October, 2022

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:

October, 2022

10/30/2022

  1. Pesticide use around world almost doubles since 1990, report finds: Agricultural chemicals drive falls of 30% in populations of field birds and butterflies, says Pesticide Atlas
    • Global pesticide use has soared by 80% since 1990, with the world market set to hit $130bn next year, according to a new Pesticide Atlas. But pesticides are also responsible for an estimated 11,000 human fatalities and the poisoning of 385 million people every year, the report finds. Their use has hit biodiversity, driving falls of around 30% in populations of field birds and grassland butterflies since 1990. Almost one in 10 of Europe’s bees are now threatened with extinction, due in no small part to the use of toxic chemical formulations in herbicides, pesticides and fertilisers.
    • Clara Bourgin, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, one of the groups that compiled the atlas, said: “The evidence is staggering; the current food system based on the heavy use of poisonous chemicals is gravely failing farmers and consumers and feeding biodiversity collapse. The EU needs to stop shutting its eyes to the agribusinesses’ increasingly toxic trade and listen to its citizens instead.”
    • Last week, an EU committee failed to agree on a one-year extension for glyphosate, the key ingredient in Bayer’s best-selling Roundup herbicide. The current authorisation for the controversial product is due to run out in mid-December.
    • Ariel Brunner, the policy chief of BirdLife Europe, said: “The farm lobby is cynically exploiting Russian aggression in Ukraine to try and keep us on the road to ecological collapse. The European Commission must resist the siren songs, defend its Green Deal and push for the deep changes farming needs to survive the gathering ecological and climate crisis.”
    • A quarter of all pesticides are sold in the EU, which is also the world’s top exporter of crop protection products. However, EU laws currently allow the export of toxic weedkillers banned on the continent to developing countries with weaker regulations. In 2018, European agrochemical companies planned to export 81,000 tonnes of pesticides prohibited on their own fields, the atlas says. In the same year, more than 40% of all pesticides used in Mali and Kenya were found to be highly hazardous, as were 65% of all pesticides used in four states of Nigeria. [ael: isn't that nice?]

10/29/2022

  1. PFAS left dangerous blood compounds in nearly all US study participants: The toxic ‘forever chemicals’ can stay in human blood for years, and are linked to cancers, kidney damage and heart disease
    • Nearly all participants in a new study looking at exposure to PFAS “forever chemicals” in the US state of North Carolina have multiple dangerous compounds in their blood, and most at levels that researchers say requires medical screening. The North Carolina State University study, which is among the largest ever conducted, checked about 1,500 blood samples from people living in the Cape Fear River basin over several years. It’s the first study to recommend screening for cancers, kidney damage, heart disease and other health issues linked to the chemicals, using newly developed physicians’ guidelines for PFAS exposure.
    • Some of the compounds, like those commonly known as Nafion byproduct 2 and PFO4DA, are produced by Chemours. But “legacy” compounds that have largely been phased out of production in the US, like PFOS (perfluorooctanesulfonic acid) and PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid), were also used by other industries near the river. Chemours has previously seized on those points: “The results showed that legacy compounds not associated with Chemours manufacturing were the compounds most prevalent in participants.”

10/28/2022

  1. A piano chord helped reduce chronic nightmares, a study showed: Hearing a piano chord while imagining a more positive ending to a scary dream was part of an experimental method that led to fewer nightmares
    • A treatment from Perogamvros and his team may help those with chronic nightmares. The experimental method, which combined an established treatment — imagery rehearsal therapy — with a sound, led to fewer nightmares among participants for as long as three months afterward, their study showed.
    • Two to 8 percent of people suffer from chronic, debilitating nightmares that wreck their sleep, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. While nightmares are common among children — most outgrow them by age 10 — an estimated 50 to 85 percent of adults also have them occasionally, the academy says.
    • The scientists modeled their method after an approach known as targeted memory reactivation, or TMR, which uses a specific learning-associated trigger, typically an odor, to enhance memory consolidation when reapplied during sleep. Their trigger was a sound, described as a “neutral” piano chord, which they added to imagery rehearsal therapy — which takes place when patients are awake — and to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the final stage of sleep when nightmares usually occur.
    • All 36 subjects engaged in initial imagery rehearsal therapy in the lab. But only half heard the sound during the initial IRT lab session, meaning only one group formed a positive connection to the sound during therapy. Later, all received the sound while asleep at home via a wireless headband that automatically detected the onset of REM. All the participants also were instructed to practice IRT for five minutes every night at home — no sound included — then wear the headband while sleeping for two weeks. The device delivered the piano sound every 10 seconds.
    • The results, published in the journal Current Biology, found that both groups experienced a decrease in nightmares, but the half that received the sound during the lab-based IRT session had even fewer nightmares and “more positive dream emotions” for two weeks after the experiment and a sustained decrease in nightmares up to three months later, the researchers said.

10/27/2022

  1. Climate crisis: UN finds ‘no credible pathway to 1.5C in place’: Failure to cut carbon emissions means ‘rapid transformation of societies’ is only option to limit impacts, report says
      • The UN environment report analysed the gap between the CO2 cuts pledged by countries and the cuts needed to limit any rise in global temperature to 1.5C, the internationally agreed target. Progress has been “woefully inadequate” it concluded. Current pledges for action by 2030, if delivered in full, would mean a rise in global heating of about 2.5C and catastrophic extreme weather around the world. [ael: my emphasis — and we won't reach current pledges….] A rise of 1C to date has caused climate disasters in countries from Pakistan to Puerto Rico.
      • Inger Andersen, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said: “This report tells us in cold scientific terms what nature has been telling us all year through deadly floods, storms and raging fires: we have to stop filling our atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and stop doing it fast. “We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over. Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster. “It is a tall, and some would say impossible, order to reform the global economy and almost halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but we must try,” she said. “Every fraction of a degree matters: to vulnerable communities, to ecosystems, and to every one of us.”
      • The report found that existing carbon-cutting policies would cause 2.8C of warming, while pledged policies cut this to 2.6C. Further pledges, dependent on funding flowing from richer to poorer countries, cut this again to 2.4C. New reports from the International Energy Agency and the UN’s climate body reached similarly stark conclusions, with the latter finding that the national pledges barely cut projected emissions in 2030 at all, compared with 2019 levels.
      • It said the transition to green electricity, transport and buildings was under way, but needed to move faster. All sectors had to avoid locking in new fossil fuel infrastructure, contrary to plans in many countries, including the UK, to develop new oil and gas fields. A study published this week found “large consensus” across all published research that new oil and gas fields are “incompatible” with the 1.5C target.
      • The UNEP report said about a third of climate-heating emissions came from the global food system and these were set to double by 2050. But the sector could be transformed if governments changed farm subsidies – which are overwhelmingly harmful to the environment – and food taxes, cut food waste and helped develop new low-carbon foods.
  2. Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century: By the end of the century, Africa will be home to 40% of the world’s population – and nowhere is this breakneck-pace development happening faster than this 600-mile stretch between Abidjan and Lagos
    • What is happening in Lagos is happening across the continent. Today, Africa has 1.4 billion people. By the middle of the century, experts such as Edward Paice, author of Youthquake: Why Africa’s Demography Should Matter to the World, believe that this number will have almost doubled. By the end of this century, the UN projects that Africa, which had less than one-tenth of the world’s population in 1950, will be home to 3.9 billion people, or 40% of humanity. [ael: delusional, given the climate crisis described above and in the Times article below….]
    • There is one place above all that should been seen as the centre of this urban transformation. It is a stretch of coastal west Africa that begins in the west with Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, and extends 600 miles east – passing through the countries of Ghana, Togo and Benin – before finally arriving at Lagos. Recently, this has come to be seen by many experts as the world’s most rapidly urbanising region, a “megalopolis” in the making – that is, a large and densely clustered group of metropolitan centres. When its population surpassed 10 million people in the 1950s, the New York metropolitan area became the anchor of one of the first urban zones to be described this way – a region of almost continuous dense habitation that stretches 400 miles from Washington DC to Boston. Other regions, such as Japan’s Tokyo-Osaka corridor, soon gained the same distinction, and were later joined by other gigantic clusters in India, China and Europe.
    • Togo maintains a democratic facade through regular elections, but has been tightly controlled by one family since 1963. In contrast to Nigeria, though, the electricity works, the internet is fast, and everyday life is not plagued by insecurity. With its commercial future in mind, Togo has built a port with capacity much larger than its domestic needs, and also produces cement, steel and other industrial and consumer goods for its larger neighbours. On this basis, Wells sees the country as a good bet, and hopes to make money building hotels there. “The places that learn how to create the right tax incentives and legal protections [for investors] will basically be able to arbitrage on Lagos and its dysfunction,” he told me. Others are much more sceptical that this vision will ever be realised. After all, it relies on canny decision-making at the top of government. Bright Simons, a prominent Ghanaian political analyst and entrepreneur, called this five-nation megaregion “one of the most administratively broken landscapes on the planet”. Its governments are “unbelievably un-strategic”, he said. “I am always puzzled by the enthusiasm of elites for creating chambers of commerce with Mexico, or some other distant country, rather than with their own neighbours.”
    • When I asked a longtime acquaintance, a successful businessman from Benin, whether people in his country, including its leaders, sustain close relations with Nigeria, the answer was no. “The elite here still flatters itself with talk about being the Latin Quarter of the region, due to our French chauvinism,” he said, referring to the pre-independence era when France made Benin a regional centre of colonial education. “Our leaders are very poor at thinking ahead … If you tell the president he has nice shoes, he’ll be swimming in happiness. With Nigeria next door, what we should have done long ago is make English a compulsory second language in school, but no one has ever thought of that.” This kind of pessimism, built upon a scornful assessment of governance at the national level in west Africa, is widespread. “We are going to need to have a functioning Ghanaian state, functioning states in Benin and Togo, and at least a minimally functional Nigerian government all at the same time in order to make this hugely urbanised future livable,” said E Gyimah-Boadi, the 70-year-old co-founder and former CEO of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, a thinktank. “Part of me wants to believe that the youth of west Africa can be their own saviours, and that it is not because of the failures of my generation that they are necessarily doomed. The nation state has been a huge curse. It worked very well for some of us, but we have left very little behind for the young. Basically, we have cheated them.”
  3. Analysis: Africa’s unreported extreme weather in 2022 and climate change: From deadly floods in Nigeria to devastating drought in Somalia, Africa has faced a run of severe – and sometimes unprecedented – extreme weather events since the start of 2022.
    • [ael: had to include this story, in ironic counter-point to the previous.]
    • Carbon Brief’s analysis of disaster records finds that extreme weather events in Africa have killed at least 4,000 people and affected a further 19 million since the start of 2022. However, the impacts of African extreme events often go unrecorded – especially for heatwaves – and so the true figures are likely to be much higher.
    • Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents in the world to climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2022, every part of the continent was affected by extreme weather events, ranging from wildfires in Algeria to catastrophic flooding in South Africa.
  4. Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View (By David Wallace-Wells)
    • [ael: It's sad when "only 2 to 3 degrees C" sounds good, or even mildly optimistic…]
    • Now, with the world already 1.2 degrees hotter, scientists believe that warming this century will most likely fall between two or three degrees. (A United Nations report released this week ahead of the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, confirmed that range.) A little lower is possible, with much more concerted action; a little higher, too, with slower action and bad climate luck. Those numbers may sound abstract, but what they suggest is this: Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years. [ael: 5 degrees C was the outside… and could certainly still occur. I'm shaking my head, because it seems that Wallace-Wells is delusionally pushing pseudo-optimism…]
    • Neither of those futures looks all that likely now, with the most terrifying predictions made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse. [ael: nice to be short of true apocalypse — we'll just have a pseudo-apocalypse.]
    • Second, and just as important, the likeliest futures still lie beyond thresholds long thought disastrous, marking a failure of global efforts to limit warming to “safe” levels. Through decades of only minimal action, we have squandered that opportunity. Perhaps even more concerning, the more we are learning about even relatively moderate levels of warming, the harsher and harder to navigate they seem. In a news release accompanying its report, the United Nations predicted that a world more than two degrees warmer would lead to “endless suffering.” [ael: mere endless suffering]
    • Let’s take technology first. Among energy nerds, the story is well known, but almost no one outside that insular world appreciates just how drastic and rapid the cost declines of renewable technologies have been — a story almost as astonishing and perhaps as consequential as the invention within weeks and rollout within months of new mRNA vaccines to combat a global pandemic. Since 2010, the cost of solar power and lithium-battery technology has fallen by more than 85 percent, the cost of wind power by more than 55 percent. The International Energy Agency recently predicted that solar power would become “the cheapest source of electricity in history,” and a report by Carbon Tracker found that 90 percent of the global population lives in places where new renewable power would be cheaper than new dirty power. The price of gas was under $3 per gallon in 2010, which means these decreases are the equivalent of seeing gas-station signs today advertising prices of under 50 cents a gallon.
    • Sustainable ‘Supercrops’ A tropical “supertree” used in reforestation, pongamia grows beans similar to soy, producing protein and oil. It can be cultivated in almost any soil with limited use of pesticides or irrigation, and it sucks nitrogen out of the air. It has grown wild in Southeast Asia, Australia and the Pacific Islands for hundreds of years, but Terviva, a company based in Alameda, Calif., has begun to plant it widely for the first time in the United States. It now grows across 1,500 acres in Hawaii and Florida, including groves in St. Lucie County, Fla., where this photo was taken. The twin goals of cutting agricultural emissions while producing food for more and more people presents a formidable challenge; “supercrops” like pongamia offer promising solutions.
    • Matthew Huber of Purdue University, the climate scientist who helped introduce the idea of a temperature and humidity limit to human survival, likewise describes himself as considerably less worried than he used to be, though he believes, drawing on inferences from the deep history of the planet, that a future of two degrees warming is less likely than a world of three. “Some of my colleagues are looking at three degrees and going, oh, my God, this is the worst thing ever — we’re failing!” he says. “And then someone like me is saying, well, I used to think we were heading to five. So three looks like a win.” [ael: "looks like a win"; used to think that I would be drawn and quartered, but now discover that they're going to just hang me — so it looks like a win!"] A very bruising win. “The good news is we have implemented policies that are significantly bringing down the projected global average temperature change,” says the Canadian atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a lead chapter author on several National Climate Assessments and an evangelical Christian who has gained a reputation as a sort of climate whisperer to the center-right. The bad news, she says, is that we have been “systematically underestimating the rate and magnitude of extremes.” Even if temperature rise is limited to two degrees, she says, “the extremes might be what you would have projected for four to five.”
    • “Things are coming through faster and more severely,” agrees the British economist Nicholas Stern, who led a major 2006 review of climate risk. In green technology, he says, “we hold the growth story of the 21st century in our hands.” But he worries about the future of the Amazon, the melting of carbon-rich permafrost in the northern latitudes and the instability of the ice sheets — each a tipping point that “could start running away from us.” “Each time you get an I.P.C.C. report, it’s still worse than you thought, even though you thought it was very bad,” he says. “The human race doesn’t, as it were, collapse at two degrees, but you probably will see a lot of death, a lot of movement of people, a lot of conflict over space and water.”
    • In 2017, I wrote a long and bleak magazine article about worst-case scenarios for the climate, focused on a range of possible futures that began at four degrees Celsius of warming and went up from there. In 2019, I published a book about the disruptions and transformations projected by scientists for lower but still “catastrophic” levels of warming — between two degrees and four. I was called an alarmist, and rightly so — like a growing number of people following the news, I was alarmed. I am still. How could I not be? How could you not be? In Delhi this spring, there were 78 days when temperatures breached 100 degrees Fahrenheit, a monthslong heat event made 30 times more likely by climate change. Drought across the Northern Hemisphere was made 20 times more likely, resulting in dried-up riverbeds from the Yangtze to the Danube to the Colorado, exposing corpses dumped in Lake Mead and dinosaur footprints in Texas and live World War II munitions in Germany and a “Spanish Stonehenge” in Guadalperal, and baking crops in agricultural regions on multiple continents to the point of at least partial failure. Hundreds died of heat just in Phoenix, more than a thousand each in England and Portugal and Spain.
    • At two degrees, in many parts of the world, floods that used to hit once a century would come every single year, and those that came once a century would be beyond all historical experience. Wildfire risk would grow, and wildfire smoke, too. (The number of people exposed to extreme smoke days in the American West has already grown 27-fold in the last decade.) Extreme heat events could grow more than three times more likely, globally, and the effects would be uneven: In India, by the end of the century, there would be 30 times as many severe heat waves as today, according to one estimate. Ninety-three times as many people would be exposed there to dangerous heat. This is what now counts as progress. Today, at just 1.2 degrees, the planet is already warmer than it has been in the entire history of human civilization, already beyond the range of temperatures that gave rise to everything we have ever known as a species. Passing 1.5 and then two degrees of warming will plot a course through a truly foreign climate, bringing a level of environmental disruption that scientists have called “dangerous” when they are being restrained. Island nations of the world have called it “genocide,” and African diplomats have called it “certain death.” It is that level that the world’s scientists had in mind when they warned, in the latest I.P.C.C. report, published in February, that “any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.”
    • The tools are many — in fact, close to infinite. Given that most of the world’s infrastructure was built for climate conditions we have already left behind, protecting ourselves against new conditions would require something like a global construction project: defenses against flooding — both natural, like mangrove and wetland restoration, and more interventionist, like dikes and levees and sea walls and sea gates. We’ll need stronger housing codes; more resilient building materials and more weather-conscious urban planning; heat-resistant rail lines and asphalt and all other kinds of infrastructure; better forecasting and more universal warning systems; less wasteful water management, including across very large agricultural regions like the American West; cooling centers and drought-resistant crops and much more effective investments in emergency response for what Juliette Kayyem, a former official at the Department of Homeland Security, calls our new “age of disasters.”
    • “For me, what we are witnessing at the present level of warming, it is already challenging the limits to adaptation for humans,” says Fahad Saeed of Climate Analytics. Over the last six months, Saeed, a Pakistani scientist based in Islamabad, has watched the country endure months of extreme heat, crop failures and monsoon flooding that submerged a third of the nation, destroyed a million homes, displaced 30 million people and inflicted damage estimated at $40 billion or above — 11 percent of Pakistan’s 2021 G.D.P. “One can’t believe what would happen at 1.5 degrees,” he says. “Anything beyond that? It would even be more devastating.”
    • But perhaps the more profound questions are about distribution: Who gets those seeds? Who manages to build those dikes? Who is exposed when they fail or go unbuilt? And what is the fate of those most frontally assaulted by warming? The political discourse orbiting these issues is known loosely as “climate justice”: To what extent will climate change harden and deepen already unconscionable levels of global inequality, and to what degree can the countries of the global south engineer and exit from the already oppressive condition that the scholar Farhana Sultana has called “climate coloniality”? “The big thing politically that’s going to happen on a massive scale is movement,” says Taiwo, the philosopher. “The numbers I’ve seen for displacement — both internal displacement and cross-border displacement at two degrees — are at least in the tens if not the hundreds of millions. And I don’t think we have a political context for what that means.”
    • “We live in an unimaginable future,” says the writer Rebecca Solnit, who has grown increasingly focused on the political and social challenges of climate change. “Things thought impossible or inconceivable or unlikely not very long ago are accepted norms now.” Today, as a result, “a lot of my hope is just radical uncertainty,” she says. “You see that the world can’t go on as it is — that is true. But it doesn’t mean the world can’t go on. It means that the world will go on, not as it is but in some unimaginably transformed way.”
    • Normalization is a form of adaptation, too, however cruel and unfortunate a form it may appear in theory or ahead of time. Indeed, already we can say a given heat wave was made 30 times more likely by climate change, or that it was a few degrees hotter than it would have been without climate change, and both would be true. We’ll be able to talk about the contributions of warming to disasters that buckle whole nations, as the recent monsoon flooding in Pakistan has, or about the human contributions to such vulnerability. And as we do today, we will often reach for the past when trying to judge the present, reckoning with how the world got where it is and who was responsible and whether the result of the fight against warming counts as progress or failure or both. History is our handiest counterfactual, however poor a standard it sets for a world that could have been much better still. “We’ve come a long way, and we’ve still got a long way to go,” says Hayhoe, the Canadian scientist, comparing the world’s progress to a long hike. “We’re halfway there. Look at the great view behind you. We actually made it up halfway, and it was a hard slog. So take a breather, pat yourself on the back, but then look up — that’s where we have to go. So let’s keep on going.”

10/26/2022

  1. Climate Pledges Are Falling Short, and a Chaotic Future Looks More Like Reality: With an annual summit next month, the United Nations assessed progress on countries’ past emissions commitments. Severe disruption would be hard to avoid on the current trajectory.
    • Countries around the world are failing to live up to their commitments to fight climate change, pointing Earth toward a future marked by more intense flooding, wildfires, drought, heat waves and species extinction, according to a report issued Wednesday by the United Nations. Just 26 of 193 countries that agreed last year to step up their climate actions have followed through with more ambitious plans. The world’s top two polluters, China and the United States, have taken some action but have not pledged more this year, and climate negotiations between the two have been frozen for months.
    • Without drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the report said, the planet is on track to warm by an average of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels, by 2100.
    • The United Nations report analyzed the commitments made by countries to cut their emissions, known as nationally determined contributions, or N.D.C.s. Countries that signed the 2015 Paris agreement promised to update and strengthen their commitments every five years. The 2020 meeting was postponed a year because of the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, acknowledging the urgency of the climate crisis, nations agreed not to wait another five years and instead pledged to make new commitments before the climate talks that begin Nov. 7 in Egypt.
    • The United States, in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for cleaner technologies, has jumped forward in its ability to make good on its promise to cut emissions by between 50 and 52 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade. But the new law will still only get the United States about 80 percent of the way to its current pledge to cut emissions, Ms. Fransen said. Mr. Höhne said the United States’ new law was the strongest move made by a major emitter in 2022, but was “30 years overdue.”
    • The release of the U.N. report provoked grumbling from those in the developing world who were quick to point out that, of the few countries that strengthened their pledges this year, most are not heavy polluters.

10/21/2022

  1. Bodies of water all over North America are drying up due to drought, climate change: Experts: Riverbeds that used to be covered in ample water are now dehydrated by drought.
    • Earlier this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that the 22-year megadrought affecting the West would not only intensify but also move eastward. That prediction appears to be coming into fruition, with about 82% of the continental U.S. currently showing conditions between abnormally dry and exceptional drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
    • "Rivers all over the world are running really low," especially the Tigress and Euphrates Rivers in Iraq, as well as significant bodies of water in countries like Italy, Romania, France and China, Jonathan Deason, professor of the Environmental and Energy Management Program at George Washington University. The experts said that a two-pronged approach that includes climate change mitigation and better water management policies will be crucial as bodies of water continue to dry up. But so much damage has already been done, that even drastic improvements or reductions in emissions will not immediately impact reducing the stress on water levels, they said.
    • Decreasing water levels along the Mississippi River, one of the most important trade routes in the country, have been causing ripple effects worldwide. Earlier this month, barges with shipping containers began idling along the sandbars of the river that previously contained ample water. Waters along the Mississippi have receded so much that a ferry that likely sunk in the late 1800s or early 1900s was discovered near Baton Rouge, earlier this month, and possible human remains were located by a resident in Coahoma County, Missouri, on Saturday.
    • Supply chain delays for goods like grains, cement and fuel, which travel through New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico, could be a consequence of a dried-up Mississippi, experts say. "What happens is, commercial vessels have trouble, have obstacles popping up," Deason said. "Waters used to be so deep, it didn't make a difference for navigation." Ripple effects will include inflation and the prices of food and goods increasing, Deason added.
    • The Great Salt Lake, the largest saltwater lake in the world and largest terminal lake in the Western Hemisphere — is continuing to lose its volume at alarming rates. By 2017, the lake had lost half of its water since the first settler arrived in 1847, according to a study published in Nature Geoscience. It is now one-third of its original capacity and has reached unsustainable levels, researchers told PBS. The loss of water in the lake, which is now at its lowest levels ever, is already causing a dangerous ecological ripple effect throughout Utah, and it will likely get worse, scientists told ABC News in July. More than 800 square miles of river have been exposed as a result of the dry-up.
    • Lake Oroville and Lake Shasta, the two biggest reservoirs in the state, are barely above 30% capacity, and every major reservoir in California except for one is below the historical average, according to the California Department of Water Resources. In addition, more than 60% of monitored groundwater wells in California are below normal conditions, and more than 21% are currently experiencing historically low levels, Ortiz said. Workers who are drilling into groundwater wells have told Ortiz that groundwater levels in some regions have dropped up to 10 feet, Ortiz said. "This impacts hundreds of communities that depend on groundwater as their primary source of drinking water," as well as the agriculture industry, he said.

10/20/2022

  1. Oceans are warming faster than ever. Here’s what could come next. A paper finds that the upper reaches of the ocean have been heating up since the 1950s.
    • Scientists attribute about 40 percent of global sea level rise to the effects of thermal expansion in ocean water. Warmer oceans also speed the melting of ice sheets, adding to rising seas. They disrupt traditional weather patterns and deepen drought in some areas. And they fuel more intense hurricanes, as well as create the conditions for more torrential rainfall and deadly flooding.
    • In addition, the analysis found that future warming could cause precipitous drops in certain fisheries, causing the loss of livelihoods and food sources. The trend also makes it “inevitable” that marine heat waves will become more extensive and longer-lasting — a reality that can trigger toxic algal blooms and fuel massive mortality events among coral reefs, kelp forests and other ocean life. While the authors make clear that oceans around the world are projected to continue warming over the coming decades, even if humanity begins to cut greenhouse gas emissions, that warming will not happen equally across the globe. Largely due to circulation patterns, some regions are projected to warm faster than others and are likely to grapple with more intense impacts.
    • If the world can steer toward a future with the kind of rapidly shrinking emissions envisioned by the Paris climate agreement, the author of this week’s review write, that would likely “lead to a detectable and lasting reduction in [the] ocean warming rate, with noticeable reductions in climate-change impacts.” Russell said the latest findings emphasize that it “absolutely matters” that humans cut emissions as quickly as possible, to limit warming in the oceans and the ripple effects that ultimately has for humans. “Our oceans are doing us a profound service,” she said. “As a scientist and a mom, I pray about the fact we need to bend that curve in my lifetime. … It is important that we do this.”
  2. Secret files suggest chemical giant feared weedkiller’s link to Parkinson’s disease: Documents seen by Guardian detail effort to refute scientific research into paraquat and derail nomination of key EPA adviser
    • For decades, Swiss chemical giant Syngenta has manufactured and marketed a widely used weed-killing chemical called paraquat, and for much of that time the company has been dealing with external concerns that long-term exposure to the chemical may be a cause of the incurable brain ailment known as Parkinson’s disease. Syngenta has repeatedly told customers and regulators that scientific research does not prove a connection between its weedkiller and the disease, insisting that the chemical does not readily cross the blood-brain barrier, and does not affect brain cells in ways that cause Parkinson’s. But a cache of internal corporate documents dating back to the 1950s reviewed by the Guardian suggests that the public narrative put forward by Syngenta and the corporate entities that preceded it has at times contradicted the company’s own research and knowledge.
    • In one defensive tactic, the documents indicate that the company worked behind the scenes to try to keep a highly regarded scientist from sitting on an advisory panel for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency is the chief US regulator for paraquat and other pesticides. Company officials wanted to make sure the efforts could not be traced back to Syngenta, the documents show. And the documents show that insiders feared they could face legal liability for long-term, chronic effects of paraquat as long ago as 1975. One company scientist called the situation “a quite terrible problem” for which “some plan could be made … ”
    • Among the revelations from the documents: scientists with Syngenta predecessor Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and Chevron Chemical were aware in the 1960s and 70s of mounting evidence showing paraquat could accumulate in the human brain. When Syngenta’s own internal research showed adverse effects of paraquat on brain tissue, the company withheld that information from regulators while downplaying the validity of similar findings being reported by independent scientists.
    • Syngenta also created a website the company used to publicly dismiss concerns about links between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease and provide positive product messaging. On that website, the company asserted that paraquat did not readily cross the blood-brain barrier, even when the company had evidence from animal and human data that paraquat accumulated in brain tissue. The company no longer uses that language on its website.
    • Paraquat is one of the most widely used weed killing chemicals in the world, competing with herbicides such as glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup brand for use in agriculture. Farmers use it to control weeds before planting their crops and to dry out crops for harvest. In the United States, the chemical is used in orchards, wheat fields, pastures where livestock graze, cotton fields and elsewhere. As weeds have become more resistant to glyphosate, paraquat popularity has surged. It is used on approximately 15m acres of US farmland. US government data shows that the amount of paraquat used in the United States has more than tripled between 1992 and 2018.
    • Paraquat was banned in the European Union in 2007 after a court found that regulators did not thoroughly assess safety concerns, including scientific evidence connecting Parkinson’s to paraquat. It is also banned in the UK, although it is manufactured there. The chemical was banned in Switzerland, Syngenta’s home country, in 1989. And it is banned in China, the home base for ChemChina, which purchased Syngenta five years ago. In the US, the EPA has largely agreed with Syngenta and other chemical companies that say paraquat can be safely used. Last year, the EPA said it would continue to allow farmers to use paraquat, including spraying it across fields from small airplanes.
    • “The Parkinson’s pandemic has exacted an enormous toll on tens of millions of individuals who bear the brunt of the disease,” Ray Dorsey, a neurologist at the University of Rochester Center for Health + Technology in New York, wrote in a 2020 book about the rise of the disease. Dorsey is one of a number of leading scientists from around the world who say research clearly shows paraquat exposure can cause Parkinson’s disease. “Paraquat is considered the most toxic herbicide ever created,” Dorsey said in an interview.
    • In the early 1970s, animal studies by ICI researchers found more evidence of the chemical’s ability to move into the brain, as well as the lungs, and spinal cord. Field workers exposed to the chemical were complaining of health problems, and the documents indicate that by 1974 some state regulators were expressing concerns about the potential long-term, chronic effects on workers who might inadvertently lick small quantities of paraquat residue off lips, or inhale paraquat mist. Company officials were also warned of rumors that some people inside the EPA were in favor of banning paraquat.
    • In October 1985, an internal memorandum circulated to Chevron officials noted that a study by a Canadian researcher had found “an extraordinarily high correlation” between Parkinson’s and the use of pesticides, including paraquat. The memo also noted that paraquat was “chemically very similar” to the byproduct of synthetic heroin called MTPT, “which produces almost instant Parkinson’s, by killing dopaminergic neurons in the brain”. The author of the Canadian study had warned that an increase in Parkinson’s disease would be seen as a consequence of the relatively recent introduction of paraquat-like pesticides.
    • R Gwin Follis, the retired chairman of Standard Oil – which became known as Chevron in 1984 – wrote to GM Keller, the chairman of Chevron: “I cannot think of anything more horrible for us to bequeath to our successors than an asbestos problem.” Chevron stopped selling paraquat a year later, in 1986. The “decision to exit the paraquat distribution business was made solely for commercial reasons due to increased competition and did not relate to any health concerns regarding paraquat,” Chevron USA said in a statement to the Guardian.
    • Syngenta noted these “external pressures on paraquat” and decided its own scientists should repeat studies done by the outside scientists to see if they came up with the same results. There was a caveat: the Syngenta science team “avoided measuring PQ [paraquat] levels in the brain, since the detection of any PQ in the brain (no matter how small) will not be perceived externally in a positive light”, according to an internal Syngenta presentation.
    • As Syngenta honed its defenses, the data from its internal studies started to come in. The first internal study done in 2003 was designed to dose mice with paraquat as outside scientists had done, and then measure any loss of dopamine neurons in the substantia nigra of the animals’ brains. Syngenta’s tests did find losses but used a manual counting technique for analyzing those losses that was different from the automated technique used by independent scientists. Under the Syngenta analysis, the impacts of paraquat on the animal’s brains were deemed not statistically significant, a finding Syngenta made public. What the company did not publicize at the time, however, was the fact that Syngenta scientist Louise Marks, who led the animal studies in question, repeated those studies using the more accurate, automated technique used by independent scientists. She found that when using an automated analysis technique, paraquat actually did result in a statistically significant loss of the relevant brain cells – just as the outside scientists had found. Marks did another study, and the results were the same. Marks could not be reached for comment.
    • Part of the strategy to influence regulators involved trying to lobby for and against who the EPA looked to for independent scientific advice. In 2005, the EPA was considering appointing Dr Deborah Cory-Slechta to an open position on an important agency scientific advisory panel (SAP) on pesticides. Cory-Slechta was an influential US scientist whose work at the time was establishing ever stronger evidence that paraquat could cause Parkinson’s disease. “This is important. We do not want to have Cory-Slechta on the SAP core panel,” Syngenta senior research scientist Charles Breckenridge wrote to colleagues in a June 2005 email. Company emails show Syngenta decided to ask Ray McAllister, a regulatory policy expert at the industry lobbying group CropLife America (CLA), to disparage Cory-Slechta’s work in communications to the EPA. Syngenta officials wrote what they wanted McAllister to tell the EPA, and delivered it to McAllister.
    • In a separate email, Watson wrote that “for many, many of our projects it would be a real disaster to have her on the SAP!” Watson suggested, among other things, that McAllister tell the EPA that Cory-Slechta used an “over-interpretation of data” to present scientific conclusions that were “in reality, speculation,” and was someone who made “overly dogmatic” statements. McAllister communicated the concerns about Cory-Slechta to the EPA without mentioning they came from Syngenta. The agency chose someone else for the advisory panel.
    • When asked to comment about the company’s actions against her, Cory-Slechta said she was not surprised. She said Syngenta representatives had tried various tactics over the years to intimidate her, and also at least once to woo her with an invitation to help fund and collaborate on research. “They would follow me around,” she said in an interview. “It was clear they were not happy with me. Consistently our research showed that when you administer paraquat in rodent models you would see a loss of dopamine cells … in the substantia nigra. That is the hallmark, or the gold standard, of Parkinson’s disease.” She said: “They didn’t like the data. They saw a threat to a huge market.”

10/17/2022 — Dr. Jess Wade Day

  1. Why We Should All Be Chasing Acorns:
    • As Douglas W. Tallamy explains in his splendid 2021 book, “The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees,” oaks are keystone plants, the central life form upon which so many other species in the ecosystem depend. Hundreds of insects and caterpillars feed on oak leaves, and those insects in turn feed birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles and even other insects. In fall and winter, acorns feed many of them all over again. Because so many predators eat the creatures that eat the acorns, a good year for oaks is a good year for everybody. “No other tree genus supports so much life,” Dr. Tallamy notes.
    • Last fall I tried to start some acorns from a friend’s chestnut oak, which also belongs to the white oak group, but the squirrels dug them all up and carried them off. This year I’ll plant my acorns in flowerpots and protect them with bricks and hardware cloth. Come spring, I’ll hand the seedlings out like Easter eggs. If I can talk my new human neighbors into planting these seedlings in their yards, they’ll have shade again someday, and our wild neighbors will have food and shelter, too.
    • Maybe it seems pointless, all this hope based on nothing more than a couple of dozen acorns. Even if they all germinate, even if they survive rabbits and drought long enough to reach acorn-bearing age, how much difference will it even make? In the context of rampant deforestation and massive biodiversity loss, will it matter if one small neighborhood in one growing city becomes a safe place for oak trees and the creatures they shelter and feed? My answer lies in the acorn itself: As the old English proverb goes, mighty oaks from little acorns grow.
    • We don’t even necessarily need to plant the acorns ourselves; a policy of benign neglect toward the yard might be enough. A single blue jay can collect 3,000 to 5,000 acorns a year, gathering them from up to a mile away. The birds often store their prizes by pressing them into disturbed soil. There’s a lot of disturbed soil in our little half acre of suburbia, partly owing to my old friend the mole and partly owing to the holes I leave behind when I pry up the bush honeysuckle and privet and other invasive seedlings that take root here every year. Fortunately for the rest of the backyard creatures, blue jays don’t always remember when they stored their acorns.
  2. She’s made 1,750 Wikipedia bios for women scientists who haven’t gotten their due: ‘Not only do we not have enough women in science, but we aren’t doing enough to celebrate the ones we have,’ said physicist Jess Wade.
    • “We do an awful lot of talking about underrepresentation,” Wade added, “but not enough acting on it.” Most evenings, Wade sits at her desk for several hours, looking online for inspiring lesser-known scientists. There is no shortage of potential subjects, she said. “I’ve never sat down and not had someone to write about,” said Wade, who scours archived documents, scientific papers, journals and social media in search of notable people without a Wikipedia page.
    • She’ll often have 20 internet tabs open at one time, sifting through library archives and institutional sites to scrape together as much information as possible. Each profile takes a few hours to produce.

10/13/2022

  1. Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70% since 1970, report reveals: Huge scale of human-driven loss of species demands urgent action, say world’s leading scientists
    • From the open ocean to tropical rainforests, the abundance of birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles is in freefall, declining on average by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 2018, according to the WWF and Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) biennial Living Planet Report. Two years ago, the figure stood at 68%, four years ago, it was at 60%.
    • The Living Planet Index combines global analysis of 32,000 populations of 5,230 animal species to measure changes in the abundance of wildlife across continents and taxa, producing a graph akin to a stock index of life on Earth.
    • Latin America and the Caribbean region – including the Amazon – has seen the steepest decline in average wildlife population size, with a 94% drop in 48 years. Tanya Steele, chief executive at WWF-UK, said: “This report tells us that the worst declines are in the Latin America region, home to the world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon. Deforestation rates there are accelerating, stripping this unique ecosystem not just of trees but of the wildlife that depends on them and of the Amazon’s ability to act as one of our greatest allies in the fight against climate change.”
    • Guardian graphic. Source: World Wildlife Fund and Zoological Society London
      lossOfBiodiversity.png
    • “Despite the science, the catastrophic projections, the impassioned speeches and promises, the burning forests, submerged countries, record temperatures and displaced millions, world leaders continue to sit back and watch our world burn in front of our eyes,” said Steele. “The climate and nature crises, their fates entwined, are not some faraway threat our grandchildren will solve with still-to-be-discovered technology.”
  2. 8 ways to feel less anxious about things beyond your control: Hope fatigue is the latest mental health challenge therapists are seeing
    • One of my patients showed up at her virtual psychotherapy session last week looking tired. She had always been ambitious and concerned about injustice. During this session, she sighed when talking about a meeting where her colleagues complained about unfair treatment. She said: “I don’t know why they bother getting upset, when it feels like nothing matters.” I was concerned by her disengagement. But then a colleague sounded similarly worn down. She had spent the pandemic helping her third and fourth graders with remote school while trying to keep her small business going. She confided to me: “I haven’t followed the war in Ukraine at all, I simply don’t have the bandwidth.” To an unusual degree, people are weary.
    • Patients who had been concerned about national and world events and visibly frightened during the pandemic, now seem exhausted. The murder of George Floyd was horrific, and mass shootings are increasingly common. Now it feels like we are all in a relentless game of whack-a-mole, but in this case the rodents are existential threats. I’m noticing that many of my patients are experiencing a deficit of optimism, and are overwhelmed about important issues that are beyond their control. I’m calling it “hope fatigue.”
    • “I see a lot of people ‘going through the motions of living’ but, since they don’t know what to make of life, how to keep safe, how to have control over anything or make a difference in anything, how to have fun, they slip into a kind of detachment,” said psychologist Judy Levitz, founding director of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center in New York City. Humans need to feel they have some degree of control. When you take away a person’s sense of safety, depression and anxiety can set in. Our nervous systems were simply not designed to attend to so many crises at once.
  3. Signs of dementia may be detectable nine years before diagnosis – study: Findings by Cambridge researchers raise possibility of early interventions for those at risk
  4. Kamoya Kimeu obituary: Expert field palaeontologist who made many key discoveries about early human evolution in East Africa.
    • When Kamoya started work with Louis Leakey in the 1960s it seemed unlikely that the local fieldworkers would receive the recognition they deserved. Times have changed for the better, and there is more and more recognition of the key role that people beyond the academy can play in contributing to scientific discovery. Kamoya was not only a wonderful example of this, he was also someone who made the times themselves change.

10/11/2022

  1. Extreme heat could make parts of Asia, Africa uninhabitable in decades:
    • By the year 2100, extreme heat events will make parts of Asia and Africa uninhabitable for up to 600 million people, the United Nations and the Red Cross said Monday.
    • “Let us be clear: This is not a problem that humanitarian organizations can solve alone. The urgent priority must be large and sustained investments that mitigate climate change and support long-term adaptation for the most vulnerable people,” the report said. “Without those investments, we are destined for a future of ever larger and deadlier heat disasters.”
  2. 'Humble' worm saliva can break down tough plastic: One of the worst forms of plastic pollution may have met its match in the saliva of a humble worm.

10/10/2022

  1. Climate Conversations: Pathways to Action: Climate Conversations: Pathways to Action is a monthly webinar series that aims to convene high-level, cross-cutting, nonpartisan conversations about issues relevant to national policy action on climate change.
  2. Young people need experiences that boost their mental health: More policymakers and practitioners should encourage exploration and discovery during youth, to prevent adolescents from reaching crisis.
    1. First, youth need healthy ways to channel their motivation to explore their world. These could be school-based extracurricular activities, special-interest clubs and sports or community-based activities, such as volunteering in social-service agencies. But to have the greatest impact, programmes must be designed thoughtfully. A 2014 meta-analysis8 showed, for example, that community service positively affected all sorts of measures in young people aged 12–20. These ranged from participants’ thoughts about themselves to their level of motivation in school. But this happened only if participants were also given an opportunity to process their experiences, such as through keeping a journal or in group discussions.
    2. Second, young people need opportunities to contribute to the lives of others. Both survey work and experiments in developmental psychology have shown that adolescents become increasingly attuned to their position and role in the world as they age. This might manifest as a greater concern about their status among peers, or as an increased awareness of how factors such as ethnicity and economic background shape their standing in society. They also increasingly explore different ways to play a part in society through their jobs, families and activities.
    3. Third, adolescents need healthy relationships with parents and other adults: these are essential for young people’s mental health and well-being. Data from questionnaires, for instance, show that adolescents who have secure and supportive relationships with their parents or other carers have lower levels of depression and a stronger sense of identity than do those with insecure relationships. Caring, affectionate and validating parenting behaviours — collectively known as positive parenting — have also been linked to the maturation of certain brain regions that are associated with the regulation of emotions, such as the amygdala.

10/8/2022

  1. How America’s most enigmatic fruit is making a comeback: The pawpaw ‘tastes best when it looks worst’ – and occupies a niche the food industry cannot fill
    • According to Sheri Crabtree, a plant breeder at the nation’s only pawpaw research program at Kentucky State University, pawpaws have kept a low profile in recent decades because they’re almost big agriculture-proof: ripe for only a few days before they spoil, they’re hard to ship and sell, which is why you’ve probably never seen them in grocery stores. “So much of fruit and vegetable production in the US is based around being able to store fruit for a long time and ship it long distances,” Crabtree said. Plus, she added, pawpaws may have suffered from a stigma attached to wild foods. “Another name for the pawpaw is the ‘poor man’s banana’. In the early part of the 20th century, processed foods were seen as more appealing because they communicated access to refrigeration,” she said. “Wild forest foods fell out of favor for a while. People thought, ‘That’s what poor rural people eat.’”
    • “They taste best when they look worst – after the first frost, they’re all bruised and almost black, but that’s when they’re perfect,” Mihesuah said.
    • Plus, Crabtree adds, the insecticidal compounds that make pawpaw seeds an effective ingredient in lice-treatment shampoo mean that pawpaw trees don’t need many pesticides. “They are pretty easy to grow sustainably or organically since there’s not a lot of insects or diseases that bother them that would require you to spray, like you would for apples or grapes,” Crabtree said.

10/7/2022

  1. Toxic ‘forever chemicals’ detected in commonly used insecticides in US, study finds: ‘Screamingly high’ levels of PFOS, one of the most dangerous PFAS compounds, found in six out of 10 insecticides tested
    • The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has known about the findings for more than 18 months but appears to have not yet investigated the products or taken any action against the manufacturer.
    • PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, can be taken up by crops. Such high levels in pesticides creates a health risk if spread on fields where food is grown, public health advocates say. “We know PFOS is a carcinogen, we know it’s a deadly chemical and there’s no safe level in drinking water,” said Kyla Bennett, a former EPA official and science policy director with the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which issued a press release on the study. “Our soil and water are now contaminated.”
    • Bennett said there is little consumers can do to immediately protect themselves beyond eating organic food, but she noted that many people don’t have access to or can afford organic products.
  2. Hilaree Nelson notched many firsts in a life of high-altitude adventures: The climber and ski mountaineer, who died on a peak in Nepal, was driven to seek challenges that stretched her endurance to the limit.
    • On Monday, American ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson and her partner Jim Morrison reached the summit of 26,781-foot Manaslu, the eighth-highest mountain in the world. Soon after the 49-year-old Nelson began her descent on skis, she triggered a small avalanche and was swept away. On Wednesday, Morrison found her body.
  3. As Himalayan Glaciers Melt, a Water Crisis Looms in South Asia: Warmer air is thinning most of the vast mountain range’s glaciers, known as the Third Pole because they contain so much ice. The melting could have far-reaching consequences for flood risk and for water security for a billion people who rely on meltwater for their survival.
    • That future is daunting. New research suggests that the area of Himalayan glaciers has shrunk by 40 percent since the Little Ice Age maximum between 400-700 years ago, and that in the past few decades ice melt has accelerated faster than in other mountainous parts of the world. Retreat seems to have also recently initiated in Pakistan’s Karakoram range, one of the few areas where glaciers had been stable. Depending on the level of global warming, studies project that at least another third, and as much as two-thirds, of the region’s glaciers could vanish by the end of the century. Correspondingly, meltwater is expected to increase until around the 2050s and then begin to decline.
    • These changes could have far-reaching consequences for hazard risk and food and water security in a heavily populated region. More than a billion people depend on the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra river systems, which are fed by snow and glacial melt from the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, known as the world’s “Third Pole” because it contains so much ice. Peaking in summer, meltwater can be a lifesaver at a time when other water sources are much diminished.

10/6/2022

  1. How a hobby farm taught me to set priorities in academia: With tenure and training, I learnt to say no to endless meetings and remake my academic career.
    • Today, I have my trees and plants well maintained, and my animals are healthy and stable. I became a farmer in late 2020. It was well into the COVID-19 pandemic, and, as an epidemiologist with training in infectious diseases, I knew things wouldn’t end quickly — despite the many tools we had on hand to prevent transmission. As a result, I wanted more outside space to grow my own food and be able to physically distance myself. My family and I sold our home and purchased a smaller house with significantly more land, including hundreds of fruit trees and plants — along with a flock of chickens and a group of farm cats.
    • I thought at first that every hour spent on the land supporting outside life meant one less hour for meetings and academic productivity. But I found that the time I spent working outside with a shovel allowed for deep thought, and inspired the creativity that I needed to innovate and problem-solve for research. It also helped me to come up with ideas for supporting under-represented students and dealing with my other work at the University of California (UC), Riverside. The hour outside contributed in many ways to my productivity, and it allowed me to consider my own priorities rather than those of others.
    • Ultimately, I’ve learnt that stepping away from your laboratory is helpful. You don’t need a farm to do that, and I never imagined that I would be a farmer, but you could do something that brings you a sense of calm and frees your mind for an experience like mine. The act of stepping away could involve going for a walk, playing video games, cooking, listening to music, working out, watching the sunrise — or even writing your own personal story, so that others can benefit from your experience. But stepping away from the lab takes work, and perhaps means saying no to requests for meetings, so that you can focus on your own mental and physical health.

10/4/2022

  1. Wax worm saliva rapidly breaks down plastic bags, scientists discover: Its enzymes degrade polyethylene within hours at room temperature and could ‘revolutionise’ recycling
    • The discovery came after one scientist, an amateur beekeeper, cleaned out an infested hive and found the larvae started eating holes in a plastic refuse bag. The researchers said the study showed insect saliva may be “a depository of degrading enzymes which could revolutionise [the cleanup of polluting waste]”.
    • Polyethylene makes up 30% of all plastic production and is used in bags and other packaging that make up a significant part of worldwide plastic pollution. The only recycling at scale today uses mechanical processes and creates lower-value products.
  2. Want a career saving the planet? Become an electrician. To ‘electrify everything’ the country is going to need a lot more electrical experts.
    • “It’s a billion machines that need to be installed or replaced over the next 25 years across 121 million homes,” said Ari Matusiak, the CEO of Rewiring America. “There need to be significantly more individuals who are trained to install these machines — and one subset of that is electricians who are trained to put in breaker boxes, wire our homes, and connect devices to our electric sources.” The problem is that many in the industry say the country is already in a state of electrician shortage — one that could get worse as clean energy ramps up. “We’re in an electrician shortage now,” said Sam Steyer, the president and CEO of Greenwork, a start-up that tries to connect clean energy workers with companies. Steyer says that homeowners attempting to install heat pumps or electric car chargers have already reported problems finding certified tradespeople to do the work that they need: Waiting lists sometimes stretch on for months.

10/1/2022

  1. Hurricane Ian is no anomaly. The climate crisis is making storms more powerful: Michael E Mann and Susan Joy Hassol]
    • We can also draw upon basic physics, as we explained in Scientific American in 2017. Warmer oceans mean more fuel to strengthen hurricanes, with an average increase in wind speeds of major hurricanes of about 18mph for each 1C (1.8F) of ocean surface warming, a roughly 13% increase. Since the power of the storm increases roughly the wind speed not only squared but raised to the third power, that amounts to a roughly 44% increase in the destructive potential of these storms.
    • There is also evidence that human-caused warming is increasing the size of these storms. All else being equal, larger storms pile up greater amounts of water, leading to larger storm surges like the 12 to 18 feet estimated for Ian in some locations. Add sea level rise, and that’s the better part of foot of additional coastal flooding baked into every single storm surge. If humanity continues to warm the planet, and destabilize the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets, we could see yards, not feet, of eventual sea-level rise. Think of that as a perpetual coastal flooding event.
  2. David Foreman, Hard-Line Environmentalist, Dies at 75: As a co-founder of the group Earth First!, he advocated slashing tires and downing power lines in an effort to return vast swaths of the country to their natural state.
    • David Foreman, who as the co-founder of the environmental group Earth First! urged his followers to sabotage bulldozers, slash logging-truck tires and topple high-voltage power lines, earning him a reputation as a visionary, a rabble-rouser, a prankster and, even among some fellow activists, a domestic terrorist, died on Sept. 19 at his home in Albuquerque. He was 75.
    • Its members drew inspiration from the writer Edward Abbey, whose 1975 novel, “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” depicts a group of eco-warriors who attack increasingly grandiose targets — including the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona — in the name of the environment. Indeed, in Earth First!’s debut action, in 1981, Mr. Foreman and a group of activists unfurled a 300-foot-long banner, painted to look like an enormous crack, down the side of Glen Canyon Dam.
    • It soon emerged that the F.B.I. agent had encouraged the sabotage, essentially trying to entrap Earth First! in a felony, and most of the charges were dropped. Mr. Foreman eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for giving the agent two copies of his book “Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching” (1985), an action that prosecutors said constituted conspiracy to commit a crime.

Time machine:

RClimate Examples

  • Here's the 10-day weather forecast for Mattawa, Ontario, where we have a farm, away from the noise of that blowhard tRump, the once-and-always-liar-in-chief. 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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