March, 2023

Thanks

Much of my climate news comes from The Daily Climate, whose wonderful subscription service clues me in to what's going on each day. Another great source of stories (and commentaries) comes from my friend Jim Poyser, at Apocadocs. Unfortunately he and his pal Michael stopped collecting news at the election of U.S. Unindicted Co-conspirator Forty-Five, which was a frickin' party pooper of a day, I'll tell ya. Their recovery scenario is perhaps more progressive than the Green New Deal (and their book is darkly inspirational, and terribly funny — and free).

Quotes

  • James Baldwin:
    • "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction…." — Notes of a Native Son
    • "It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." — No Name in the Street
    • "Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced." — As Much Truth As One Can Bear
  • "If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there." — Malcolm X, TV interview, Mar. 1964
  • "… all you can talk about is money, and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!" — Greta Thunberg (address to the UN, 2019)
  • "Poverty is the worst form of violence." — Mahatma Gandhi
  • "The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands." — Genesis 9:2
  • "[Y]ou cannot postpone a rendezvous with reality forever." Nick Cohen, Observer columnist
  • “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” — Voltaire
  • "Any course in US history is inauthentic — worse, is a lie — if it doesn't teach the experiences of people like Fannie Lou Hamer." [ael: me, late to the game…:(]
  • "I want to be a great ancestor…." Overheard on an ACLU zoom call….
  • "A question ain't really a question if you know the answer too." John Prine (Far from me)

And Now for the News:

March, 2023

3/29/2023

  1. 10 Big Findings from the 2023 IPCC Report on Climate Change:
    • 23-03-15-IPCC-report_Insights-global-warming-illustration.png?VersionId=BTjgjaXmIm7UyVUn1bgDFAIVuDl07CIQ&itok=P0E4K-Mk&w=600
    • 23-03-15-IPCC-report_Insights-risks-rising-temps.png?VersionId=qkurMD.JHqdb6XwrwFpEOGDhBKZkUPON&itok=eS8iMsnj&w=600
    • 23-03-15-IPCC-report_Insights-ecosystem-based-adaptation.png?VersionId=OSzDJLYu1n_j4.kzGC.Vut6vm5kbmxI5&itok=AXEsSM8a&w=600
    • 23-03-15-IPCC-report_Insights-10-solutions-mitigate-climate-change.png?VersionId=okwmTSgnrkYNOEM.sHqZDgdFEPwxk8cE&itok=zp3Z38AI&w=600
  2. Why sea creatures are washing up dead around the world
    • Videos from the scene showed a thick carpet of silver fish carcasses on top of the water, and residents complained of the stench of rotting fish carcasses. Joy Becker, an aquatic animal health expert at the University of Sydney, described it as a “blackwater event” where flooding caused a lot of organic material to enter the river system. That was followed by a period of “intense warm air temperatures” that led to a “very low oxygen event” in the river, she said. Fish need more oxygen to survive warmer temperatures, according to officials. “Why do we have so much flooding and why do we have such extreme air temperatures?” Becker said. “What we’re seeing is a result of climate change.”

3/28/2023

  1. Can a Machine Know That We Know What It Knows?: Some researchers claim that chatbots have developed theory of mind. But is that just our own theory of mind gone wild?
    • Mind reading is common among us humans. Not in the ways that psychics claim to do it, by gaining access to the warm streams of consciousness that fill every individual's experience, or in the ways that mentalists claim to do it, by pulling a thought out of your head at will. Everyday mind reading is more subtle: We take in people's faces and movements, listen to their words and then decide or intuit what might be going on in their heads.
    • Recently, Michal Kosinski, a psychologist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, made just that argument: that large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 — next-word prediction machines trained on vast amounts of text from the internet — have developed theory of mind. His studies have not been peer reviewed, but they prompted scrutiny and conversation among cognitive scientists, who have been trying to take the often asked question these days — Can ChatGPT do this? — and move it into the realm of more robust scientific inquiry. What capacities do these models have, and how might they change our understanding of our own minds?
  2. World ‘population bomb’ may never go off as feared, finds study: Population likely to peak sooner and lower than expected with beneficial results – but environment is priority
    • Previous studies have painted a grimmer picture. Last year, the UN estimated the world population would hit 9.7 billion by the middle of the century and continue to rise for several decades afterwards. The new projection, released on Monday, was carried out by the Earth4All collective of leading environmental science and economic institutions, including the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Stockholm Resilience Centre and the BI Norwegian Business School. They were commissioned by the Club of Rome for a followup to its seminal Limits to Growth study more than 50 years ago.
    • In the business-as-usual case, it foresees existing policies being enough to limit global population growth to below 9 billion in 2046 and then decline to 7.3 billion in 2100. This, they warn, is too little too late: “Although the scenario does not result in an overt ecological or total climate collapse, the likelihood of regional societal collapses nevertheless rises throughout the decades to 2050, as a result of deepening social divisions both internal to and between societies. The risk is particularly acute in the most vulnerable, badly governed and ecologically vulnerable economies.”

3/27/2023

  1. What’s ‘Woke’ and Why It Matters: A marker of just how much American politics has changed over the last eight years.
    • Whatever you think of the word, the rise of “woke” to ubiquity is a helpful marker of just how much American politics has changed over the last eight years. There’s a new set of issues poised to loom over the coming campaign, from critical race theory and nonbinary pronouns to “cancel culture” and the fate of university courses. Fifteen years ago, I would have said these topics could divide a small liberal arts campus, not American politics. I would have been wrong.
    • The new left speaks with righteousness, urgency and moral clarity. While liberals always held strong beliefs, their righteousness was tempered by the need to accommodate a more conservative electorate. Mr. Obama generally emphasized compromise, commonality and respect for conservatives, “even when he disagreed.”
    • Today’s new left consciously strives to include, protect and promote marginalized groups. In everyday life, this means prioritizing, trusting and affirming the voices and experiences of marginalized groups, encouraging people to share their pronouns, listing identities on social media profiles, and more. This extension of politics to everyday life is a difference from Obama-era liberalism in its own right. While the Obama-era liberals mostly focused on policy, the new left emphasizes the personal as political.
    • The new left sees society as a web of overlapping power structures or systems of oppression, constituted by language and norms as much as law and policy. This view is substantially informed by modern academic scholarship that explains how power, domination and oppression persist in liberal societies…. This does not readily lend itself to a “politics of hope,” as virtually everything about America might have to change to end systemic racism. No law will do it. No candidate can promise it. But it does imbue individual actions that subvert oppressive hierarchies with liberatory and emancipatory implications, helping explain the urgency of activists to critique language and challenge norms in everyday life.
  2. The Finns hold the secret of happiness – and it is not what you might expect: Finland’s tourist board is running a competition to win a happiness masterclass. Sadly, the prize doesn’t involve drinking in your underwear
    • Alternatively, according to a Finnish sociology professor bemused by his country’s reputation for relentless positivity, Finns are all about low expectations: “A cultural orientation that sets realistic limits to one’s expectations for a good life.” Low expectations are definitely in my wheelhouse, but I have no idea how to make enticingly Instagrammable content about them. I bet Kaurismäki would know.
  3. A quarter of world population lacks safe drinking water: UN
    • According to the report, water use has been increasing globally by roughly 1% per year over the last 40 years “and is expected to grow at a similar rate through to 2050, driven by a combination of population growth, socio-economic development and changing consumption patterns.” Connor said that actual increase in demand is happening in developing countries and emerging economies where it is driven by industrial growth and especially the rapid increase in the population of cities. It is in these urban areas “that you’re having a real big increase in demand,” he said. With agriculture using 70% of all water globally, Connor said, irrigation for crops has to be more efficient — as it is in some countries that now use drip irrigation, which saves water. “That allows water to be available to cities,” he said.
    • As for water pollution, Connor said, the biggest source of pollution is untreated wastewater. “Globally, 80% of wastewater is released to the environment without any treatment,” he said, “and in many developing countries it’s pretty much 99%.”
  4. Big Oil is selling off its polluting assets — with unintended consequences: Shell’s divestments in Nigeria help the company meet its green goals. But villagers and watchdogs say conditions have worsened after the sales.
    • Local companies that have acquired the Niger Delta assets from international firms have failed to respond quickly to oil spills such as the one in Nembe, environmental activists say. Greenhouse gas emissions from gas flaring — the burning off of natural gas, a byproduct of oil extraction — have increased dramatically in multiple cases after Nigerian companies took over, according to data from flare tracker Capterio and reports by the Environmental Defense Fund and Stakeholder Democracy Network. At the same time, according to several analyses by these two groups and others, information about those effects has become scarce, because the local companies tend to make fewer environmental commitments and set fewer reporting standards.
    • Executives at Shell and other major companies said their divestments have been prompted mainly by unrest and oil theft in Nigeria, where government regulators report that hundreds of thousands of barrels are stolen each day. In a 2021 speech to investors, Shell’s CEO at the time, Ben van Beurden, said the company’s remaining assets “continue to be subject to sabotage and theft despite our efforts to limit and respond to illegal activity.” He said that Shell’s onshore activities in Nigeria were no longer worth the risk and that the company would focus on its offshore oil assets in Nigeria.
    • Even when measured per barrel of oil, Nigerian companies tend to flare much more gas on average than do international ones, according to data collected by Stakeholder Democracy. The data showed that domestic companies flare more than 10 times as much gas per barrel of oil produced. If the two highest-flaring companies are excluded, local firms still flare nearly five times as much. At the Nembe operation, which Aiteo purchased from Shell in 2015, Capterio’s data shows that flaring increased nearly threefold between 2014 and 2016. And at Eruemukohwarien, which Nigerian companies purchased from Shell at the end of 2012, the amount of flaring has doubled over the past decade, and a massive flare at that site now emits the equivalent emissions of 48,000 cars daily, according to Capterio’s data.

3/26/2023

  1. Gordon E. Moore, Intel Co-Founder Behind Moore’s Law, Dies at 94: His prediction in the 1960s about rapid advances in computer chip technology charted a course for the age of high tech.
    • Mr. Moore had wanted to be a teacher but could not get a job in education. He later called himself an “accidental entrepreneur, because he became a billionaire as a result of an initial $500 investment in the fledgling microchip business, which turned electronics into one of the world’s largest industries.
    • And it was he, his colleagues said, who saw the future. In 1965, in what became known as Moore’s Law, he predicted that the number of transistors that could be placed on a silicon chip would double at regular intervals for the foreseeable future, thus increasing the data-processing power of computers exponentially. He added two corollaries later: The evolving technology would make computers more and more expensive to build, yet consumers would be charged less and less for them because so many would be sold. Moore’s Law held up for decades.
    • This was the group that advocated the use of the thumbnail-thin chips of silicon, a highly polished, chemically treated sandy substance — one of the most common natural resources on earth — because of what turned out to be silicon’s amazing hospitality in housing smaller and smaller electronic circuitry that could work at higher and higher speeds. With its silicon microprocessors, the brains of a computer, Intel enabled American manufacturers in the mid-1980s to regain the lead in the vast computer data-processing field from their formidable Japanese competitors. By the ’90s, Intel had placed its microprocessors in 80 percent of the computers that were being made worldwide, becoming the most successful semiconductor company in history.
    • In the early 1970s, Intel’s 4000 series “computer on a chip” began the revolution in personal computers — although Intel itself missed the opportunity to manufacture a PC, for which Mr. Moore partly blamed his own shortsightedness. “Long before Apple, one of our engineers came to me with the suggestion that Intel ought to build a computer for the home,” he recalled. “And I asked him, ‘What the heck would anyone want a computer for in his home?’”
    • In the 1960s, when Mr. Moore began in electronics, a single silicon transistor sold for $150. Later, $10 would buy more than 100 million transistors. Mr. Moore once wrote that if cars advanced as quickly as computers, “they would get 100,000 miles to the gallon and it would be cheaper to buy a Rolls-Royce than park it. (Cars would also be a half an inch long.)”
    • Mr. Moore himself commented from time to time on the inevitable end of Moore’s Law. “It can’t continue forever,” he said in a 2005 interview with Techworld magazine. “The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens.”
  2. Wash, blow dry and 1.5 degrees please: hairdressers trained to talk about climate action: A salon in Sydney is spearheading workshops for hairdressers on how to steer small talk about the weather into conversations about global heating
    • “The weather is the hook. You can take a cue from that,” says Prof Lesley Hughes, one of two climate scientists who have helped run workshops to give hairdressers the tools for times when the conversation turns to the existential. “You can show the science until you’re blue in the face but what can be more effective are people who you trust talking about it. It’s important to show it’s not a subject to be afraid of.” More than 400 hairdressers have attended workshops as part of a project called A Brush With Climate being driven by Paloma’s owner, Paloma Rose Garcia.
    • “For women, hair is so much a part of our identity and there’s a lot of trust that goes into that. You’re letting someone touch your hair and so you have to like them. That trust allows them to start that conversation. “There have been so many salons affected by fires and floods in the last few years in Australia. We could see what was happening to small businesses and how they were being affected by climate change – they’re casualties of what’s happening.”
  3. The professor trying to protect our private thoughts from technology: Prof Nita Farahany argues in her new book, The Battle for Your Brain, that intrusions into the mind are so close that lawmakers should enact protections
    • “All of the major tech companies have massive investments in multifunctional devices that have brain sensors in them,” Farahany said. “Neural sensors will become part of our everyday technology and a part of how we interact with that technology.” Coupled with advances in science aimed at decoding and rewriting of brain functions are widespread and pose a discernible risk, Farahany argues, and one that requires urgent action to bring under agreed controls.
    • “We have a moment to get this right before that happens, both by becoming aware of what’s happening and by making critical choices we need to make now to decide how we use the technology in ways that are good and not misused or oppressive.” The brain, Farahany warns, is the one space we still have for reprieve and privacy, and where people can cultivate a true sense of self and where they can keep how they’re feeling and their reactions to themselves. “In the very near future that won’t be possible,” she said.
  4. Why Americans should eat lentils every day:
    • Lentils conceal their superpowers with a dowdy exterior. Pound for pound, raw lentils have more protein than steak. While not as protein-dense once cooked, they pack even more iron than meat, in addition to other vitamins and minerals. Fast to cook, easy to store and exalted enough to be buried with the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, these seeds have sustained empires. Roman soldiers lived on the essential portable protein over their long campaigns.
    • Lentils are pulses, or the edible seed of a legume plant. This category of dry beans or seeds — as opposed to fresh green beans — encompasses everything from black beans to chickpeas to pigeon peas. They’re older than agriculture, as archaeological evidence suggests humans collected wild varieties more than 13,000 years ago. There’s a good reason. While not as dense or digestible as meat once they are cooked, lentils become a complete protein similar to meat when combined with many grains. They’re also a slow burn, satiating hunger for hours.
    • What’s good for you is also good for the land. America’s most popular crops, like wheat and corn, often degrade the soil over time. Legumes like lentils rebuild it. That’s what happened on Mader’s family farm, which grows crops under the Palouse Brand name. For 125 years, the family has farmed the rich soil of Washington state’s eastern flank, which has sediment deposited there after the last ice age. But after a century of cultivation, the region’s fertility was eroding fast. So in the 1930s, Mader’s family tried something different. They rotated chickpeas, peas and lentils into their wheat fields. By the 1980s, they also adopted no-till farming, leaving organic matter on the surface instead of plowing it. While uncommon at the time, the Mader family’s embrace of legumes in Palouse, Wash., was prophetic. Today, about a third of the farm is always planted with legumes. And farms like Mader’s in North America now produce more than half the world’s crop of lentils in fields stretching from the Pacific Northwest to Canada’s interior. [ael: my emphasis]
    • Not a day goes by when he doesn’t have a bowl. “I really have lentils for breakfast every morning,” says McGreevy, who cooks a pot each Sunday, enough for the entire week. “It sounds crazy, but my wife and I put a little butter and salt and pepper on them with an egg. I can go well past lunchtime before I need a snack. They just carry you a long way.”
    • Related: How to Grow Lentils

3/25/2023

  1. In Duluth, Real Estate Collides With Climate: More Americans are uprooting their lives for safer climates. That sent one Times real estate reporter to the Upper Midwest.
    • In January, I flew to Duluth, Minn., to find people who had moved across the country seeking refuge from climate change. But before I traveled to Minnesota, I went to Ohio. I grew up just outside Cleveland, on the southern edge of Lake Erie. When an assignment took me back home in October, I reconnected with a friend from high school. She had moved to Seattle after college and had recently returned to Cleveland with her husband and children. The reason, she said, was simple: Seattle, a city of mild temperatures where many residents don’t have air-conditioning, was changing. The past several summers had brought record-breaking heat and scorching wildfires, and she feared rising sea levels as well.
    • I also sat down with newcomers — from places like Denver, San Francisco and Santa Fe, N.M. — all of whom had contended with drought, wildfires and ferocious heat at home, and who had hoped to find sanctuary in Duluth. We shared craft beers in the Lincoln Park district, where trendy restaurants and breweries are popping up alongside outdoor curling rinks. They told me they had left everything behind to raise their families in a place they felt would offer them protection as the globe grows hotter. They all shared a similar sentiment: Nowhere on the globe is fully removed from climate change. But as wildfires become more intense and sea levels rise, Duluth might be manageable.

3/24/2023

  1. Trump appointees interfered to weaken EPA assessment of toxic chemical: Watchdog finds PFBS toxicity value was altered in 2021 report, as scientists say episode part of ‘larger rot at the agency’
    • Trump administration appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) meddled in agency science to weaken the toxicity assessment of a dangerous chemical, a new report by the US body’s internal watchdog has found. In response to what it labeled “political interference”, the Biden administration in February 2021 pulled the assessment, republished it months later using what it said is sound science, and declared it had resolved the issue. But EPA scientists who spoke to the Guardian say several employees willingly worked with the Trump appointees to weaken the assessment, and they were never reprimanded or fired.
    • In its recent report, the EPA’s office of inspector general described “unprecedented” interference by former Trump-appointed EPA chief Andrew Wheeler and other political appointees, who ordered the alteration of the PFBS toxicity value just as the assessment was about to be published in late 2020. The revised assessment went live just four days before Trump left office in 2021.
    • The inspector general noted the ORD’s development of the assessment was twice peer-reviewed, followed EPA review protocol, and the office of chemical safety and pollution prevention (OCSPP) had twice reviewed and signed off on the assessment. “There was a lot of rigor, a lot of involvement across the agency,” said Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, then an ORD science adviser. Still, at political appointees’ behest, the OCSPP alternative uncertainty factors were inserted just days before the assessment was published. The new numbers were inserted without being fully scientifically vetted, and they lacked “technical and quality assurance review”, the inspector general wrote.
    • An internal email thread from the Trump EPA’s waning days and comments in the inspector general report illuminate how career employees in the OCSPP either requested the changes or did not object to alterations. Among the career employees were Anna Lowit, Todd Stedeford and Tala Henry. Henry and Stedeford were previously accused by whistleblowers of altering scientific documents at industry’s behest to make other chemicals appear less toxic.
    • In response to Orme-Zavaleta’s emails, a Trump political appointee said the assessment needed to be published in the next week because Wheeler had a media interview on PFAS and wanted to be able to “highlight” the assessment. “They were trying so hard to get it out before Trump left office,” Bennett said. On 8 January, a Trump appointee said Wheeler had allowed the review process to be “expedited”, and the altered assessment would be published before Biden took over the EPA. “Great news!” the appointee wrote. Wheeler’s decision “flew in the face of scientific integrity”, Orme-Zavaleta told the Guardian.
    • The inspector general report failed to address how to protect employees from political leadership pressure, she added. And with the EPA deeming the incident “political interference” instead of a larger problem, employees who spoke with the Guardian fear more of the same. “People know what happened, and they know there were no consequences, so there’s no deterrent,” said an employee familiar with the situation. “It’s only going to make people more brazen about doing this kind of thing in the future.”
  2. Decline of more than 500 species of marine life on Australian reefs ‘the tip of the iceberg’, study finds: Increasing ocean temperatures present ‘existential threat’ with knock-on effects for ecosystems and commercial fisheries, researchers say
    • Global heating was likely the main driver of the falls, with marine heatwaves and a rise in ocean temperatures hitting species that live on rocky and coral reefs. The study, published in the journal Nature, monitored 1,057 species and found 57% of them had declined, and almost 300 were declining at a rate that could qualify them as threatened species.
    • Species in waters in Australia’s south that were closer to big urban centres such as Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney, were being affected by not only warming oceans but also pollution, coastal development, fishing, aquaculture and land run-off.
    • Associate Prof Zoe Richards, a marine invertebrate expert at the Western Australian Museum and Curtin University, said the study “sends a clear message that not all is well in the ocean”. “This new study provides much-needed empirical evidence that population declines are occurring even among the most common marine taxa,” said Richards, who was not involved in the study. “These are common species and so are major players in the way these ecosystems function. It’s quite ominous if they are declining. “You have to ask what on earth is happening to everything else.”

3/22/2023

  1. Bees learn to dance: Experience yields precision in the waggle dance of honey bees
    • After the discovery of a rich food source, honey bee (genus Apis) foragers can recruit nestmates by performing a figure-of-eight–shaped dance (consisting of a central “waggle run” followed by alternating left and right semicircles) on the vertical wax combs inside the hive, with followers touching the dancer’s abdomen with their antennae. The duration of the straight waggle run informs the others about the distance to the bounty. Direction of the target relative to the Sun is encoded in the angle of the waggle run, so that a waggle run straight up means “fly toward the Sun’s azimuth” and a waggle run at an angle 20o to the right of the vertical means “fly 20o to the right of the Sun’s azimuth” (4). The full dance circuit is repeated many times over to allow dance followers to average out variation of the display. There are indications that dance behavior is at least in part genetically encoded: All species of honey bees exhibit a form of this communication, and no other bee species do.
  2. Multidecadal trend of increasing iron stress in Southern Ocean phytoplankton
    • Southern Ocean primary productivity is principally controlled by adjustments in light and iron limitation, but the spatial and temporal determinants of iron availability, accessibility, and demand are poorly constrained, which hinders accurate long-term projections. We present a multidecadal record of phytoplankton photophysiology between 1996 and 2022 from historical in situ datasets collected by Biogeochemical Argo (BGC-Argo) floats and ship-based platforms. We find a significant multidecadal trend in irradiance-normalized nonphotochemical quenching due to increasing iron stress, with concomitant declines in regional net primary production. The observed trend of increasing iron stress results from changing Southern Ocean mixed-layer physics as well as complex biological and chemical feedback that is indicative of important ongoing changes to the Southern Ocean carbon cycle.
    • The Southern Ocean acts as the climate flywheel of the planet; it buffers the impacts of climate change by accounting for half of the total oceanic uptake of anthropogenic CO2 and absorbing threequarters of the excess heat generated by anthropogenic CO2 (1, 2) while also regulating the supply of nutrients in support of low-latitude productivity (3).
    • The Southern Ocean experiences climate variability associated with the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) (14-16), with the recent increase in the positive phase of the SAM due to ozone depletion and greenhouse gases driving an intensification and poleward shift of the westerly winds (15). This is considered the clearest and most persistent change in Southern Hemisphere climate in the past half century (17).
    • For example, under optimal light and Fe-replete conditions (Fig. 1A), phytoplankton photochemistry is at maximum capacity, with any remaining energy being dissipated as either fluorescence or nonphotochemical quenching [(NPQ) the dissipation of excess energy in the form of heat] (31).

  1. Galloping Grant: the day a sitting president of the US was arrested: President Ulysses S Grant’s penchant for speeding in his horse-drawn carriage landed him in trouble with police in 1872
    • The policeman who arrested Grant was a Black civil war veteran, William H West. In 1908, West told his tale to the Washington Evening Star. From his days as a cadet at the United States Military Academy, Grant was known as an excellent horseman.
    • Even as president, the Star said, he “loved nothing better than to sit behind a pair of spirited animals. He was a good driver, and sometimes ‘let them out’ to try their mettle.” When he was stopped by West, the Star said, Grant “was driving a pair of fast steppers and he had some difficulty in halting them, but this he managed to do”.
    • The president asked: “Well, officer. What do you want with me?” West said: “I want to inform you, Mr President, that you are violating the law by speeding along this street. Your fast driving, sir, has set the example for a lot of other gentlemen.” Grant said sorry and left. The next day, however, he did it again.
    • According to the Star, Grant smiled like “a schoolboy who had been caught in a guilty act by a teacher” and said he had not been aware he was traveling too fast. West said: “I am very sorry, Mr President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation, and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest.”
    • Grant was taken to a police station and ordered to pay $20. A trial was held the next day, with numerous cases against speeding drivers “contested bitterly”. A judge issued heavy fines and a “scathing rebuke”. Grant, however, did not show up.
  2. Psychedelic brew ayahuasca’s profound impact revealed in brain scans: Study gives most advanced picture yet of DMT compound’s effect on advanced functions such as imagination
    • The brew is so potent that practitioners report not only powerful hallucinations, but near-death experiences, contact with higher-dimensional beings, and life-transforming voyages through alternative realities. Often before throwing up, or having trouble at the other end. Now, scientists have gleaned deep insights of their own by monitoring the brain on DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, the psychedelic compound found in Psychotria viridis, the flowering shrub that is mashed up and boiled in the Amazonian drink, ayahuasca.
    • The recordings reveal a profound impact across the brain, particularly in areas that are highly evolved in humans and instrumental in planning, language, memory, complex decision-making and imagination. The regions from which we conjure reality become hyperconnected, with communication more chaotic, fluid and flexible. “At the dose we use, it is incredibly potent,” said Robin Carhart-Harris, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. “People describe leaving this world and breaking through into another that is incredibly immersive and richly complex, sometimes being populated by other beings that they feel might hold special power over them, like gods.”
    • Humans have sought the altered states brought on by ayahuasca for at least 1,000 years. In 2019, an archaeological dig at a Bolivian cave unearthed a leather pouch fashioned from three fox snouts. Analysis of the bag’s interior revealed traces of DMT, cocaine, probably from coca leaf, and other psychoactive substances. The bag, dating from AD900 to 1170, was wrapped in a bundle with little llama bone spatulas, wooden snuffing tablets and a brightly coloured headband.
    • https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2218949120
  3. Ban hydrogen in homes? Mass. debate mirrors national quandary. Plans by Massachusetts utilities to blend low-carbon hydrogen into natural gas distribution networks to feed homes and other buildings has sparked a national debate over “green” hydrogen’s reliance on renewables and what that might mean for the electric grid.
    • The debate came to the forefront this month when Gas Transition Allies — a coalition of environmental nonprofits — released a report slamming the utility plans in Massachusetts. Making green hydrogen from renewable electricity and water, the groups argue, is an energy-intensive process that would divert other clean electricity from the grid. Green, or renewable, hydrogen is expected by analysts to become the central way of producing a low-carbon version of the fuel in the coming years. In Massachusetts, the process could conceivably be driven by offshore wind turbines, although the Gas Transition Allies argue that the turbines’ power would be more efficiently used directly for power generation.
  4. Every stage of plastic production and use is harming human health: Report: New report recommends the United Nations Global Plastics Treaty significantly reduce plastic use through aggressive bans and caps, and closer examination of toxic ingredients.
    • Experts say the report is one of the most comprehensive to date in compiling evidence of plastics’ risks for humans, the environment and the economy at every stage of their lifecycle. The commission — a group of researchers organized by the Australian foundation Minderoo, the Scientific Center of Monaco and Boston College — found plastics disproportionately harm low-income communities, people of color and children. They’re urging negotiators of the United Nations Global Plastics Treaty to take bold steps, such as capping plastic production, banning some single-use plastics and regulating the toxic chemicals added to plastics. Countries launched the plastics treaty process in March 2022, with the goal of adopting it in 2024.
    • “The bottom line is that plastic is not nearly as cheap as we thought it was, it’s just that the costs have been invisible,” Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician, director at the Boston College Global Observatory on Planetary Health and lead author of the report, told Environmental Health News (EHN). In fact, health-related costs resulting from plastic production were more than $250 billion in 2015, the report found. [ael: it's all about externalized costs….]
  5. ‘Climate homicide’: Could Big Oil be sued for disaster deaths?
    • But can petroleum producers be held criminally responsible for climate-related deaths that occurred after companies allegedly deceived the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels? A new academic paper says they can, and authors of the research say the novel legal theory — known as “climate homicide” — is already stirring interest from prosecutors.

3/21/2023

  1. Arctic ice is getting thinner by the day—and sea life is suffering: A new study says the structural change has been abrupt, making life harder for everything from tiny algae to polar bears.
    • The gnarled ice-scape that thwarted Nansen is now largely a thing of the past, according to research reported in Nature on Wednesday. Arctic sea ice has undergone an abrupt, permanent, and consequential change in its structure—from thick and ridged to thin and flat. The shift occurred around 2007, when record-low summer ice cover triggered a feedback cycle of rising ocean heat and spiraling ice.
    • As with icebergs, 90 percent of an ice floe is below water. Ridges on the underside can stretch 60 feet deep, where they act as keels to help hold the ice in place and give it more time to grow. But the Transpolar Drift Stream—the powerful current Nansen discovered by deliberately freezing his ship into the ice—has sped up by more than a third since 2007, the researchers report. With smaller or absent keels, today's ice has less power to resist the forces pushing it across the Arctic and out into the warmer Atlantic, to melt. Consequently, the average lifespan for an ice floe has shortened by more than 1.5 years.
  2. ‘We have money and power’: older Americans to blockade banks in climate protest: Demonstrations at 90 sites are billed as first major action by older activists: ‘It’s not fair to ask 18-year-olds to solve this’
    • The protests, across more than 90 locations, including Washington DC, are billed as the first set of mass climate demonstrations by older Americans, who have until now been far less visible than younger activists, such as the school strike movement spearheaded by Greta Thunberg. In a nod to the more seasoned age of participants, older people in painted rocking chairs will block the entrances to some of the US’s largest banks to highlight their funding of oil and gas extraction.
  3. World Has Less Than a Decade to Stop Catastrophic Warming, U.N. Panel Says: A new report says it is still possible to hold global warming to relatively safe levels, but doing so will require global cooperation, billions of dollars and big changes.
    • Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade, and nations will need to make an immediate and drastic shift away from fossil fuels to prevent the planet from overheating dangerously beyond that level, according to a major new report released on Monday. The report, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, offers the most comprehensive understanding to date of ways in which the planet is changing. It says that global average temperatures are estimated to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels sometime around “the first half of the 2030s,” as humans continue to burn coal, oil and natural gas.
    • But Earth has already warmed an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius since the industrial age, and, with global fossil-fuel emissions setting records last year, that goal is quickly slipping out of reach.
    • There is still one last chance to shift course, the new report says. But it would require industrialized nations to join together immediately to slash greenhouse gases roughly in half by 2030 and then stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by the early 2050s. If those two steps were taken, the world would have about a 50 percent chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
    • The report comes as the world’s two biggest polluters, China and the United States, continue to approve new fossil fuel projects. Last year, China issued permits for 168 coal-fired power plants of various sizes, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Finland. Last week, the Biden administration approved an enormous oil drilling project known as Willow that will take place on pristine federal land in Alaska.

3/19/2023

  1. The Poignant Music of Melting Ice: Have a Listen: Scientists and musicians are recording the sounds of unfreezing water to document and predict the effects of climate change. Can their work help slow it, too?
    • Spotify playlist of melting ice
    • But, as Samartzis admitted with a grin, bowdlerizing wind from the breeziest place in the world wasn’t very authentic. When he returned in February 2016, he intended to focus on wind itself, to log the ways it pulverized the place. He got his chance, during the strongest summertime blizzard ever witnessed there. As ice and snow pelted eight microphone stations through the 36-hour storm, the timbre of his work began shifting. ael: here it is, on YouTube
    • FOR NEARLY TWO decades, the Norwegian musician Jana Winderen has been at the forefront of transforming her straightforward recordings of glaciers and the land and water surrounding them into emotional records, poignant musical postcards from melting and cracking masses of ice. During a 2006 family vacation in Iceland, Winderen dipped a hydrophone — a sealed microphone that detects pressure changes underwater — under a glacier’s edge. She shushed her daughters, sloshing in nearby mud, so she could tease out the source of some plangent rumble. “It sounded like a loud engine, so I started looking for a tractor,” Winderen, 57, said recently, speaking by video in her studio from her family’s farm outside Oslo. “But I realized for the first time that the glacier is gliding — really, really slowly — on this water underneath sediments. And the sound has presence, like a creature. I totally fell in love.”
    • Related: Blizzard at Antarctica
  2. Earth to Hit Critical Warming Threshold by Early 2030s, Climate Panel Says: A new U.N. report says it is still possible to hold global warming to relatively safe levels, but doing so will require global cooperation, billions of dollars and big changes.
    • Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade, and nations will need to make an immediate and drastic shift away from fossil fuels to prevent the planet from overheating dangerously beyond that level, according to a major new report released on Monday.
    • There is still one last chance to shift course, the new report says. But it would require industrialized nations to join together immediately to slash greenhouse gases roughly in half by 2030 and then stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by the early 2050s. If those two steps were taken, the world would have about a 50 percent chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
    • The report comes as the world’s two biggest polluters, China and the United States, continue to approve new fossil fuel projects. Last year, China issued permits for 168 coal-fired power plants of various sizes, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Finland. Last week, the Biden administration approved an enormous oil drilling project known as Willow that will take place on pristine federal land in Alaska.
    • “The 1.5 degree limit is achievable, but it will take a quantum leap in climate action,” António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said. In response to the report, Mr. Guterres called on countries to stop building new coal plants and to stop approving new oil and gas projects.
    • Scientists say that warming will largely halt once humans stop adding heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, a concept known as “net zero” emissions. How quickly nations reach net zero will determine how hot the planet ultimately becomes. Under the current policies of national governments, Earth is on pace to heat up by 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius this century, analysts have estimated.
    • Governments and companies would need to invest three to six times the roughly $600 billion they now spend annually on encouraging clean energy in order to hold global warming at 1.5 or 2 degrees, the report says. While there is currently enough global capital to do so, much of it is difficult for developing countries to acquire. The question of what wealthy, industrialized nations owe to poor, developing countries has been divisive at global climate negotiations.
    • The new report is expected to inform the next round of United Nations climate talks this December in Dubai, where world leaders will gather to assess their progress in tackling global warming. At last year’s climate talks in Sharm el Sheik, language calling for an end to fossil fuels was struck from the final agreement after pressure from several oil-producing nations. [ael: is it odd that oil-producing nations were the ones that thought it important to strike language calling for an end to fossil fuels? Monkey trap, monkey trap, monkey trap…. but we're all chained to the monkey.]
      • ael: from the Monkey Trap reference above: "In Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig’s bonkers-but-brilliant philosophical novel that turns 40 this year, he describes “the old South Indian Monkey Trap”. (I’m pretty sure it was never used to trap monkeys, but that’s par for the course with Pirsig; he doesn’t teach you much about motorbikes, either.)"
  3. ‘ChatGPT said I did not exist’: how artists and writers are fighting back against AI: From lawsuits to IT hacks, the creative industries are deploying a range of tactics to protect their jobs and original work from automation
    • Poetry may still be a hard nut for AI to crack convincingly, but among the first to face a genuine threat to their livelihoods are photographers and designers. Generative software can produce images at the touch of the button, while sites like the popular NightCafe make “original”, data-derived artwork in response to a few simple verbal prompts. The first line of defence is a growing movement of visual artists and image agencies who are now “opting out” of allowing their work to be farmed by AI software, a process called “data training”. Thousands have posted “Do Not AI” signs on their social media accounts and web galleries as a result.
    • For Alegre, who last month discovered paragraphs of her prize-winning book Freedom to Think were being offered up, uncredited by ChatGPT, there are hidden dangers to simply opting out: “It means you are completely written out of the story, and for a woman that is problematic.”

3/18/2023

  1. Trump Claims His Arrest Is Imminent and Calls for Protests, Echoing Jan. 6: His indictment by a Manhattan grand jury is expected, but its timing is unclear.
  2. Is ‘No Dig’ Gardening Really Possible?: Charles Dowding, a longtime proponent, insists that it’s not only easier than what you’re doing now, but it actually works. Here’s how.
    • With a bow rake or an oscillating hoe in hand, he kicks off the new season with a quick pass over each bed, “tickling the soil surface,” he said, rather than upending it, “to disturb any weeds seeds that might be germinating.”
    • He doesn’t sow cover crops. (His beds are too busy with repeat plantings, one after another.) And he doesn’t rotate crops in the traditional manner, which calls for not growing the same thing in the same spot in consecutive years. (Last year marked year eight of successfully growing potatoes in one bed, and cabbages and fava beans in others.)
    • With certain vegetables, including beets, turnips and onions, he defies the usual advice about spacing. Instead, he “multisows” small groupings of seeds together in cells in his greenhouse and later transplants the little clusters into the garden.
  3. Kentucky Residents Angered by US Forest Service Logging Plan That Targets Mature Trees: Biden pledged to protect old-growth trees, but proposed clear-cutting in national forests collides with climate policy.
    • The U.S. Forest Service’s plan, unveiled in October, is for logging, much of it clear-cutting, and the use of herbicides in nearly 10,000 acres over the next 40 years—a project that would spread over roughly half of Jellico Mountain and surrounding peaks on the Tennessee border. Bowlin is now one of hundreds of residents of Kentucky’s Whitley and McCreary counties begging the Forest Service to abandon the idea. Their pleas bring up the tragedy that looms over the Jellico logging conflict—last summer’s floods and mudslides that killed 44 people in neighboring counties of the Appalachian Mountain range—a disaster residents view as inextricably linked to wanton extraction of both coal and timber.
    • And yet, even while the Forest Service proceeds with its mature and old-growth census—due in April—the agency has more than 20 logging projects planned or underway on 370,000 acres of older forest around the country, according to a tally by the Climate Forests Project, a large coalition of environmental groups. In a slew of those projects—particularly in the eastern United States—the Forest Service is seeking explicitly to reduce the amount of mature forest on its lands—including in Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky. “The overall purpose of this project is to balance the age class distribution across this area,” said Tim Reed, district ranger overseeing the Jellico plan, in a November meeting with residents. Acreage with trees more than 80 years old, now 73 percent of this section of the national forest, would be cut back to 54 percent. Currently, 65 percent of the stands in the Jellicos would be older than 130 in 40 years; that proportion would be cut back to 35 percent under the logging plan.
    • The ultimate beneficiaries of the drive are timber companies, who face global challenges in sourcing raw material due both to the depletion of resources and environmental restrictions. The industry is increasingly consolidated and global. Domtar, for example, the largest U.S. manufacturer of print and copy paper, was purchased in 2021 by Paper Excellence of Canada, a company owned by Jackson Wijaya, a member of one of Indonesia’s wealthiest families.
    • In 2014, a massive international study in Nature led by researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey showed not only that older trees store more carbon than younger ones, but that their ability to absorb carbon grows continually as they age. The research, based on direct measurements of more than 160,000 trees from 400 species covering every forested continent, shattered the notion that young trees can replace the capacity of old trees to remove carbon from the atmosphere in anything close to the amount of time that humanity has to address climate change. In fact, because of soil disturbance after a timber harvest, studies have shown that new young forests release more carbon than they absorb for 10 to 20 years after planting.
    • In January, the Biden administration did curb old-forest logging on some federal land—reinstating the ban on timber harvests in 9 million acres of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, protection that had been eliminated by President Donald J. Trump on North America’s largest temperate rainforest, a landscape so rich that it accounts for 20 percent of the carbon stored in U.S. National Forests.
  4. How to ‘Make Some Good’ Out of East Palestine, Ohio, Rail Disaster? Ban Vinyl Chloride, Former EPA Official Says: The Feb. 3 derailment, spill and conflagration has focused attention on the key ingredient in PVC, a long fought-over plastic with a variety of health and safety concerns throughout its lifecycle.
    • Last month, Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician, epidemiologist and director of Boston College’s Global Public Health Program and Global Observatory on Planetary Health, told Inside Climate News that PVC had problems at every stage of its lifecycle, beginning with potential dangers to workers who make it. Researchers in the 1970s first linked vinyl chloride occupational exposure to a rare form of cancer—angiosarcoma of the liver—to rubber workers at a factory in the Rubbertown complex of chemical plants in Louisville, Kentucky. Landgrand said there was evidence it may also cause brain cancers and that toxic ingredients in PVC may “leach out of plastics products and get into drinking water or blood products.”
    • An EPA spokesperson said vinyl chloride was included for potential review in a 2014 work plan, but the agency has not yet acted on it. That work plan had 90 chemicals on its list. The written statement from the EPA did not explain why the agency hadn’t begun to put the chemical through the review process.
  5. Washington’s Treasured Cherry Blossoms Prompt Reflection on Local Climate Change: Over the years, the trees have been blooming earlier and earlier. Does it matter? Yes and no, experts say.
    • Each year, the National Park Service calculates when “peak’’ bloom of the cherry trees—when 70 percent of the blossoms are open—is expected to occur. This year, it is anticipated between March 22 and March 25. While directly in line with last year’s peak, that’s a full two weeks earlier than the area’s historic average.

3/17/2023

  1. Global fresh water demand will outstrip supply by 40% by 2030, say experts: Landmark report urges overhaul of wasteful water practices around world on eve of crucial UN summit
    • Governments must urgently stop subsidising the extraction and overuse of water through misdirected agricultural subsidies, and industries from mining to manufacturing must be made to overhaul their wasteful practices, according to a landmark report on the economics of water.
    • Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, and a lead author of the report, told the Guardian the world’s neglect of water resources was leading to disaster. “The scientific evidence is that we have a water crisis. We are misusing water, polluting water, and changing the whole global hydrological cycle, through what we are doing to the climate. It’s a triple crisis.”
    • Many of the ways in which water is used are inefficient and in need of change, with Rockstrom pointing to developed countries’ sewage systems. “It’s quite remarkable that we use safe, fresh water to carry excreta, urine, nitrogen, phosphorus – and then need to have inefficient wastewater treatment plants that leak 30% of all the nutrients into downstream aquatic ecosystems and destroy them and cause dead zones. We’re really cheating ourselves in terms of this linear, waterborne modern system of dealing with waste. There are massive innovations required.” [ael: yes! Wake up people! Use yer poop — don't drink it!]

3/16/2023

  1. Seaweed Is Having Its Moment in the Sun: It’s being reimagined as a plastic substitute, even as cattle feed. But can seaweed thrive in a warming world?
    • In London, a start-up is making a plastic substitute out of seaweed. In Australia and Hawaii, others are racing to grow seaweed that, when fed to livestock, can cut methane from cow burps. Researchers are studying just how much carbon dioxide can be sequestered by seaweed farms, as investors eye them as a new source of carbon credits for polluters to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
    • But even as its champions see it as a miracle crop for a hotter planet, others worry that the zeal to farm the ocean could replicate some of the same damages of farming on land. Much is unknown about how seaweed farms, particularly those far offshore, can affect marine ecosystems.
    • There’s another problem. Seaweed is itself feeling the impact of climate change, particularly in Asia. “The water is way too hot,” said Sung-kil Shin, a third-generation seaweed farmer, as he pulled his boat into harbor one morning on Soando Island, just south of the South Korean mainland, where seaweed has long been foraged and farmed.
    • Steve Meller, an American businessman in Australia, grows seaweed in giant glass tanks on land. Specifically, a red seaweed native to the waters around Australia called asparagopsis, which beef and dairy companies are eyeing as a way to meet their climate goals. A sprinkle of asparagopsis in cattle feed can cut methane from their burps by between 82 and 98 percent, according to several independent studies.
  2. Toxic ‘forever chemicals’ found in toilet paper around the world: Research finds waste flushed down toilets and sent to sewage plants probably responsible for significant source of water pollution
    • All toilet paper from across the globe checked for toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” contained the compounds, and the waste flushed down toilets and sent to sewage treatment plants probably creates a significant source of water pollution, new research has found. Once in the wastewater plant, the chemicals can be packed in sewage sludge that is eventually spread on cropland as fertilizer, or spilt into waterways.
    • The peer-reviewed University of Florida report did not consider the health implications of people wiping with contaminated toilet paper. PFAS can be dermally absorbed, but no research on how it may enter the body during the wiping process exists. However, that exposure is “definitely worth investigating, said David Andrews, senior scientist with the Environmental Working group, a public health non-profit that tracks PFAS pollution. Brands that used recycled paper had just as much PFAS as those that did not, and it may be that there is no avoiding PFAS in toilet paper, said Jake Thompson, the study’s lead author and a University of Florida grad student.
    • The PFAS levels detected are low enough to suggest the chemicals are used in the manufacturing process to prevent paper pulp from sticking to machinery, Thompson said. PFAS are often used as lubricants in the manufacturing process and some of the chemicals are commonly left on or in consumer goods.
    • The average American uses 57 pounds of toilet paper a year and more than 19bn pounds of toilet paper flushed every year in the US. The study also checked wastewater at eight wastewater treatment plants and found it is likely that 6:2 diPAP in toilet paper represents much of the compound found in wastewater.
  3. Scientists warn of ‘phosphogeddon’ as critical fertiliser shortages loom: Excessive use of phosphorus is depleting reserves vital to global food production, while also adding to the climate crisis
    • “We have reached a critical turning point,” said Prof Phil Haygarth of Lancaster University. “We might be able to turn back but we have really got to pull ourselves together and be an awful lot smarter in the way we use phosphorus. If we don’t, we face a calamity that we have termed ‘phosphogeddon’.”
    • Phosphorus was discovered in 1669 by the German scientist Hennig Brandt, who isolated it from urine, and it has since been shown to be essential to life. Bones and teeth are largely made of the mineral calcium phosphate – a compound derived from it – while the element also provides DNA with its sugar phosphate backbone.
    • However, significant deposits of phosphorus are found in only a few countries: Morocco and western Sahara have the largest amount, China the second biggest deposit and Algeria the third. In contrast, reserves in the US are down to 1% of previous levels, while Britain has always had to rely on imports. “Traditional rock phosphate reserves are relatively rare and have become depleted in line with their extraction for fertiliser production,” added Johnes.
    • The predicament was once summed up by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov: “Life can multiply until all the phosphorus is gone and then there is an inexorable halt which nothing can prevent.”
    • The global spread of the element reveals how profoundly humanity is now shaping the makeup of our planet, added Johnes. “In one case, we dig up ancient carbon deposits of coal, oil and gas, burn them and so pump billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, triggering climate change. “With phosphorus, we are also mining mineral reserves but in this case we are turning them into fertiliser which is washed into rivers and seas where they are triggering algal blooms. In both cases these grand translocations are causing planetary havoc.”
  4. Nature is out of sync—and that’s reshaping everything, everywhere: Everything in nature—flowering, breeding, migration—lives and dies by a clock that is being recalibrated by climate change. We don’t yet know how severe the consequences may be.
    • Timing is everything in nature. From the opening notes of a songbird’s spring chorus to the seasonal percussion of snapping shrimp, every important ecological process lives and dies by a clock. Flowering. Egg laying. Breeding. Migration. It’s as true on the Mongolian steppe as it is in the Arabian Sea or a Costa Rican rainforest. Centuries of evolution honed these patterns. Now climate change is recalibrating them.
    • Marmots’ behavior is changing. Because of climate change, they now emerge from winter about a month earlier, which forces them to scrounge for food sooner. Yet most marmots, as researchers also would learn with Anchor, actually still wind up big and healthy. Early emergence gives them extra time to eat, which lets them get fatter and helps them produce more offspring.
    • Changes are discovered almost everywhere scientists look. The timing of leaf appearance and leaf dropping has already shifted dramatically across more than half the planet. Humpback whales in the Gulf of Maine are gathering 19 days later than they once did, while jack mackerel, hake, and rockfish are spawning earlier in the North Pacific. In North Dakota’s Red River Valley, scientists found 65 of 83 bird species arriving earlier, some by as much as 31 days. South Carolina’s dwarf salamanders are arriving at breeding grounds 76 days later.
    • So researchers the world over are straining to document the timing of life cycle events, a scientific discipline known as phenology. That timing is being upended by our fossil fuel emissions.
    • Few can top their firsthand observations of the ways planet warming is contorting nature’s timing. In 2000, before anything like it had been done in North America, the group, which by then included his ecologist son, Brian, showed migrating American robins were arriving 14 days earlier. In 2008, Inouye found that climate-driven changes to the growing season have paradoxically increased frost events, killing more sunflowers and lavender-hued daisies. (Rather than staying continuously cold until June, the ground now warms and refreezes and repeats that pattern several times before summer.) By 2013, having documented by hand two million flowers over 39 years, Inouye and others showed blooming can start roughly four weeks earlier, even as flowering across the landscape, from first bud to last, can take 36 days longer.
  5. Your brain expands and shrinks over time — these charts show how: Based on more than 120,000 brain scans, the charts are still preliminary. But researchers hope they could one day be used as a routine clinical tool by physicians.

3/15/2023

  1. What if climate change meant not doom — but abundance?: Rebecca Solnit, a writer and historian, is the author of more than 20 books and co-editor of the anthology “Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story From Despair to Possibility” .
    • [ael: that's putting the best possible spin on things….]
    • A monastic once told me renunciation can be great if it means giving up things that make you miserable. This vision, I think, is what has been missing when we talk about the climate crisis — and how we should respond to it.
    • Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience. But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come?
    • To accomplish that, we need a large-scale change in perspective. To reframe climate change as an opportunity — a chance to rethink who we are and what we desire.
    • What if we imagined “wealth” consisting not of the money we stuff into banks or the fossil fuel-derived goods we pile up, but of joy, beauty, friendship, community, closeness to flourishing nature, to good food produced without abuse of labor? What if we were to think of wealth as security in our environments and societies, and as confidence in a viable future? “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” William Wordsworth wrote a couple of centuries ago. What would it mean to recover those powers, to be rich in time instead of stuff?
    • To respond to the climate crisis — a disaster on a more immense scale than anything our species has faced — we can and must summon what people facing disasters have: a sense of meaning, of deep connection and generosity, of being truly alive in the face of uncertainty. Of joy.

3/14/2023

  1. Out-of-Towners Head to ‘Climate-Proof Duluth’: The former industrial town in Minnesota is coming to terms with its status as a refuge for people moving from across the country because of climate change.
    • In the second half of the 20th century, Duluth’s population fell off a cliff, shrinking to about 84,000 by 2008 from nearly 107,000 in 1960. Its massive steel and cement manufacturing complex — the largest employer in the city — closed, and other factory closures followed. Grain shipments to its port slowed. By the early 1980s, the economic situation in Duluth was so grim that a billboard popped up on the highway leading out of town, bearing the message “Will the last one leaving Duluth please turn out the light?” Today, the traffic is flowing in the other direction. Duluth saw 2,494 new residents from out of state over the last five years, according to the American Community Survey. Many came armed with cash from home sales in more expensive cities and towns, as well as a newfound ability to do their jobs remotely. Real estate agents in Duluth say that nearly every out-of-town client now mentions concerns about rising temperatures and natural disasters as a motivation for their move.
    • For Jamie Beck Alexander, 40, there have also been challenges. She never planned to come to Duluth, but in the summer of 2020, exhausted from Covid-19 lockdowns, she, her husband, and two children, now 5 and 7, rented a camper van and drove east from San Francisco. They were in southern Minnesota when they saw pictures of the sky in Northern California, which was turning apocalyptic orange from wildfires. “That was the point when we said, wow, maybe we won’t go back,” said Ms. Alexander. Climate adaptation is familiar to her — she is the director of Drawdown Labs, a nonprofit that works with tech companies on climate solutions. So she admits she kicked herself a little when, a year after settling in Duluth, wildfire smoke blowing across the border from Canada created air quality too poor to go outside. “We moved here with a Pollyannish idea that we were moving to safety,” she said. “But as someone who works in climate change, I know that planet systems are connected. You cannot pick up one part of the world and separate it from the rest of the planet.”
    • Duluth is not the only city in America that’s been branded a climate refuge, and others, like Buffalo, have leaned into the label with outreach and marketing campaigns. But in Duluth, Mayor Emily Larson is distancing herself from the idea. “The idea that we are so ignoring the needs of our planet that people have to move is terrifying. It’s dystopian,” she said in an interview at Duluth’s city hall, a grand, cavernous granite building with Doric columns and arched windows. Built in 1928 as part of a Beaux-Arts civic center, it sits in the heart of Duluth’s now blighted downtown, where cocktail bars and co-working spaces form a checkerboard with abandoned storefronts. “I don’t want to prey on that.”
  2. African Countries Made Huge Gains in Life Expectancy. Now That Could Be Erased. Incidence of illnesses such as diabetes and hypertension is climbing quickly in most sub-Saharan countries, but the conditions are rarely diagnosed or treated.
    • “But this was offset by the dramatic rise in hypertension, diabetes and other noncommunicable diseases and the lack of health services targeting these diseases,” the agency said, launching a report on health care in Africa. It warned that the rise in life expectancy could be erased before the next decade is out.
    • Routine screening for conditions such as high blood pressure is rare here, diagnosis rates are low and care is often available only at specialized centers in urban areas. The public is not aware of the ailments — everyone can recognize malaria, but few connect blurry vision or exhaustion with hypertension — and primary care health workers often don’t know what to check for either. When Dr. Asiki’s organization set up random screenings in a low-income community in Nairobi a couple of years ago, researchers found that a quarter of adults had hypertension. But 80 percent of them did not know they had it. Of those who did, fewer than 3 percent were controlling their blood pressure with medication.
    • “In the Democratic Republic of Congo, hypertension treatment is two-thirds of the typical household income each month,” he said. “That’s absurd, for that family. But it is not unusual.”
    • It is clear that rapid urbanization and an increase in sedentary lifestyles is driving some of the increase in these conditions. So is growing use of tobacco and alcohol, and consumption of processed foods…. It is common in low-income households to find both malnourished children, who lack the protein and nutrients essential for growth, and adults who are obese, because they are reliant on cheap, fatty and energy-dense street foods — often a more affordable option than paying for vegetables and cooking gas to make food at home.

3/13/2023

  1. Arctic oil project was a conundrum for Biden. Will there be others? There are no fossil fuel megaprojects on the horizon as big as Willow in Alaska, approved Monday. But more U.S. oil drilling decisions await.
    • Approved Monday by the Interior Department, Willow is a behemoth, slated to produce a peak of 180,000 barrels of oil per day, roughly 40 percent of all current daily production in Alaska.
    • The administration signaled it had few legal options but to approve Willow, given that the oil giant ConocoPhillips has lease rights for the region that date back to the late 1990s. But the project’s sheer size has made it a top target of the environmental movement: At a time when scientists say emissions must start to drop to address climate change, Willow would lock in an estimated 9.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — equal to driving nearly 2 million gas-powered cars — for potentially 30 years.
    • The administration appears poised to restrict new federal leasing as much as possible as part of its climate agenda, reducing the number of wells in years to come, if not immediately. And that will make things especially difficult for larger oil developments more common in federal waters and in Alaska, at a time when U.S. industry is investing in shale drilling, which features many smaller wells sprinkled across onshore basins.
    • “This was an existing project and the U.S. government had already given ConocoPhillips the rights to the reserves, and they would have lost in court if they had been sued and forced to greenlight this project,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, director of the Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab at New York University’s School of Professional Studies. “Given the cards that were on the table, I think it’s interesting that the administration tried to negotiate a solution that could both stand up in court and would minimize the impact on places that are very sensitive,” she said.
    • In its decision Monday, the administration said it is shrinking Willow from the five pads that ConocoPhillips originally proposed to three. And as part of the deal, the Interior Department negotiated with ConocoPhillips to relinquish oil rights for roughly 68,000 acres on leases it currently holds in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), about 60,000 in the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area, the department said Monday.
    • But the decision to allow three pads will also enable the construction of hundreds of miles of roads and pipelines, airstrips, a gravel mine and a large processing facility on near-pristine tundra and wetlands in the reserve. While originally set aside for oil production 100 years ago, only two sites produce oil there now — both run by ConocoPhillips — and the expanse provides important habitat for migrating caribou, waterfowl and other wildlife.
    • Environmental groups possibly will sue to block Willow, another reason oil companies will be reluctant to attempt further megaprojects. “We will consider every appropriate tool in our continuing fight to stop the Willow climate bomb,” Christy Goldfuss, chief policy impact officer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “Willow is a project out of time. With science demanding an end to fossil fuels, this locks in decades more dependence on oil.”
  2. Wild Isles review – David Attenborough’s last hurrah makes for unmissable TV: The broadcasting legend takes a lovely, unparalleled look at the majestic wildlife of the UK and Ireland. If anyone can stop its terrifying destruction, it’s him
    • There has been some controversy over a reportedly too-hot-to-broadcast – but OK to put out on iPlayer – “sixth episode” of Wild Isles (which the BBC claims is a “separate film inspired by the series” and was never going to air on BBC One), which will tackle the causes of these catastrophic declines. But this opener is sensitive, in a very BBC way, with a mildness that occasionally seems disproportionate to what is going on. It is as if nobody has been steering the ship towards the rocks through sewage-infested waters. Perhaps the captains will be unmasked at the end of the series. It isn’t until the final minutes of this episode that Attenborough delivers the hammer blow. “Though rich in places, Britain as a whole is one of the most nature-depleted places in the world,” he says.
  3. Retreat in Rodanthe: Along three blocks in a North Carolina beach town, severe erosion is upending life, forcing hard choices and offering a glimpse of the dilemmas other coastal communities will face
    • On a blustery afternoon, Dare County Commissioner Danny Couch walks along Ocean Drive, a stretch he calls the “poster child” for accelerated coastal erosion in the United States. He nods toward the empty oceanfront lots where houses stood only months earlier, before their collapse into the roiling sea. A half dozen other homes on the street stand perilously close to the crashing waves. Beside one, a septic tank rises from the eroding beach. Officials have cut off power to it and other homes around Rodanthe, having deemed them unsafe to occupy.
  4. G-7 Science Academies Call for Actions to Improve Climate Change Decision-Making, Protect Ocean Biodiversity, and Support Well-Being of Older People
    • Today the science academies of the G-7 countries issued three joint statements to their respective governments to inform discussions during the G-7 summit to be held in Hiroshima, Japan, in May, as well as ongoing policymaking. The statements, which were drawn up by the academies under the aegis of the Science Council of Japan, call for strategies to address systemic risks and improve decision-making related to climate change; restore and recover ocean biodiversity; and deliver better health and well-being for aging populations.
    • The academies expressed grave concern about three global challenges: the increasing number of climate-related disasters; the COVID-19 pandemic and its global socioeconomic impacts; and the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its exacerbation of climate and health impacts. These three challenges highlight the need for action to reach climate targets, the statement says. It recommends multiple steps, such as increasing support for the improvement of models to project anthropogenic climate change’s impact on economies; establishing cross-sectoral frameworks at the local, national, regional, and global levels to link cutting-edge science with on-site decision-making and action; and enhancing technical cooperation and financial support, especially for the most vulnerable countries with a large resource deficit, in order to pursue shared objectives and take concerted actions.
    • Addressing systemic risks in a changing climate: Science and technology in support of cross-sectoral decision-making
  5. Officials representing Florida governor Ron DeSantis tried to define what “woke” meant to them, and the result is jarring.
    • We’ve heard the word so much over the years, especially from conservatives and right-winged figures. But what is the definition? What does “woke” mean? One of the most prominent critics of “woke” culture, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, had his lawyers provide a definition. The answer was quite telling. Suspended Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren has spent the last couple of weeks in federal court trying to retrieve his position working for the state of Florida. This comes after DeSantis suspended Warren in August after the Hillsboro state attorney signed a pledge for abortion seekers and providers to not be prosecuted.
    • During the trial, Warren’s attorney, Jean-Jacques Cabou, asked those within DeSantis’ administration for their personal definition of ‘woke,” a term that DeSantis has used to disparage Warren in the past.
    • DeSantis’ general counsel, Ryan Newman, responded that the term means “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

3/12/2023

  1. Moooove over: How single-celled yeasts are doing the work of 1,500-pound cows: Cowless dairy is here, with the potential to shake up the future of animal dairy and plant-based milks
    • Dozens of companies have sprouted up in recent months to develop milk proteins made by yeasts or fungi, including Perfect Day, the California-based dairy company that laid out this unusual spread. The companies’ products are already on store shelves in the form of yogurt, cheese and ice cream, often labeled “animal-free.” The burgeoning industry, which calls itself “precision fermentation,” has its own trade organization, and big-name food manufacturers such as Nestlé, Starbucks and General Mills have already signed on as customers.
  2. Don’t forget to floss: the science behind dementia and the four things you should do to prevent it: A picture is emerging of a healthy lifestyle which is key to the condition’s prevention – exercise, being sociable, and looking after your ears
    • Less intuitive than mental and physical fitness is the impact of hearing loss. Poor hearing in middle age is thought to be one of the most significant drivers of dementia that people can act on. The mechanisms are still being teased out, but brain scans have linked poor hearing to faster brain shrinkage, itself a driver of dementia. Hearing loss also drives up social isolation, which compounds the problem, as people withdraw from social gatherings and the conversations they entail. But there is good news emerging: the marked declines seen in people with hearing impairments are not as dramatic in people who wear hearing aids, suggesting that correcting the problem can help keep dementia at bay.
    • One of the more speculative ideas on how to reduce dementia risk comes from research into bugs in the mouth. A recent study in the US found that people with gum disease and mouth infections were more likely to develop Alzheimer’s, the most common cause of dementia. Work is now under way to check whether bacteria such as Porphyromonas gingivalis help drive the condition, or simply proliferate in people in the early stages of dementia. If bacteria raise the risk, there will be even more reason to properly brush and floss twice a day.
  3. Artificial Intelligence Is Booming—So Is Its Carbon Footprint: Greater transparency on emissions could also bring more scrutiny
    • Artificial intelligence has become the tech industry’s shiny new toy, with expectations it’ll revolutionize trillion-dollar industries from retail to medicine. But the creation of every new chatbot and image generator requires a lot of electricity, which means the technology may be responsible for a massive and growing amount of planet-warming carbon emissions. Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and ChatGPT maker OpenAI use cloud computing that relies on thousands of chips inside servers in massive data centers across the globe to train AI algorithms called models, analyzing data to help them “learn” to perform tasks. The success of ChatGPT has other companies racing to release their own rival AI systems and chatbots or building products that use large AI models to deliver features to anyone from Instacart shoppers to Snap users to CFOs.
  4. Room-Temperature Superconductor Discovery Meets With Resistance: A paper in Nature reports the discovery of a superconductor that operates at room temperatures and near-room pressures. The claim has divided the research community.
    • Previously, superconductivity has been observed only at frigid temperatures or crushing pressures — conditions that make those materials impractical for long-desired applications such as lossless power lines, levitating high-speed trains and affordable medical imaging devices. The newly forged compound conducts current with no resistance at 21 degrees Celsius (69.8 degrees Fahrenheit) and at a pressure of around 1 gigapascal. That’s still a lot of pressure — roughly 10 times the pressure at the deepest point in the Marianas Trench — but it’s more than 100 times less intense than the pressure required in previous experiments with similar materials.
  5. No One Knows if You Need Another Covid Booster: It’s cellular immunity, not antibodies, that probably protects against the coronavirus’s worst effects—and scientists haven’t worked out how long it lasts.
    • But when this antibody response fails to stop Covid from gaining a foothold and the virus gets inside cells so it can reproduce, a third protective strand comes into play: long-term, cellular immunity. Memory T cells, which are also tailored to the specific threat, are a key part of this. “Once a virus infects cells, T cells can then limit the amount of viral replication,” says Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and editor at large at KFF Health News. When a virus like Covid reproduces, it parks parts of itself in the outer membrane of the cell, which announces to the host that the cell is infected. T cells—primed, through vaccination or prior infection, to notice these odd parts—then kick into gear, killing infected cells and directing the production of more antibodies. “That’s preventing the disease from progressing,” Gounder says.

3/10/2023

  1. Superconducting crystal may be ‘revolutionary’: After retraction, researchers make fresh claim of room temperature superconductivity
    • The U of R group, led by physicist Ranga Dias, caused a sensation in 2020 when it reported superconductivity in a tiny speck of carbon, sulfur, and hydrogen (CSH), created by squeezing materials between the tips of two diamonds to millions of times atmospheric pressure. Scientists had made other hydrogen-rich superconductors, known as hydrides, but they had to be chilled to 250 K (–23°C) or lower. CSH superconducted at 287 K, the temperature of a wine fridge.
    • On 22 February, Dias and his colleagues doubled down on their original claim. In a preprint posted on arXiv they reported synthesizing a new version of CSH that superconducts at a slightly lower 260 K, but at only about half the previous pressure. “This should clear up any questions regarding CSH,” says co-author Russell Hemley, an x-ray crystallographer at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who helped determine the material’s structure.
    • Now comes the even more promising substance: nitrogen-doped lutetium-hydride (LNH). To make it, Dias’s team loaded a thin lutetium foil in a diamond vise and injected a mix of hydrogen and nitrogen gas. By ramping the pressure up to 2 gigapascals (nearly 20,000 times atmospheric pressure) and baking the mix at 200°C for up to 3 days, they forged a bright blue crystalline fleck, one that survived even after the pressure was eased. When they dialed the pressure back up to as little as 0.3 gigapascals, the blue fleck turned pink as the electrical resistance plunged to zero. The substance reached a peak superconducting temperature of 294 K—7° warmer than the original CSH and truly room temperature—at pressures of 1 gigapascal. Magnetic measurements also showed the sample repelled an externally applied magnetic field, a hallmark of superconductors. The paper, the authors say, went through five rounds of review.
  2. Gigantic map of fly brain is a first for a complex animal: Fruit fly ‘connectome’ will help researchers to study how the brain works, and could further understanding of neurological diseases.
    • The research, published on 9 March in Science1, provides a brain-wiring diagram known as the connectome of a complex animal for the first time — the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The map shows all 3,016 neurons and 548,000 synapses tightly packed in a young Drosophila’s brain, which is smaller than a poppy seed.

3/6/2023

  1. ‘Everyone should be concerned’: Antarctic sea ice reaches lowest levels ever recorded: With the continent holding enough ice to raise sea levels by many metres if it was to melt, polar scientists are scrambling for answers
    • One major area of concern is a marked loss of ice around the Amundsen and Bellinghausen seas on the continent’s west.Even as the average amount of sea ice around the continent grew up to 2014, these two neighbouring seas saw losses. That’s important because the region is home to the vulnerable Thwaites glacier – known as the “doomsday glacier” because it holds enough water to raise sea levels by half a metre.
    • Antarctic scientists are now scrambling to work out what’s happening. Are the drops in sea ice and the back-to-back record lows just a natural phenomenon in a continent notoriously difficult to study? Or are these records another clear sign the climate crisis is beating down on the frozen continent? [ael: are they really that slow?]

3/2/2023

  1. Scott Adams Echoes White America’s Resentful History of “Helping” Others: For centuries, we’ve been assisting African Americans, Native Americans, Vietnamese people, and Iraqis and have never been thanked once.
    • The first seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, created after King Charles I granted the colony a charter in 1629, portrayed a Native American saying, “Come Over and Help Us.” Just eight years later, during the Pequot massacre, the men of Massachusetts helped about 500 women, children, and other civilians become dead.
    • [ael: some "white people" are very thin white skinned….]
  2. Why Chatbots Sometimes Act Weird and Spout Nonsense: No, chatbots aren’t sentient. Here’s how their underlying technology works.
    • In June, a Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, claimed that similar chatbot technology being tested inside Google was sentient. That’s false. Chatbots are not conscious and are not intelligent — at least not in the way humans are intelligent.
    • Why do they get stuff wrong?
      • Because they learn from the internet. Think about how much misinformation and other garbage is on the web. These systems also don’t repeat what is on the internet word for word. Drawing on what they have learned, they produce new text on their own, in what A.I. researchers call a “hallucination.”
  3. Congress Moves to Block Investment Rule, Setting Up Veto Fight: The Senate voted to upend a rule allowing retirement plan managers to consider environmental and social factors in their investments, in defiance of a White House veto threat.
    • The Senate passed the resolution by a vote of 50 to 46 after two Democrats, Senators Jon Tester of Montana and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, joined every Republican. Coming the day after the House approved the measure on a mostly party-line vote, that cleared the measure to be sent to the White House, where Mr. Biden’s advisers have said he plans to veto it.
    • “The Biden administration wants retirement plan managers to invest people’s retirement funds based not on the best return for the money — nope — based on woke ideology,” Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said on Wednesday, characterizing Mr. Biden’s priorities as those of the “radical left.” [ael: if by being awake to the threat of climate change is "woke", then I'm proudly woke — and call Senator John Barrasso an ignorant, evil son-of-a-bitch: he knows it's going on, but is a whore for the fossil fuel industry. Climate change will produce a far bigger return on Mr. Barrasso's investment than he cares to admit — and his deeply lined pockets, oozing with dirty oily money, won't protect him — and certainly won't protect his citizens, as they watch their retirement funds swirl down the climate toidy.]

3/1/2023 — Charles Pernasilice and Eduardo Mendúa Day

  1. Charles Pernasilice, Haunted by the Violence at Attica, Dies at 70: He was being held in the prison when inmates took it over in 1971. Murder charges against him were dropped, but he spent years trying to escape the memories.
    • During the last decade of his life, Charley Hoblin lived alone on his catamaran, poking into backwater marinas along the Southeast coast. He would anchor offshore, coming in occasionally for a meal or supplies, then move on before anyone noticed. He called his boat the Cheshire Cat. In the spring of 2021 he showed up at McCotters, a marina outside Washington, N.C. The boat was in bad shape. He asked if he could put it on blocks, out of the water, until he could get the money to repair it. He kept living on the boat, keeping to himself even as he grew sick. A lifelong smoker, he developed throat cancer but refused treatment, walking with a cane, then not really walking at all, boat-bound, until the marina staff called 911.
    • A guard named William Quinn had been killed at the start of the violence, and in 1972 Mr. Pernasilice and another prisoner, John Hill, were charged with his murder. While Mr. Pernasilice was being held for trial, guards beat him severely, an incident for which the judge blamed his own intransigence. As his lawyers showed in court, the evidence against Mr. Pernasilice was so thin as to be nonexistent, and the murder charge fell apart. But he was still convicted of attempted assault, again with almost no evidence, and sentenced to two years in prison.
    • 28Pernasilice-03-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&w=600
    • No one knows why he made Washington, a small city on the Pamlico River in North Carolina, his last port of call. But he knew the area well. Just 60 miles to the east is Ocracoke Island, where as a child he had spent so many happy days.
  2. Worried about Sea Level Rise? Look for the Lichens. One of the great infrastructure challenges of the next few decades is to figure out which coastal sites should be abandoned and which can be saved. Lichens can help.
    • The clock is ticking for many low-lying coastal areas. Sea level is rising faster than at any time in recorded history, promising to radically redraw the map. At a broad scale, we know this to be true. But knowing precisely which plots will be inundated and which will remain dry land is a much more daunting task. That effort may have an ally almost no one would have guessed: one of the smallest and least conspicuous forms of life—lichens. More than 18,000 species of lichens have been described worldwide. Each is a community made up of one or more species of fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria. This combination has enabled lichens to survive in diverse and often hostile conditions, everything from tropical heat to bitter Antarctic cold.
    • To scratch out its niche, each species has developed to tolerate different levels of temperature, light, air quality, and other factors. Because of this sensitivity, lichens are already used by scientists to gauge environmental disturbance, such as the influence of logging or nitrogen pollution. Lichens also vary in their salt tolerance. It’s this property, says botanist Roger Rosentreter at Idaho’s Boise State University, that makes them so useful in understanding sea level rise. “Lichens are a good indicator of site history,” says Rosentreter, who has studied lichens and related species for over 40 years. Specifically, the species of lichens that grow on a coastal site may be an effective indicator of low levels of saltwater intrusion and spray, which can be caused by infrequent flooding or storm events. Since sea levels are continuing to rise, any site that has experienced occasional salt water in the past is likely to see more frequent flooding and storm effects in the future.
    • In general, they found that the species that best indicate if a site will be relatively safe from sea level rise and saltwater inundation are lichens that are larger and leafier and often light green or blue in color. But lichens can be tricky to identify, and some promising indicator species look quite similar to less useful ones. “You’ve got to be at least an intermediate plant person to figure it out,” says Rosentreter.
  3. Eduardo Mendúa, Ecuadorian Who Fought Oil Extraction on Indigenous Land, Is Shot to Death: The proposed expansion of petroleum operations on Amazon rainforest territory belonging to the A'i Cofan people has divided Indigenous locals.
    • Eduardo Mendúa (center), an Indigenous Ecuadorian activist fighting oil extraction in the Amazon rainforest, was shot to death in his garden on Sunday. Photo Courtsey of Kayla Jenkins
      333057675_1258664305073573_6105155015919365937_n.jpg&w=600
    • Eduardo Mendúa, an Indigenous activist who was fighting to protect Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest from oil extraction, has been killed by gunmen, the Indigenous organization CONAIE reports. Mendúa, the director of international relations for CONAIE, or the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, and a member of the A’i Cofan people, was part of a group of about 130 campaigners who have been blocking the state-owned oil company, Petroecuador, from expanding oil operations east of the oil town of Lago Agrio in the northeastern province of Sucumbíos.
    • [ael: courageous people, shot down by greedy and ugly people….]
  4. Fossil fuels kill more people than Covid. Why are we so blind to the harms of oil and gas? Were we able to perceive afresh the sheer scale of fossil fuel impact we might be horrified, but because this is an old problem too many don’t see it as a problem
    • If fossil fuel use and impact had suddenly appeared overnight, their catastrophic poisonousness and destructiveness would be obvious. But they have so incrementally become part of everyday life nearly everywhere on Earth that those impacts are largely accepted or ignored (that they’ve also corroded our politics helps this lack of alarm). This has real consequences for the climate crisis. Were we able to perceive afresh the sheer scale of fossil fuel impact we might be horrified. But because this is an old problem too many don’t see it as a problem.
    • [ael: back to greedy, ugly people, who will kill the earth and the earth's people — like Eduardo Mendúa — who get in the way of their ease…. As Rupert Murdoch — a famously greedy and ugly person — famously said, in his criminal conduct of Fox News, "It's not Red or Blue; it's green."]
  5. A vanishing world: Winter sea ice is melting away from Labrador, threatening to take the traditional Inuit way of life there with it
    • Locals normally get resources from the land. Country food like arctic char, seal and ptarmigan, and dry wood from places accessible only by snowmobile, supplement their kitchens and homes. The land provides what they need to survive here, and without a solid layer of sea ice, they simply can’t get to it. For weeks now, people have been relying on imported groceries and fuel instead, and their frustration shows. “I know there’s freight and overhead and storage,” Earle says, pleadingly, “but things shouldn’t be 100 per cent more.”
    • For Rutie Lampe, it’s the close ties between the sea ice and well-being in remote Nain. Lampe, now an elder and mental health co-ordinator with the Nunatsiavut government, grew up in fishing camps. Living off the day’s bounty is how she was raised and taught. She’s seen the arrival of gas-powered snowmobiles, of electric heat. But the thought of seeing the sea ice disappear forever has left her dabbing at her eyes. “It breaks my heart to even think about that,” she says quietly. “It’s not survival. It’s a way of life, and what we always grew up with. Our ancestors, our grandparents. It’s sad to mention our children may not see it.”
    • “The observed changes in ice and snow conditions … have very likely had negative impacts on the physical and mental health of people in the region,” write the authors of a 2021 Nunatsiavut climate update report. “Model simulations of continued warming and declining snow and ice cover suggest that these impacts may be exacerbated in the future.” Pottle, too, describes the deep connection between the ice and Inuit health. He later shows me pictures of sealskins stretched out to dry outside his home. “It’s our identities, where we come from. It’s where we belong. It’s our calling,” Pottle explains, eloquent and sincere. “The land and sea is who I am. It’s what keeps me alive. It’s my heartbeat.”
  6. Why Greta Thunberg is protesting wind farms in Norway
    • Norway’s top court ruled in 2021 that the wind farms violated Sami herders’ cultural rights, but the infrastructure, part of a $1 billion-plus project, remains in operation. The energy ministry has said that the legal situation around the turbines is complex, Reuters reported. One mayor in central Norway told the NRK public broadcaster that the wind farms would provide jobs and renewable energy, and that he hoped an agreement could be reached.
    • The Sami people number between 50,000 and 100,000, according to the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, with as many as 65,000 of them located in Norway. The United Nations has documented how Nordic countries have long suppressed their language and customs, though more recent Norwegian governments have moved to protect their culture, experts say.
    • Indigenous rights must “go hand-in-hand” with climate action, Thunberg told Reuters in Norway. Action “can’t happen at the expense of some people. Then it is not climate justice.” The number of rights abuse allegations related to renewable energy projects has increased in recent years, according to a 2022 report by the U.K.-based Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, which said the most serious and frequent charges were linked to not respecting Indigenous land rights.
  7. US firm to bid to turn DRC oil permits in Virunga park into conservation projects: Exclusive: company plans to sell carbon and biodiversity credits in endangered gorilla habitat and Congo basin rainforest as alternative to drilling for fossil fuels
    • EQX Biome, a biodiversity fintech company, has sent an expression of interest to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) government for 27 oil exploration blocks put up for auction last July, some of which are in critical ecosystems. The concessions include areas of critically endangered gorilla habitat, parts of the world’s largest tropical peatlands in the Cuvette Centrale, and swathes of the planet’s second-largest rainforest in the Congo basin, prompting criticism from environmentalists and western governments who have warned of irreversible environmental harm if exploration goes ahead. Three gas blocks, put up for auction at the same time, have already been sold to North American companies.
    • The company estimates the project would generate at least $6bn, create more jobs than oil exploration and produce higher tax revenue for the DRC government, which has vigorously defended the auction and accused western nations of hypocrisy after US climate envoy John Kerry urged it to abandon the sale.
    • Matthias Pitkowitz, EQX Biome CEO, said: “The pitch to the DRC government is that they are the second most nature-rich country on Earth, they have the second largest rainforest after Brazil, nations agreed at biodiversity Cop15 that these areas need to be protected and there’s economic value in it. Let us prove that we have an alternative to oil exploration and provide a way to centre the economy around nature conservation instead of destroying them for extractive industries. “Oil and gas have never left anything good behind in Africa and take a very long time to generate meaningful revenue. It is clear that all rainforest nations are waiting for a mechanism like this to monetise rainforests and conservation results.”
    • The DRC was second only to Brazil in the amount of forest cleared in 2021, the last year with high-quality data available, with small-scale agriculture and demand for firewood being the primary drivers. By working with conservation organisations and Indigenous communities, EQX Biome says its investment will create alternative livelihoods while preserving the forest. The firm would not manage any conservation areas in the DRC, only facilitate finance and standards.
  8. Laurie Anderson: ‘Lou Reed was one of the few men I’ve ever met who could cry’: As Lou Reed’s early poems are published for the first time, his widow Laurie Anderson talks to Roderick Stanley (First published in The Times, May 16 2018)
    • Much of the writing feels taut and contemporary, with lines such as: “We are the people who conceive our destruction and carry it out lawfully. We are the insects of someone else’s thought.” Anderson says: “He was fierce and he was political. Oh, to hear what he would have said about Don [Trump] … it would have been completely outrageous, in a way very few people are now.
    • Anderson thinks that tailored news feeds are “insane”, and the prime reason that debate is so polarised. She was always “very suspicious” of technology, she explains, but says it still came as a shock to see how “people are so mean. And so many barriers could fall so fast.” She refers to the anti-Hillary Clinton chants during the Trump campaign: “That you could just start saying shit, and getting a bunch of people to chant, ‘Lock her up! Lock her up!’ That was a big moment for me.”
    • As someone who has been studying the effects of technology on society since before most, she finds the idea that it is going to save us particularly poisonous. “People are always asking me, as a techy kind of person, ‘What’s going to happen?’ ” she says, referring to climate change. “So I’ve had to learn as much as I could. And I feel pretty dark about it, though I try to restrain myself, because it’s not a great story when you go, ‘Guess what? There’s nothing you can do!’

Time machine:

RClimate Examples

  • Here's the 10-day weather forecast for Mattawa, Ontario, where we have a farm. I try to spend as much time as I can on the farm.
  • Public News Service - Environment
  • More quotes:
    • Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. HANNAH ARENDT. From the Introduction to “Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism”, by Henry Giroux.
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