figure 8 figure 9 figure 10 figure 11 figure 12 figure 13 figure 14 figure 15
Figure 8 This is how Italy looked during the last Ice Age. The dotted curve is today's Italian coastline, and this is Italy how it looked during the last Hot Age. You in Japan will be able to more or less imagine how Japan would look under these conditions, in particular the Tokyo and Kansai agglomerations. I read the newspapers last week that the island of Tuvalu was in the process of relocating people who live there because of a tiny sea level rise of some perhaps 30 centimeters so far. This already threatens the existence of Tuvalu. Figure 9 What is going to happen if parts of Greenland break off? Theoretically this could happen and, in fact, it could happen rapidly in a non-linear fashion. Some 7,800 years ago there was such a non-linear event. Until 7,800 years ago Labrador and the Hudson Bay were covered by ice as is Greenland today, and in a matter of a few decades, it could have been a few weeks, the sea water table rose by 7 or 8 meters. People say that this is the historic background for the deluge or "Atlantis saga" at that time because of God's making. Mankind had not a lot to do with it, but suffered from it. But this time, global warming is essentially human made. Figure 10 So much for the climate challenge. We seem to be well advised to aim at stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations. In order to achieve that, according again to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, what we would have to do would be to reduce carbon dioxide by at least 50 percent. On the other hand, energy experts tell us that we are going to have a doubling instead. Why? Well, quite easily because people in India and Bangladesh and Egypt and China, etc., and, of course, all Africa, South America, etc., are going to do the same as we have shown them, to be the core of our industrial success story, including our story of becoming clean and rich. So, the gap is opening before us at least as large as the factor of 4. Bio is absolutely right that this is but a step in the direction of a factor of 10. Figure 11 Let me, from this climate story, turn to a different way of putting the same challenge. This is the per capita carbon dioxide emission where you see easily that India, Brazil, China, Ethiopia have much lower carbon dioxide emissions per capita than the industrialized countries. Figure 12 This is the other story. It's the ecological footprint according to Matthis Wackernagel and William Rees. It is the size of the area that we need to produce food, to have nice conference rooms like this, for our living, for our cars, the streets, the cotton for our underwear, the wool for our suits. Of course, the sheep need space, and there must be space for the cattle feed, etc., etc. And then, of course, energy also is quite area-intensive. You can have some kind of renewable energy equivalent for oil or uranium because oil and uranium are both exhaustible resources. They are not available for a very long time. Actually, the reach, the availability of uranium, is not larger than the availability of natural gas. Don't believe that nuclear power is going to be the solution, leaving aside all the problems of terrorism, etc. Figure 13 Now we see that, as we would expect, the footprints, which is the red color, are normally larger than the available capacity even for the world. The latter statement is perhaps a riddle for you and results from the fact that the energy-related footprint is, of course, not now used in renewable energies because we are still privileged by using some fossil fuels and some uranium, but this is not a sustainable kind of energy use. That we in Germany or Japan or in the United States have larger footprints than are available is partly explained by the fact that we export the footprints to places like Papua New Guinea or Indonesia or Siberia. The footprints are, in a sense, equivalent to the ecological rucksacks. Figure 14 Figure 15 This is sort of a caricature for the ecological rucksack of a gold ring, a wedding ring. It's quite a heavy gift and, again, not sustainable. And then you see that the ecological rucksacks are quite heavy already, if you take the direct rucksacks. If you add the hidden flows it gets even larger.