Some other topics that we plan to detail - a partial list:

   Some of the topics overlap, but there are natural groupings that cause this.

• Carbon capture and sequestration
• The future of carbon sinks - does afforestation buy us only a little time?  Don't neglect the change in albedo at high latitudes as a contrary warming factor
• Aquaculture impacts
• Desalination as a water source
• Climate change - proper ways to attribute increased risk, rather than causation of events
• Using risk-based management and the principle of insurance against adverse change
• Resource constraints in energy technologies, including water and minerals
• Population planning as a central need in global-change strategies
• Desertification and grassland-to-woodland changes
• Reform of cost:benefit analyses, to include equity, non-monetary values, asymmetries and irrationalities in markets and nonmarket transactions, and realistic attribution of external costs and benefits, such as ecosystem services
• Winners and losers in crop production - changing the social, economic, and political landscapes
• Sustainable tourism - an illusion, if only for its large carbon footprint?
• The hydrogen economy and some significant downsides - losses of energy and of H₂ product, changes in reducing power of the atmosphere, low power density - all known problems - what do we offer?
• Lithium batteries for electric vehicles: only 13 MT of mineable reserves are known, sufficient for perhaps 1.5 billion passenger vehicles.  This is the expected number of personal vehicles (cars only, not trucks) worldwide in mid-century.  The demand could generate a new "lithium OPEC", given that the largest reserves of lithium are in Chile, Australia, China, and Russia.  Lithium use would meet with rising costs in any event, and hard limits.  Considerable implications exist for technologists, policymakers, primary industries, and consumers.  

            The estimate of the number of (small) vehicles that can be supplied with lithium batteries is based on the need for about 4.3 kg of lithium per car:

• The energy storage of lithium per gram atomic weight (gAW, 7 g) is close to the theoretical limit of (voltage)*(current transferred per gAW), or 3.6 V * 96,500 coulombs per gAW.  This is 350 kJ per gAW or 50 kJ per g.   Real values are about 90% as high, or about 45 kJ per g of lithium (45 MJ per kg).  We can convert this to other convenient units, using 1 kWh = 3.6 MJ.  Then, per kg of lithium, batteries can store about 12.5 kWh.  (Assembled batteries have most of their mass in components other than lithium; the best commercial batteries - which are not yet robust to recharging - store about 1.6% as much on a mass basis, or 0.2 kWh per kg of battery.)
• A desirable range for an electric vehicle is 400 km or more.   At normal highway speeds, a car of modest size uses about 15 kW of power (about 20 hp, in old units).  At 112 km/h (70 mph), the car traverses 400 km in about 3.6 h.  Thereby, it consumes about 3.6 h * 15 kW = 54 kWh.
• The mass of lithium needed is 54 kWh/ (12.5 kWh/kg) = 4.3 kg.
• Currently known mineable reserves of lithium total about 13 MT worldwide, or 13 billion kg.   Dividing this by 4.3 kg per car yields 3 billion cars.  We might assume that only 50% of Li goes into car batteries but that double the current reserves might be found.   The price would become progressively higher as reserves were depleted. 
• Batteries would need replacement perhaps every 5 y.  The annual demand per billion cars would be (1/5)(4.3 MT) or 0.86 MT.  If recycling captures 90% of the lithium content, the annual demand per billion extant cars would be 1/10 of the total demand, or 0.09 MT.  This would match the initial (capital) demand in furnishing batteries for 1 billion cars (4.3 MT) in about 50 years.  Therefore, with capital plus maintenance use over 50 years, 8.6 MT of lithium would be needed per billion cars.
• Sustainability of agriculture in view of fossil fuel use, declining water and nutrient supplies
• Pollinator problems with

• phenology offsets induced by climate change,
• changes in ranges and activities of disease vectors affecting pollinators
• exotic species
• diseases (colony collapse disorder of honeybees, e.g.)

                Big problem already in CA - e.g., with almonds

• Loss of food security

• Ex outsourcing
• Ex fossil-fuel dependence
• Ex emerging and outbreaking crop diseases
• Ex terrorism (less of a worry than the above!)
• Ex loss of gene pool
• In wild species available for gene introgression
• In breeding programs, from conglomeration of seed companies
• Ex loss of water supplies
• Ex loss of arable land
• Erosion
• Salinization
• Ex loss of wild populations - ocean fish, ...

• Depletion of the phosphorus supply in the next 40y - nutrient redistribution w/o recovery

• Extends to N  also
• Both contribute to runoff and coastal dead zones
• Lack of long-term relevance of vegetative buffer zones

• Solar photovoltaics - centralized and distributed (what new spin? what apps in other countries?)  Covering a range of issues - efficiency, siting, habitat conversion, tying to the grid, economics, international competition for PV production, balance with other alternative energy sources (wind, biofuels, solar thermal…)
• Emerging infectious diseases.  What can we do that's new, that 10 Army cooperative centers, the CDC, and others can't/won't do?  Most likely, a framework to account for:

• Rising CO2 effects on plant and animal biogeographic distributions (including vectors for human. livestock, and plant diseases), and for the role of extreme events defined properly in biological terms
• Introduction of exotic plants and animals

• Alternative power for transportation

• Some technologies represent a useful if partial move from fossil fuels
• Hybrid vehicles - substantial recovery of energy in regenerative braking
• Fully electric vehicles, if electric power is generated at centralized stations with only partially renewable sources
• Others present the possibility of fully renewable power

·        Fully electric vehicles with electric power generated solely from renewable sources

·        The hydrogen economy, if hydrogen is generated directly by solar photolysis of water, or electrolysis with electric power from renewable sources

·        Fuel cells, reducing fossil-fuel use via higher thermodynamic efficiency

• Deforestation
• Soil erosion

• Diverse causal factors that force it:
• Poor farming practices, in both developed and Third Worlds
• Deforestation, particularly on thin tropical soils
• Past history of erosion: positive feedbacks operate
• Root causes / upstream causes: overpopulation, lack of capital
• Diverse factors that ameliorate it:
• Better plowing, fallowing, contouring practices
• Low-till and no-till agriculture

• CCS - carbon capture and sequestration at central power plants
• Carbon markets and regulations: how should nations, corporations involve selves in cap and trade, afforestation, etc.
• Biodiversity
• Trends (basically, losses from extinctions at rates far above background levels) and their causes
• Consequences of losses and changes (redistribution of species, if not losses)

• Loss of utilitarian values - wild plants for crop breeding, diverse organisms for pharmaceuticals, many species for ecosystem services that are often not readily discerned
• Loss of amenity values and biophilial values
• Difficulties of assessment, even within an agreed-upon uniform, admittedly limited framework such as an economic one
• Challenges from ecosystem connectivity: loss of some valued species may result from loss of species that have no direct value but that stabilize the presence of the valued species - e.g., keystone species

• Amelioration strategies - refuges, captive breeding, conservation easements, etc. - and their limitations and tradeoffs
• Exotic / invasive species
• Sustainability of materials use, especially metals, in view of limits on rates of recycling from manufactured items with intimate mixing of materials
• (Ozone hole)

• Black carbon from combustion of fossil fuels and biomass (deforestation, wildfires)

• Recently appreciated for its:

§         High rate of production globally and regionally

§         Effects on climate and hydrology via effects on

o       tropospheric absorption of sunlight

o       acceleration of snowmelt

• Controllable in industrial application, as with new diesel technology
• Getting alternative energy sources for electric power generation on the grid in the US
• Problems of poor grid coverage in many areas that are well-suited for generating alternative energy - e.g., sparsely settled plains in western NM and TX. 

§         Natural economic decisions - low consumer demand in these areas

§         Utility decisions - abandoning redundancy in transmission lines after deregulation, to save money

§         Consequences: long waits for tie-ins - up to 47 years in California

• Problems of grid maintenance and ageing

§         Decreased investment of utilities in maintenance after deregulation; equipment failures are expected to become severe without very large investment (several trillion dollars)

§         Increased stress on transmission lines, from increased use of lines for power trading rather than load balancing; resultant loop currents cause failures and damage

• Energy efficiency - manufacturing, commercial, residential

• HVAC - heat exchanger use
• Green building in general - How much is true greenness over the life cycle limited by large use of materials in construction (capital energy cost, for one)?
• Coastal dead zones caused by fertilizer runoff from farmland in large watersheds, such as the Mississippi River basin - covered in part, earlier
• Population control - overpopulation as the root and/or exacerbator of most problems
• Amelioration methods - beginning with the education of women
• Oceanic heat conveyor (thermohaline circulation)- shutdown under global warming?
• Problems of farm policy: the corn economy for:
• Livestock production

§         Loss of nutritive value in meat (omega-3 fatty acids)

§         Suboptimal digestion of animals à required use of antibiotics à generation of antibiotic resistance in microbes

• Ethanol production

§         Poor energy return in many systems

§         Expansion of ethanol crop area at expense of food crop area, wildlife habitat

§         Enhanced soil erosion

• Expanded use of high-fructose corn syrup in human diets

§         Obesity à health problems, especially diabetes à high costs of medical care

o  Origins in federal farm policies (Earl Butz); political life of its own

• Antibiotic resistance of human and livestock pathogens
• Past extremes - how did species  come through them?  Are there lessons or principles to be derived that can be applied to current extremes (e.g., global temperatures, water pollution)?  Do the rates of development of current extremes, and the co-occurrence of many extremes at once negate the potential for species to acclimate physiologically or to adapt genetically?
• Depletion of oceanic fish stocks
• General applicability of the principle of insurance to global change risks
• Evolutionary medicine - in some aspects, it is tied to global change (e.g., the management of emerging infectious diseases)
• Sustainability of food crop production in large regions
• Challenge: supplies of nitrogen fertilizer or replacment by enhanced biological nitrogen fixation in symbioses

§         Half the people alive today are supported by N fertilizers produced by industrial N₂ fixation (Haber-Bosch process)

§         Is this process sustainable, especially on an equitable basis in different world regions, given the high energy cost (3% of world energy use)?

• Challenge: climate change

§         Changes in precipitation - mean levels, droughts, floods

§         Changes in temperature, humidity, wind regimes, etc.

o       Physiological tolerance limits

o       Effects of biological extreme events - dominant determinants, more so than climatic means?

§         Changes in activities of weedy competitors, pathogens, and pests

 

 

There are many areas where there is already much development and our contribution would likely be peripheral; here, we can point to exceptionally valuable findings and tools that are not widely appreciated.  This helps build a customer base (but we can't spend a great deal of time on it).  Examples:

 

• Deforestation detection: Greg Asner and colleagues at the Carnegie Institution (Global Ecology) have developed CLASLite, which processes Landsat satellite imagery to detailed time series of deforestation.  The method is easy to use.  It appears to be open-source.  (Put in the URL)
• Carbon stocks in soils, quantified for carbon credits: there are many groups doing this in concert on different landscapes, such as cropland, rangeland, and forest.