A slight improvement to bad odds: Satellites spot previously undiscovered emperor penguin colonies

The diversity of life on Earth has always been a source of fascination and joy for me. It’s common, in our current society, to focus on things like ecosystem services, and the ways in which biodiversity is essential to human life, and human wellbeing. All of these arguments are valid and true, and in my opinion are important to remember in considering our relationship with the rest of life on this planet.

But there is also an aesthetic value to it. Maybe this is just me categorizing the ways in which biodiversity benefits human mental health, but even so, it’s an angle that’s often neglected, outside of research into how time spent around plants is beneficial.

It makes me happy to know about the strange and wonderful organisms that inhabit this world. I like that the reality of life on Earth is consistently more bizarre and more interesting than any aliens inhabiting science fiction. At the same time, I always feel an intense sense of loss when I remember that we are the only surviving human species on this planet. I can’t help but think that our world and our lives would be richer had our relatives survived, and lived along side us.

Still, we have our more distant relatives, at least for now, and while I’ve come to understand the effort to save endangered species and ecosystems from the effects of human civilization as central to our ability to survive in the long term, it started as something of a gut reaction. My life is better when there’s a lot of other life out there, even if I never get to see most of it in person.

Learning that humans had caused other species to go extinct was hard. Learning that we were still doing it was harder. Many species exist on borrowed time. Others may still make it, but it’s hard to tell. Either way, the chances that any given species will survive tend to be influenced by how large and widespread their global population is. If they only exist in one location, or they’re spread out but there are too few of them, it takes very little to move from a small population to one that faces certain extinction.

That’s why it’s nice to learn that, while they are still in danger, there are more emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica than we had previously thought.

Satellite images have revealed 11 previously unknown emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica, boosting the number of known colonies of the imperilled birds by 20%.

The discoveries were made by spotting the distinctive red-brown guano patches the birds leave on the ice. The finds were made possible by higher-resolution images from a new satellite, as previous scans were unable to pick up smaller colonies.

Two of the colonies were a particular surprise. They were found far from the coast, living on sea ice that is anchored to grounded icebergs, a location never seen before.

The new colonies are thought to number a few hundred penguins each, which is smaller than average, so the discoveries increase the total population of emperor penguins by a smaller proportion of about 5-10%.

Emperor penguins are the only penguins that breed on sea ice, rather than land, making them especially vulnerable to the climate crisis. All the new colonies are in areas that are at risk and researchers say these will be the “canaries in the coal mine” as global heating increasingly affects Antarctica.

“The [new colonies] are an exciting discovery,” said Peter Fretwell, at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), who led the research. “Whilst this is good news, the colonies are small and so only take the overall population count up to just over half a million penguins.”

I don’t know whether the species will survive. I want them to, and the world will be poorer for their loss if they do die out. It pleases me that we’ve got even a fractionally better shot at helping them make it through the changes we’re forcing them to live through.

Hey, did you know that in this capitalist hell-world I need something called “money” to get shelter and food? It’s true! It’s also true that because of the global pandemic, there are literally hundreds of people applying for every job to which I or my wife apply, and nobody seems particularly eager to hire immigrants here. If you want to help out, you can do so for as little as $1.00 USD per month (about three pennies per day) at patreon.com/oceanoxia

My patrons are a collection of wonderful people who want to support the work I’m doing, and are contributing a little bit of their earnings to help me keep providing free content here! You could join them in that endeavor, and earn my sincere gratitude, as well as some extra content every month.

Canada has lost its last fully intact ice shelf

The last fully intact ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic has collapsed, losing more than 40 per cent of its area in just two days at the end of July, researchers said on Thursday.

This news comes as the Arctic Ocean is poised to possibly make a new record low in sea ice extent. With the way time passes for humans, it can be hard to wrap our heads around the relentlessness of the way our planet is warming right now. We’ve just hit 75 years since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and while we’ve managed to avoid any further use of nuclear weaponry in that time, it may be that what we have done will end up being as devastating as global nuclear war. It was calculated some years ago that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, caused by human emissions, has brought us to a point at which out planet is absorbing and retaining an amount of energy equivalent to four times that created by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, every second. It’s spread out around the world, and it doesn’t come with radioactive fallout, but the heat is still here. 240 atomic bombs per minute. 14,400 every hour. 345,600 every day.

Earth is huge. It takes a lot of heat to make a difference, but that’s the thing about insulation – its effect is constant, and unrelenting. As long as there’s an imbalance, it will just keep trapping more heat than it allows to release. And it accumulates, second by second.

It doesn’t all stay in the atmosphere. Some gets absorbed by land masses, and gets moved around in the atmosphere as water evaporates and precipitates. A vast majority of it has been going into the oceans:

“If you want to see where global warming is happening, look in our oceans,” said Zeke Hausfather, a graduate student in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper. “Ocean heating is a very important indicator of climate change, and we have robust evidence that it is warming more rapidly than we thought.”

Ocean heating is critical marker of climate change because an estimated 93 percent of the excess solar energy trapped by greenhouse gases accumulates in the world’s oceans. And, unlike surface temperatures, ocean temperatures are not affected by year-to-year variations caused by climate events like El Nino or volcanic eruptions.

And a chunk of it has been going into ice. Some of that has been sea ice, and probably counts as ocean warming, but some has been going into the massive ice deposits around the world. There, again, it’s a matter of accumulation. Glaciers, ice shelves, and ice sheets all exist in a degree of balance. They all lose mass every year, and they all gain mass back every year as the seasons change. The rise in temperature has shifted that balance. Because warmer air holds more water, there are some areas here glaciers are getting more snow than historically, because there’s more water in the air to snow down upon them, but on a global scale, they’re losing mass far faster than they’re regaining it each year.

This means a few things for us. The first is that this rend will accelerate as the temperature rises, and it will also make the temperature rise faster. As the ice recedes, more land and water are exposed, which can absorb more heat than ice, causing faster melting, causing faster warming, and so on.

This also means that melting land ice is going to become an increasingly big part of global sea level rise. A big chunk of what we’ve seen so far has been from thermal expansion of water as the oceans have warmed, and that will continue, but the faster land ice melts, the more of it will pour into the oceans.

It’s difficult to predict exactly how fast the seas will rise. The early damage is already occurring, with storm surges reaching farther inland and regular high tide flooding in cities that didn’t have that problem before. Action taken to slow the warming could slow sea level rise. Sudden collapses of ice shelves could speed it up. What’s not difficult to predict is that they will rise, and keep rising for the rest of our lives. There’s too much heat already in the system for anything else to happen, based on our current understanding of physics. As with so many of the other dangers of climate change, we know what’s coming, and we know a myriad of ways to prepare for it, so that we can ride out the storm, rather than being swamped by it.

Hey, did you know that in this capitalist hell-world I need something called “money” to get shelter and food? It’s true! It’s also true that because of the global pandemic, there are literally hundreds of people applying for every job to which I or my wife apply, and nobody seems particularly eager to hire immigrants here. If you want to help out, you can do so for as little as $1.00 USD per month (about three pennies per day) at patreon.com/oceanoxia

My patrons are a collection of wonderful people who want to support the work I’m doing, and are contributing a little bit of their earnings to help me keep providing free content here! You could join them in that endeavor, and earn my sincere gratitude, as well as some extra content every month.

Think like a Sponge: Global warming intensifying rainstorms in North America

One of the effects of a warming world that has long been predicted, and has caused some confusion, is the way in which higher temperatures will mean more droughts and  more floods. The basic mechanics of it are pretty straightforward, if you learn to think like a sponge.

Image shows a bright orange and yellow sponge growing on the sea floor in a coral reef. It is made of several thick vertical tubes with a rumpled texture on the outside. There's a blue-gray fan sponge or fan coral between a couple of the tubes, and the reef in the background is tinted blue from the light filtering through the water. The color of the sponge is probably so bright from a camera flash.

”                                                                                                                                                         ” -From Thoughts of a Sponge, Volume 7, by A Sponge

Wrong kind of sponge, sorry.

Basically, hot air is like a dry sponge that’s being expanded. It sucks up any water with which it comes in contact. When it cools, it’s like squeezing out that sponge. So in a hotter world water in soil, rivers, lakes, and oceans will be absorbed rapidly by the air, and dumped out in other parts of the world when that air cools down. Because of how air moves around, that can mean that one location will both get bigger rainstorms, and be in a near-permanent state of drought compared to what we’re used to. That means all the harmful effects of heavy rainstorms, but also the harmful effects of water shortages. As with so much else in this field, this is entirely predictable based on things we’ve known for a very long time, despite what the Doubt Industry might do to confuse things, so it’s no surprise that, with the planet warming fast, the likelihood of intense rainstorms is increasing:

“The longer you have the warming, the stronger the signal gets, and the more you can separate it from random natural variability,” said co-author Megan Kirchmeier-Young, a climate scientist with Environment Canada.
Previous research showed that global warming increases the frequency of extreme rainstorms across the Northern Hemisphere, and the new study was able to find that fingerprint for extreme rain in North America.

“We’re finding that extreme precipitation has increased over North America, and we’re finding that’s consistent with what the models are showing about the influence of human-caused warming,” she said. “We have very high confidence of extreme precipitation in the future.”
At the current level of warming caused by greenhouse gases—about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the pre-industrial average—extreme rainstorms that in the past happened once every 20 years will occur every five years, according to the study. If the current rate of warming continues, Earth will heat up 5.4 degrees by 2100. Then, 20, 50 and 100-year extreme rainstorms could happen every 1.5 to 2.5 years, the researchers concluded.
“The changes in the return periods really stood out,” she said. “That is a key contributor to flash flooding events and it will mean that flash flooding is going to be an increasing concern as well.”
The image shows a graph of extreme one-day precipitation events in the contiguous 48 states from 1900 to 2015. The image shows individual years as vertical gray bars, with a nine-year weighted average as an orange line. The X axis of the graph is time in decades, starting in 1910 and ending in 2020 (the vertical bars don't go that far). The Y-axis is

More often than not, when there’s a so-called “natural disaster”, the actual disaster is the result of human malfeasance or error. An event, like a storm, or an earthquake, or a drought, may be natural in origin, but the scale of disaster it causes is often a matter of how well the affected human population is prepared to deal with an event of that nature. Areas accustomed to dry weather aren’t bothered by what amounts to a catastrophic drought in other parts of the world. One of the bigger threats we face from climate change is that we are, increasingly, going to be seeing “the wrong weather” for what we’re used to in any given part of the world. This is something for which we can prepare, because we have enough understanding of how the temperature change is going to affect things.

The droughts could be significantly mitigated by a coordinated effort to capture, clean, and safely store rain water during the big rainfall events. Likewise, infrastructure could be designed to be able to handle a more monsoon-like annual rainfall pattern, while capturing the water needed. Doing all of this is not likely to be profitable, but it would dramatically decrease the need for drought-stricken areas to import water to deal with fairly predictable problems.

Hey, did you know that in this capitalist hell-world I need something called “money” to get shelter and food? It’s true! It’s also true that because of the global pandemic, there are literally hundreds of people applying for every job to which I or my wife apply, and nobody seems particularly eager to hire immigrants here. If you want to help out, you can do so for as little as $1.00 USD per month (about three pennies per day) at patreon.com/oceanoxia

My patrons are a collection of wonderful people who want to support the work I’m doing, and are contributing a little bit of their earnings to help me keep providing free content here! You could join them in that endeavor, and earn my sincere gratitude, as well as some extra content every month.

In Which We Go on an Expedition

Raksha, alas, has arthritis. When I first got her, waaay back in 2007, she was very high-energy, and could run circles around most other dogs we would encounter. As she got older, she started straining muscles when she went all-out, and we had to start being careful how much we let her run. A couple years ago, it took a very rapid turn for the worse. She couldn’t make it up stairs without us lifting her by a cloth under her belly, she wouldn’t eat, she started losing muscle mass in her hind legs – it was all very depressing, and it seemed like she wouldn’t survive another year. We got arthritis meds for her from the vet, and it completely turned things around. Within a month or so she could go up the stairs again.

After we got to Scotland, she seemed to improve even more. We had been worried the move would be too much for her, but she’s been more active, more energetic, and generally happier since we’ve been here. We had to switch her to a different arthritis medication, because that’s what the vet here was able to provide, but it has worked well. It’s clear that her hips still bother her, and they are slowly getting worse, but the meds make an incredible difference.

As a side note – this is one reason why it’s so important to have universal healthcare. For Raksha, having access to this medication has extended her life by two or three years at least, and allowed her so much more happiness than I thought was left to her. For a human suffering from arthritis, or any other debilitating condition, that can mean decades of fulfilling life, simply by having reliable access to the right medication. It should go without saying, but apparently it doesn’t, so I’ll say it again – that should be worth more than profit.

Anyway, we’ve been getting her meds refilled by mail since the pandemic started, but when we went to get a refill this time, they told us we had to bring her in. We don’t have a car, a significant portion of Uber drivers refuse to let dogs in their cars, and cabs are expensive, so we walked.

This summer has been delightful for me, and a bit too chilly for Tegan. We’ve had, I believe, one or maybe two days where the temperature might have reached 80°F(26.7°C). Today was in the 60s or 70s, and partly cloudy. It was pleasantly sunny when we set out, with a nice breeze. The walk was something like five miles(8km) round trip, with a couple stops for business/banking, and a couple big hills.

There was a time when neither I nor Raksha would consider that a particularly long walk, but we’re both older than we used to be, and I’ve gained weight (though I’m working on changing that). More importantly, none of us have done much walking since the pandemic started, because there hasn’t really been anywhere to go. We make sure Raksha gets her exercise pretty close to home, but where tiring her out used to take a couple hours of running around, now it takes a quarter of the time. It’s sad to see, but she still seems to enjoy it. Such is life.

The image shows a wrought steel sign between two lamp posts, forming what used to be where one could approach the river to board the water bus. The metal is painted blue. There's a bridge in the background, making it a little hard to read the sign, with reddish and white-ish structural elements. The cement river walk path is visible running behind the Water Bus sign, and under the bridge.

Broomielaw Water Bus sign. The bus is no longer in service, and honestly the river doesn’t see much use these days, except by seagulls. The old sign’s still there, though.

So we walked. Very slowly. Gone are the days where I have to remind her not to pull on the leash.

I’m honestly very fond of Glasgow. It has an interesting mix architecture, a few tall hills that give a bit of a view, and the slightly melancholy feel of a city that used to be a major industrial hub, and isn’t quite as central to global commerce as it once was. There’s a lot of construction going on year-round, and the city seems to be fairly busy most times of day. While Scotland’s re-opening has been going pretty well, there are still fewer people out than there were last August, many stores and restaurants are closed, and where Tegan and I were in the distinct minority with our mask-wearing back in March, they’re now required in most businesses, and about half the people walking around outside are wearing masks of one sort or another. We’re still relying on bandannas, but most people seem to have bought either surgical masks or some of the various re-usable ones that are now so common. I feel like a lot of people’s ears must be a little sore from being used as mask anchors, but maybe not. At some point I plan on whittling myself a wooden mask frame with slots for quilted filters I can run through the wash, but I need to track down some good wood for that. It’s a longer-term project, as I expect that novel viruses and masks are going to be much more present in the second half of my life than they have been in the first.

Anyway, we got to the vet, after stopping to let the dog rest in a couple parks along the way, and experienced our first big change in procedure since the pandemic started. We had to go around the back, call them to let them know we were there, and then wait outside until they came to get Raksha. I think we ended up waiting somewhere over half an hour.

Which brings us back to the weather. No matter what city I’ve lived in, someone would, at some point, tell me that if I didn’t like the weather, I could just wait five minutes. This has always had a touch of hyperbole to it. Not so in Glasgow. I don’t know if this is normal in the rest of the UK, though I expect it’s not far off, but the only time there’s weather that’s constant, particularly from one day to the next, is when there’s rain.

The reason the UK is so warm, despite being farther north than much of Canada, is that the Gulf Stream is constantly bringing heat up from the tropical Atlantic, and blasting the island with warm, humid air. The change of conditions as it leaves the ocean and rises up over this island results in a great deal of water condensing out and falling down. Sometimes there will be rain that lasts a few days, and farther south there seems to be a lot of flooding.

But in Glasgow, the default seems to be that if you don’t like the weather, wait a few minutes and the odds are good that it’ll change. We sat in chairs kindly provided by the vet, in gentle sunlight, and a few minutes later, were the beneficiaries of a gentle, soaking rain. The veterinarian came out, realized it was raining, and gave us an umbrella. I had considered bringing one of our own, but decided against it. About five minutes after we got the umbrella, the rain stopped.

The image shows a stone arch, that appears to be the entrance to a grand, old building that no longer exists. The stone is mostly reddish-brown, with a more gray-colored decorative arch over the doorway, peaked with a cross. Through the door, and around the outside of the arch, other Glaswegian buildings can be seen, making it clear that the lonely doorway stands at the top of a steep hill. The Rottenrow Gardens are a tiered garden with benches and walkways climbing down the hill below, out of view of the camera.

Rottenrow Gardens. A few rows, not much in the way of rot. Naming conventions on this island continue to intrigue me. This is the former site of the Glasgow Royal Maternity Hospital.

Raksha got her checkup, and some vaccines. She’s got a lump on her throat that seems to be benign, but it’s also likely the reason she’s been making the occasional horrible hacking noise. Apparently when she lies a certain way, it probably puts a little weight on her windpipe, and irritates it.

We got her meds, and headed back. It was lovely to be out among humanity for a while, and I still enjoy seeing people’s reaction to Raksha. Generally, most people seem to find her charming, and children seem to find her both fascinating and a little scary. A surprising number of them seem to think she might be a wolf of some sort, and I suppose they have a bit of a point. We were dry by the time we got home, and really my only regret was that I didn’t have any money to give to the folks who asked for some. Hopefully I’ll be able to start doing that again soon.

I don’t know how much longer that trip will be doable for Raksha, but she seemed to enjoy most of it, even if it was a bit longer than she’d like. She’s currently sleeping the sleep of one who has done about all she can do for the day, and Tegan and I are feeling just a little bit more connected to humanity. Glasgow is, on balance, a beautiful city. It seems unlikely we’ll be able to stay here as long as I’d like, but it’s a good place to be while we can.

As mentioned earlier, I’m more than a little short on money these days. There are far fewer jobs than there are people looking for them, so the patrons of this blog are our only stable form of income. It’s wonderful to have people willing to pay me for work they can access for free, so I try to show my appreciation with periodic patrons-only articles, and science fiction. If you’d like to support the work I do here, access a little extra content, or just pay for my dog’s food and meds, you can sign up at patreon.com/oceanoxia. The beauty of crowdfunding is that no single person needs to spend very much for the cumulative effect to make a big difference. Either way, thank you for reading, and thank you for sharing my work with others, should you choose to do so.

Positive Leftist News Roundup from @mexieYT , plus a couple additions of my own.

We live in terrifying times, my friends. There’s a lot of bad going on right now, both in the world, and in many of our personal lives. There’s real reason to be worried about the future, but as ever, it’s not all bad. Mexie is here with her much-needed positive news roundup for those who want a better future for humans around the globe, and the rest of the life with which we share our planet (sources on Youtube):

Honestly a lot of this stuff is encouraging or downright inspiring. It’s especially nice to see the Dakota Access pipeline being ordered to shut down. The fight against that has been long, and bloody, with Democratic and Republican “leaders” united in their willingness to brutalize Native Americans and their allies in service of the oil industry. I often say that many of the advances humanity has made in the last couple centuries have come from fighting against capitalism, rather than because of capitalism (as many in the U.S. like to pretend), and it’s nice to see people who put their bodies on the line win a victory for all of humanity. We owe the Water Protectors a great deal.

I’d like to add a couple other positive news stories relating to climate change and energy in particular:

First up, offshore wind energy continues to get cheaper. While more needs to be done to limit the environmental damage done by wind farms and the manufacturing of wind turbines, they’re certainly an upgrade from fossil fuels, and it’s good to see wind power increasing, even in a world where capitalist profit is valued over the habitability of the planet.

One reason the price of offshore wind has fallen so rapidly is technology development, in particular the ability to build larger wind turbines further out at sea. Larger turbines can harness more wind energy and have access to more consistent wind speeds at higher altitudes.

The biggest wind turbines under construction have rotor diameters of 220 metres — twice the diameter of the London Eye. At the same time, wind farms are getting larger; the newest wind farm at Dogger Bank has the same installed capacity as Hinkley Point C and is expected to produce about two-thirds of its annual electricity.

The success of UK offshore windfarms, which are now primarily built in the Dogger Bank region of the North Sea, also means the UK has considerable skills and expertise than can be exported around the world.

The researchers also say this success means even more ambitious projects may now be attempted at offshore wind farms, such as producing hydrogen fuels using the wind power on site, out at sea. Hydrogen fuels could be another key technology in helping decarbonise the UK, by replacing petrol used in transportation and natural gas used for heating homes.

On my move out here last summer, it was a delight to see so many wind turbines in Germany, The Netherlands, England, and Scotland. I’m glad to hear that trend is continuing.

Next up, a new study indicates that as we continue researching and implementing photovoltaic solar panels, we’re able to make them last longer.

After correcting for variations in weather and curtailment, the group found, on average, the first-year performance of these systems was largely as expected, and that newer projects have degraded at a slower rate than older ones. This suggests photovoltaics technology has improved over time. Interestingly, they also confirmed that projects in hotter climates tend to degrade faster than those in cooler climates.

Longer-lasting solar panels, and a better understanding of what we can expect from each panel over its lifetime, both contribute to photovoltaics as a reliable source of power. A longer lifespan also reduces the amount of silicon extraction and processing needed for a given amount of energy over time.

I want to express my gratitude to my patrons, whose support continues to encourage me to write, and to help make ends meet in these turbulent times. None of us expected the current pandemic to upend everything like it has, and my patrons are the only reason I’ve been able to make ends meet in recent months. That said, I’m still not breaking even. If you would like to support my work, earn my undying gratitude, and feel able to contribute a dollar or two per month, you can do so at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Every bit helps!