seems to be it.

My contribution is a short paean to Jim Lovelock. Excerpt:

Lovelock has been my subject, friend and inspiration for 20 years. Humble, stubborn, charming, visionary, proud and generous, his ideas about Gaia have started a change in the conception of biology that may serve as a vital complement to the revolution that brought us the structures of dna and proteins and the genetic code. That revolution came from the realization that biology required an understanding of living systems at a molecular level; Lovelock’s revolution, as yet unfinished, seeks to understand their mechanisms on a planetary level.

One thing that intrigued me is in the article written by Jim Hansen on Paul Crutzen. Hansen writes:

We would be wise to heed Crutzen on global warming, too, because he can fairly be described as the chief scientific caretaker of life on the planet … In contrast to the prompt attention paid to the ozone threat, foot-dragging on climate change has convinced Crutzen that major geo-engineering may be needed to cool the planet. He suggests a massive injection of sulfur into the stratosphere to form particles that reflect sunlight away. It’s a radical proposal that just might jolt some politicians into realizing what researchers learned long ago: that this scientists’ scientist always seems to be one step ahead of everybody else.

I don’t think Hansen (who’s also one of Time’s heroes, written up by Jeff Sachs) has been so sanguine about geoengineering before. Interesting times (Nature feature | blog post | and another.)

Picture of Jim Lovelock by Sandy Lovelock

…along with a few thousand other people, and some movie guy. Although I am not uncritical of the IPCC process, I do think it is a grand and important project, and I’m proud of him and the role he played in it as an author on Chapter 5 of Working Group II in the fourth assessment report.

This week in Nature we have a news story on an attempt to follow up Frank Keppler’s work on methane produced aerobically by green plants which we published early last year (news story | paper). The Keppler piece, which suggested that methane emissions from green plants were a significant but previously unappreciated factor in global methane emissions, caused quit a lot of fuss, understandably, in the media — since methane is a greenhouse gas which, over short time horizons, is about 75 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — and quite a lot of befuddlement among plant scientists. If it were true, it would have significant implications for the way that people model methane production, and the levels of production that one might predict in a warming world. The debate rumbled on last year (another news report, this time by my colleague Quirin).

The new work that Tom Dueck and colleagues have published in New Phytologist (paper), though , finds no methane emissions from plants at all.

Obviously, not necessarily the last word. As Mike Hopkin reports:

Both groups have criticized the other’s choice of experimental method. Dueck says that Keppler’s group kept plants in sealed plastic containers instead of flow chambers, and exposed them to sources of stress such as bright sunlight and high temperature, which could have produced methane as an artefact. Keppler retorts that the use of ¹³C is an artificial piece of chemical trickery with unknown effects on plant metabolism, and also argues that methane production can vary by up to three orders of magnitude between species.

Keppler says other teams will be publishing results that back him up on the methane; but Mike reports that at least one other team is siding strongly with Dueck.

What Mike doesn’t mention, because an evil news editor (me) wouldn’t give him the space, is that various people in the community have pointed to an interesting contrast between the way plant scientists responded to the discovery of isoprene emissions and the Keppler work. With isoprene people said oh that’s interesting, replicated, and got on with it. This work has had a far frostier welcome.

On isoprene, this is as good a place as any to mention an interesting perspective by Manuel Lerdau in Science a few weeks ago on a possible isoprene-ozone positive feedback (paper). Isoprene within leaves protects the plants that produce it against ozone. But when isoprene gets out into the air, as it will, it can react with nitrogen oxides to make ozone. Only some species produce isoprene, and so these isoprene-producing plants both protect themselves against ozone and, in Nox-rich environments, increase the ozone stress on their non-isoprene-producing neighbours.

If this effect is real, it might have significant effects on forest composition over the next century.

One last thing to note on the Keppler story: it led to Carl Zimmer saying something nice about us, and that is always a good thing. As of course is Carl.

This post cross-posted to Climate Feedback;if you want to comment head over there.