Here’s another perspective on the soup protest. I like Doel’s take on it, and I think that Phoebe Plummer, the soup-thrower who’s gotten the most attention, has been doing a good job with the press attention she’s gotten:
There are a lot of reasons why I keep stressing the need for ecosystem management as the core of our climate action. We have, throughout our history, been utterly dependent on the natural world, even as we have been destroying it in the name of endless “growth”. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the medicines that keep us alive, the materials we use to shelter ourselves from the elements – all of it ties back to so-called “nature”, because we are a part of it.
That means that as we work to end greenhouse gas emissions, and adapt to the changes we’ve already caused, we must also change how we do business in other areas. Ending our direct contribution to warming will mean little if we increase other forms of pollution as we do it. It’s not as simple as swapping out what kind of fuel powers our society, and if we pretend that the climate is our only existential environmental threat, then we will continue driving ourselves toward extinction through other means.
A holistic approach is going to mean a lot of things, but when it comes down to it, none of that is possible without continual access to fresh water. That may seem obvious, but it’s cause for real concern, as this report made for COP27 discusses:
The report titled: “The essential drop to reach Net-Zero: Unpacking Freshwater’s Role in Climate Change Mitigation,” released November 9 2022 at COP27 in harm El-Sheikh, is the first-ever summary of current research on the role of water in climate mitigation. A key message is the need to better understand global water shortages and scarcity in order to plan climate targets that do not backfire in future. If not planned carefully, negative impacts of climate action on freshwater resources might threaten water security and even increase future adaptation and mitigation burdens.
“Most of the measures needed to reach net-zero carbon targets can have a big impact on already dwindling freshwater resources around the world,” said Dr Lan Wang Erlandsson from Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. “With better planning, such risks can be reduced or avoided.”
The report describes why, where, and how freshwater should be integrated into climate change mitigation plans to avoid unexpected consequences and costly policy mistakes. Even efforts usually associated with positive climate action – such as forest restoration or bioenergy – can have negative impacts if water supplies are not considered.
Done right, however, water-related and nature-based solutions can instead address both the climate crisis and other challenges, said Dr Malin Lundberg Ingemarsson from Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).
“We have identified water risks, but also win-win solutions that are currently not used to their full potential. One example is restoration of forests and wetlands which bring social, ecological, and climate benefits all at once. Another example is that better wastewater treatment can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from untreated wastewater, while improving surface water and groundwater quality, and even provide renewable energy through biogas.”
That was when I decided I actually wanted to write about this a bit. “Nature-based solutions” are exactly what we need. As dangerous as heat waves and storms may be, one of the biggest dangers to our species is the breakdown of ecosystem services, of which most people seem to be largely unaware. I couldn’t say the exact numbers, but for all we must spend trillions on ending fossil fuel use, I think we should also spend trillions on ecosystem restoration and support. Even if we weren’t depleting both ground and surface water, and even if we weren’t poisoning what remains with reckless abandon, the melting of mountain glaciers around the world means that before long, billions could lose their primary water source. We need to be actively working to build up ecosystems, because they aren’t just affected by the weather, they affect the weather. Deforestation means less rainfall. That’s going to vary from ecosystem to ecosystem, but it’s not hard to understand.
Plants don’t just absorb rainwater, they also transfer it from the ground to the air. Trees in particular act as giant vaporizers, humidifying the air around their crowns. That, in turn, helps create rain downwind, or even sometimes right over the same forest. That movement of water, as I’ve discussed before, also moves heat around, which can help mitigate extreme heat, which affects everyone’s need for water. My insistence on viewing ourselves as a part of nature isn’t some spiritual feeling of connection, it’s a simple fact, supported by overwhelming evidence.
The report highlights five key messages on the interlinkage between water and mitigation:
• Climate mitigation measures depend on freshwater resources. Climate mitigation planning and action need to account for current and future freshwater availability.
• Freshwater impacts – both positive and negative – need to be evaluated and included in climate mitigation planning and action.
• Water and sanitation management can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. More efficient drinking water and sanitation services save precious freshwater resources and reduce emissions.
• Nature-based solutions to mitigate climate change can deliver multiple benefits for people and the environment. Measures safeguarding freshwater resources, protecting biodiversity, and ensuring resilient livelihoods are crucial.
• Joint water and climate governance need to be coordinated and strengthened. Mainstreaming freshwater in all climate mitigation planning and action requires polycentric and inclusive governance.“Climate change mitigation efforts will not succeed if failing to consider water needs,” said Marianne Kjellén, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). “Water must be part of powerful solutions for enhancing ecosystem resilience, preserving biodiversity and regenerative food and energy production systems. In short, water security needs to be factored in to climate action,” she adds.
There’s a part of me that simply cannot believe that that last thought needs to be spelled out. How could anybody possibly think that we could respond to the threat of climate change without factoring in water? Hasn’t everyone been talking about “the coming water wars” for years? But, of course, action on that end of things has been woefully inadequate, just as it has been in every other area. Not only that, but the system we’re trying to change uses war not just to control people, but also to generate profit. Those of us still connected to our humanity hear “water wars” and think of the horrors of war, and perhaps the horrors of water scarcity. The rich and powerful, particularly in the United States, think of all the money they’ll make by converting raw resources into dead bodies, ravaged landscapes, and fat paychecks. There’s also a rather large portion of the population that is ideologically committed to the belief that a magical being put this entire cosmos here for “us” (which means the rich and powerful) to do with as we see fit. So yeah – it needs to be spelled out. For a lot of people, I’m afraid we’ll have to change the world around them, and hope their minds change afterwards, but in the meantime, it’s good to figure out what we should be doing about the water problem.
While I hope to go through the report more thoroughly, and write about its contents, I’ve had such intentions in the past. I’m approaching a year of daily posting (not counting the time I took off for Raksha’s death), which is a strange new experience for me, so hopefully I’ll actually be able to follow through this time. Still, maintaining work on my current novel is a more important right now, so in the meantime, here’s a link to the report, all nicely laid out by section. If you want me make this project (or any other) more of a priority, I’ll take that into consideration once you sign up at patreon.com/oceanoxia and send me a message about it.
It is a simple fact that on this planet, water is life. It’s also a fact that when we have tried to, we’ve been able to clean up polluted bodies of water, restore ecosystems, and bring species back from the brink of extinction. We do have the resources and understanding to make the world better, all we lack is a political an economic system that values doing so.
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His Holiness Saint Ray The Cat leads a life of both excitement and boredom. He and I now have a morning routine of stepping outside to take the air. I contemplate life, catch up on social media and the like, and he wanders around eating grass and sniffing things (catching up on social media and the like). Then we go back inside, and he either begs for catnip, or goes to sleep. I want to be clear – he does not get catnip when he begs. I can’t get around giving him food when he’s been howling for the hour before feeding time, but I’ll be damned if I train my cat to expect drugs as a reward for tapping on my elbow every two minutes.
Anyway, one of my innovations for keeping him entertained during the day, is a length of candle wick hanging from my study door’s handle. It originally had a cork tied to the end, but after that was rabbit-kicked away, we both discovered that he loves just a bit of string with a knot at the end. Finally, after all these years, I found a toy that he’ll play with by himself.
In many ways, His Holiness is a perfect cat for us. He’s extremely tolerant of everything we do, to the point where we joke about him being aware of our harassment as the price for being saved from starvation on the street. He loves cuddling, has few objections to being picked up and snuggled, and the most objection I get to trimming his claws is that he shifts his weight so that he could roll off my lap if I let him.
My one complaint – and that’s too strong of a word for it – is that he doesn’t sit in things very much. I’ve tried to get him to hang out in a box next to me and stuff, but he prefers a more luxurious environment. He tends to hang out on the bed, or the couch, or in laundry. He’ll hang out on my lap sometimes, and on the rug by the heater next to me when the heat is on, but boxes, bags, and things of that nature are primarily ways for him to make noise when he wants our attention.
I recently had a package delivered, and on a whim, I decided to put a little catnip in the empty box. It was a given that he would be in the box until he’d consumed all of it, but he decided to just… hang out, afterwards.
His Holiness is a British Shorthair of solid build, with gray-black brindled fur on his back, sides, head, and tail. His legs, belly, and throat are snowy white, and plush-soft. His face and muzzle form triangle of white fur that peaks on his forehead, and crosses his cheeks, blending with the throat fur. In this picture, he’s on his side, partly curled in a cardboard box, and looking up at the camera, with his face slightly smushed on one side by the box.
This was, as you can see, extremely cute. I had put the box between the legs of a chair , which held the sides up so they didn’t bend out when subjected to his bulk. I think he likes the way the box holds him. Naturally, I had to grab his string.
His Holiness is curled rather like the Golden Spiral, as he attempts to catch the blurred string between his mitten-like paws.
One thing he likes to do with the string (and if I get enough *⇒patrons⇐* I’ll post a video of it), is to grab the knot at the end between his tiny little front teeth, and pull. If there’s not enough tension, he’ll step on the string. I have no idea why he does this, but I’m guessing it has something to do with the developmental weirdness of his canines.
His Holiness is the bane of all that moves within easy reach of wherever he happens to be sitting. Playing with him usually takes more effort from me than he’s willing to expend. He’s often content to just watch something, rather than chase or pounce on it, unless it’s actually in his face. In this picture he’s got a fragile grip on the string between his paw, right in front of his snoot.
I played with him till he stopped reacting to the string bumping against his face, and he apparently decided that he was in a great place for his midday nap.
Eventually, His Holiness got tired, so he curled up and just went to sleep in the box. He spent most of the rest of the day there.
He ended up spending most of the rest of the day there, and I was hopeful that this would become a regular thing, but since then it seems that he’s only really going to interact with the box when he’s either begging for catnip, or has just been given some. As I mentioned earlier, I’m not willing to train him to harass me for drugs, so box time will probably end up being an infrequent occurrence. Regardless, I’m glad I got these pictures to share with all of you.
If you want to help me keep this ravenous beast fed, you can become a patron for less than four pennies a day. Because of my immigration status in Ireland, I’m prohibited from normal work, so this is my only income for the next few years, and I’d like to have it be my main source of income after that. If you think this blog’s contents are worth a dollar per month (or more – more is definitely OK), consider helping cover the costs so I can keep doing this. Crowdfunding takes a crowd, so I really do mean it when I say that I want more patrons in the $1-$5 range. If you can’t afford that, share my posts if you like them, and thanks for reading either way!
A few weeks back I wrote a blog post about what I called “Liberal Protest Activism”, in response to both the infamous souping of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and to the general response to said souping. What I didn’t mention was that that post was, in part, inspired by a Twitter disagreement with Michael Mann. Basically, someone had called the protest inappropriate, and I responded by pointing out that more conventional protest had not resulted in adequate action. Mann quote-tweeted me, and basically said I was lying, and that saying “nothing has been done” is being used to justify extremism. I pointed out that I hadn’t said “nothing”, and he blocked me.
Honestly, it hurt a little. I’ve looked up to Mann for a long time, and I still do. The work he’s done on climate science and advocacy is valuable, and he gets entirely too much hate. On the other hand, as I’ve said in the past, being an expert in climate science does not make you an expert in sociology, politics, or policy. Having him not only disagree with me, but point to me as someone being extremist and wrong was a shock, so I spent time thinking about it, which generated the blog post mentioned above. I also deleted that tweet, because I didn’t want to keep getting notifications from people responding to Mann calling me a liar. As far as I can tell, trying to “defend my honor” would end up benefiting no one worth considering. I wrote that blog post partly as a way to deal with my bad mood. I ended up writing this post, because Rebecca Watson has a new video out about the same subject, so now I feel a little braver in talking about it.
There’s a lot there that I agree with (as always, the transcript is at the link above), but I wanted to pause on one point that Watson made:
They were angry simply because young people were doing something for a cause they cared about, and the angry people know deep in their hearts that they do not have even a fraction of that courage and that conviction, and they know that the cause is a good one that SHOULD inspire us all to that kind of courage and conviction. But instead we’re at home eating Cheez-its and doom scrolling Twitter, and channeling our guilt by getting angry at someone who is actually out there doing something. My hypothesis is that NO protest these people could have done would ever have been widely considered to be “meaningful,” and “good” and “effective,” and despite that, there’s a good chance that this protest will historically be seen to be all of those things.
Oof. That hits a little close to home. Regardless of how you feel about their tactics, there’s no question that what they are doing takes courage, especially given the consistently hostile response they have gotten. They’ve put far more on the line for this cause than I have, and they’ve generated a great deal of conversation with the art protests – more conversation than came from their more direct act of spraying paint on the Bank of England to protest its investment in fossil fuels. I think I should have given them a bit more credit. I also very much agree with the guess that no protest the did would have gotten wide support
The reality is that protests generally aren’t popular, and the people who make headlines for protests share that unpopularity. From Watson’s video:
And that hypothesis is based on decades of research: as I said two years ago during the Black Lives Matter protests, “in 1961, 57% of Americans said that sit-ins hurt the cause of those fighting against segregation. By 1963 that number had risen to 60%. By 1964, after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it was 74%. Three quarters of Americans thought Martin Luther King’s “extreme” tactics were hurting the Civil Rights fight. He was one of the most hated men in America. And yet, the Civil Rights movement succeeded.” And even though “79% of people said the (LA) riots were not justified…nearly 30 years later, scientists can see that those riots helped “build support for policy by mobilizing supporters.” They found that both white and African American voters “were mobilized to register (to vote), that new registrants tended to affiliate as Democrats, and that voters shifted their policy support toward public schools, net of a general shift in support for education spending. This mobilization appears to have persisted: those mobilized by the riot remained regular participators over a decade later and remained more Democratic than the general population, even after accounting for demographics.””
She then goes on to talk about Mann’s response to the protest, and the result of his decision not to avoid getting embroiled in pointless internet arguments over tone. I knew he had an article tut-tutting about it, but I didn’t know he made himself a dishonest push poll to “back up” his opinion, and continued arguing about it. I expected better from him, but it’s a good reminder that people are just people are just people. What matters is that we keep working as best we can.
As of this recording, Mann is kind of losing it on Twitter and really insisting that this survey proves something about the relative effectiveness of the soup protest. It’s understandable, because I think he does good work in his own field (which is climatology, not public relations or sociology) and so he’s probably not accustomed to being corrected by people who actually know what they’re talking about. I hope he is able to take a step back and realize that this is just bad science with a dash of “bad understanding of history” thrown in. A well-designed survey could certainly find that people largely were turned off by this protest, but the people who study movements and social change understand that protests – nonviolent, disruptive, or outright violent – might work or not work, regardless of whether or not you like it.
I’ve written before about the problems caused by invasive species. I don’t know how they compare to other forms of habitat destruction for which we are responsible, but I think it’s safe to say that they’re often underrated as a problem. It’s true that the damage caused by the earthworm invasion of North America doesn’t seem as big of a deal as clear-cutting or climate change, but as I’ve said before, wearing away the diversity of an ecosystem wears away at its resilience. It’s like pulling blocks out of a Jenga tower – the ecosystem may be able to retain its basic structure for a long time, but after a certain point, it will be unstable enough that it can collapse at the smallest touch.
And keep in mind that the undermining of our biosphere is happening from multiple directions at once.
It seems that an invasive species of fruit fly is working away at one of those Jenga blocks:
The invasive spotted wing drosophila (SWD), introduced from South-East Asia, is a well-known fruit crop pest. It lays its eggs by destroying the mechanical protection of the fruit’s skin, providing an entry point for further infestation. Egg deposition and inoculated microbes then accelerate decay, and as a result the fruit rots and becomes inedible. While this small fly is known to cause massive economic damage in agriculture, little is known about its ecological impact on more natural ecosystems such as forests.
A recent study by Swiss scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL and the Ökobüro Biotopia, published in the scientific journal NeoBiota, concluded that the SWD competes strongly with other fruit-eating species and that its presence could have far-reaching consequences for ecosystems.
The research team assessed the use of potential host plants at 64 sites in forests from mid-June to mid-October 2020 by checking a total of 12,000 fruits for SWD egg deposits. To determine if SWD attacks trigger fruit decay, they also recorded symptoms of fruit decay after egg deposition. In addition, they monitored the fruit fly (drosophilid) fauna in the area, assuming that the SWD would outnumber and possibly outcompete other fruit-eating insects.
The authors found egg deposits on the fruits of 31 of the 39 fruit-bearing forest plant species they studied, with 18 species showing an attack rate of more than 50%. Furthermore, more than 50% of the affected plant species showed severe symptoms of decay after egg deposition. The egg depositions may alter the attractiveness of fruits, because they change their chemical composition and visual cues, such as colour, shape and reflective patterns, which in turn might lead seed dispersers such as birds to consume less fruits.
Given the large number of infested fruits, significant ecological impacts can be expected. “Rapid decay of fruits attacked by the spotted wing drosophila results in a loss of fruit available for other species competing for this resource, and may disrupt seed-dispersal mutualisms due to reduced consumption of fruit by dispersers such as birds,” says Prof. Martin M. Gossner, entomologist at the WSL. “If the fly reproduces in large numbers, both seed dispersers and plants could suffer.”
This, of course, is on top of the fact that the invasive species is outcompeting, and crowding out those fruit fly species that aren’t able to get an early start on a fruit by penetrating its outer skin. On a long enough timeline, the crises caused by invasive species would probably resolve themselves, if that was the only problem facing those ecosystems.
If only…
When I say that we need to make ecosystem management a priority, this is part of what I’m talking about. We don’t need to return to some imagined pre-industrial “perfect state”, but we do need to have an understanding of what is happening in our ecosystems. In case it hasn’t been clear, this could create many millions of jobs all over the world, and unlike so many jobs that exist today, these ones would be focused on actively making the world a better place for those that come after us. Fewer hedge fund managers, and more hedgerow managers!
This is also another reason why we should move as much of our food production indoors as possible. It may be that with a population as large as ours, there’s still value in monoculture farming for the sake of efficiency. The problem is that that’s an ecologically devastating practice. Completely aside from the damage done to the soil, pollution and runoff, and the land cleared, big farms that grow one crop pull in pests and diseases that can then spread to other crops. They act as an endlessly renewing fountain of pestilence that surrounding ecosystems are forced to absorb. Doing that in a closed system, indoors, would not just protect the crops from the weather and from pests, it would also protect the ecosystem around the farm from being inundated with fertilizers, pesticides, pests, and pathogens.
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I’m honestly a big fan of airplanes. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel a fair amount over the last couple decades, and that wouldn’t have been possible without the ability to fly. In my ideal world, I think there would be a lot less air traffic, but I don’t think we should get rid of it entirely. Obviously, the rich and their flying habits must go, and a better world would be a somewhat slower world, in which people can actually take the time to travel by boat, by zeppelin, or by train. When it comes to that, we should also have much more high-speed rail for transportation across continents. Even so, there are times when the speed and versatility of airplanes and helicopters will be indispensable.
That said, the way we do air travel needs to change, just like everything else. It’s possible that if all other fossil fuel use stopped, maintaining current airplane usage would be fine, but that seems very unlikely, and given the greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution coming from fossil fuel extraction, we need that to end. Fortunately, a lot of people have been working hard on finding alternative ways to make things like jet fuel, and they’ve been having real success! The question, with this sort of thing, is how well it can scale up. It may be that we can create this stuff under certain conditions, but will that be worth the energy and resources invested? I’ve generally been assuming so. When my friend was working on this a while back, the company he was with was using sugar beets as their starting point, but there’s a lot of vegetable matter that could be turned into fuel, which means a lot of the “work” is being doing as the plant grows. While my assumptions and anecdotes may hold credibility to some of you, for the others, here’s some research claiming that we can have an aviation industry that runs on plant-based fuel:
New research published today in the journal Nature Sustainability shows a pathway toward full decarbonization of U.S. aviation fuel use by substituting conventional jet fuel with sustainably produced biofuels.
The study, led by a team of Arizona State University researchers, found that planting the grass miscanthus on 23.2 million hectares of existing marginal agricultural lands — land that often lies fallow or is poor in soil quality — across the United States would provide enough biomass feedstock to meet the liquid fuel demands of the U.S. aviation sector fully from biofuels, an amount expected to reach 30 billion gallons per year by 2040.
“We demonstrate that it is within reach for the United States to decarbonize the fuel used by commercial aviation, without having to wait for electrification of aircraft propulsion,” said Nazli Uludere Aragon, co-corresponding author on the study and a recent ASU geography PhD graduate.
“If we are serious about getting to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, we need to deal with emissions from air travel, which are expected to grow under a business-as-usual scenario. Finding alternative, more sustainable liquid fuel sources for aviation is key to this.”
That caveat always looms over discussions of climate change, doesn’t it?
“If we are serious about getting to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions…”
It doesn’t generally feel like the “we” that has the power is serious about much of anything beyond keeping or increasing their power. Still, this research is promising, and I appreciate the bredth of the work they did.
In the study, the researchers used an integrated framework of land assessments, hydro-climate modeling, ecosystem modeling and economic modeling to assess where and under what conditions across the United States energy crops used for biojet fuels could be grown sustainably using criteria that evaluate both environmental and economic performance.
The criteria were extensive. The team first identified and assessed where optimal marginal agriculture lands already existed in the U.S. They then assessed whether one could grow the right energy crops on the land without using additional water.
The team then analyzed whether growing energy-crop feedstocks on these lands would have detrimental effects on the surrounding climate or soil moisture and predicted the potential productivity of yields of two different grasses — miscanthus and switchgrass — as suitable biomass-energy feedstocks. Finally, the team quantified the amount and the cost of biojet fuel that would be produced and distributed nationwide at scale.
“The current way we produce sustainable jet fuel is very land-inefficient and not on a large scale,” said Nathan Parker, an author on the study and an assistant professor in the School of Sustainability. “There are very limited ways that aviation could become low carbon emitting with a correspondingly low climate impact, and this is one way we’ve shown that is feasible and can get the aviation industry to be carbon neutral through agriculture.”
The scientists emphasized that this integrated systems perspective was critical to the study. In the past, research around the potential of biofuels has largely consisted of isolated assessments that have not been well integrated, for example, overlooking key data on how altering the crop cover influences the surrounding climate.
“When you plant crops over strategically designed areas, the planting of these crops has an impact on the climate,” said Matei Georgescu, co-corresponding author of the study and associate professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and director of the Urban Climate Research Center at ASU. “If there is a change in the underlying landscape, for example an increase or decrease in the amount of vegetation, there may be implications for local- to regional-scale climate, including more or less precipitation, or warmer or cooler temperatures.”
To account for these land-atmosphere interactions, the research team took outputs from their hydroclimate model to inform their ecosystem model. The team then evaluated the economic feasibility for farmers to grow these grasses.
Real-world solutions
For any uptake of an alternative-energy pathway, solutions need to make economic sense.
I get that they’re working within the world as it exists, and that makes perfect sense, but boy – “solutions need to make economic sense” is a phrase that makes me see red. So much about how our world is run right now makes zero economic sense, but exists anyway because it’s great for keeping money and power in the hands of the rich and powerful. Ian Danskin framed conservatism and capitalism as developed to protect the aristocracy from democracy, and if you look at the world through that lens, a lot of strange stuff starts to make more sense. Still, if something does “make economic sense” within the current paradigm, it seems likely that it would be at least as functional in the “ideal” scenario I discussed above.
The researchers, in their analysis, benchmarked the financial returns of the existing uses for the lands they identified — some already are used for growing corn, soy or various other crops, and others are being used as pasture — against those from cultivating either miscanthus or switchgrass as biomass feedstock.
Growing miscanthus or switchgrass needed to be more profitable to replace the existing use of the land in each area.
“These lands we identified are owned and operated by real people for different agricultural uses,” said Uludere Aragon, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The cost-effective biofuel potential from biomass feedstocks is influenced largely by the opportunity cost of alternative land uses.”
In the end, researchers found miscanthus to be the more promising feedstock and that biojet fuels derived from miscanthus can meet the 30 billion gallons/year target at an average cost of $4.10/gallon.
While this is higher than the average price for conventional jet fuel — typically about $2 per gallon — the team concluded it is reasonable when considering biojet’s potential to cut emissions. Notably, in 2022 jet fuel prices have varied from $2 to $5 per gallon (not to be confused with retail gasoline) due to changes in supply and demand, showing that prices above $4 per gallon are well within the range of possibility.
A template for the future
The researchers say that in finding further solutions to Earth’s climate crisis, it is important that the scientific community bridges disciplines and moves past incremental reductions in emissions. Rather, the researchers emphasize the importance of realistic solutions that scale.
“This was an interdisciplinary team with expertise from ecosystems sciences, climate modeling and atmospheric sciences and economics,” said Georgescu, who acknowledged this research was a culmination of eight years of modeling work and collaboration. “To truly address sustainability concerns, you need the expert skills of a spectrum of domains.
“As academics, we should remember economics drives people’s decisions on the ground. It is vitally important to find the circumstances when these decisions are also aligned with desirable environmental outcomes.”
The endless subsidies and wars propping up the fossil fuel industry, and the military-industrial complex, demonstrate that we have the ability to determine what is and is not “economical”, for all our leaders babble about “market forces”. Even so, there’s something cathartic about being able to point out that a huge number the changes we need are entirely feasible even within the system that’s resisting that change. At this point, I’m starting to wonder if I should just get a tattoo of this, but – the obstacles are social and political, not technical. There are absolutely technical challenges, and we’ll discover new problems as we work on new ways of doing things. All of that is to be expected, but none of it is why have failed to adequately address climate change.
We can do this. We can end fossil fuel use, and there’s no reason to think that doing so will result in anything other than a better standard of living for most of humanity. We just need to get around the money-hoarding doofuses that are currently in charge.
If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!
I’ve been doing housework and research for my novel today, so I’m sharing a video I found about lava caves. For a bonus, we have a glimpse into the work life of a cave explorer, which appears to be one of the most terrifying jobs in existence. I don’t consider myself claustrophobic, and I’ve been in a few caves – including some that got pretty tight.
But those caves had had people go through them many, many times before, and there was no way I would have been in them had they not been safe. Exploring unknown caves, and wedging myself through a passage that could just keep getting smaller? No thank you. It would terrify me even if I hadn’t read Junji Ito’s horror comic The Enigma of Amigara Fault. Personal discomfort aside, I’m glad that professional cavers like Ken can show us these places I’m too afraid to explore, and get fulfilment from doing it.
When people discuss the decline in insect populations, the biggest culprit, unsurprisingly, is the over-use of insecticides. Agriculture isn’t the only area where that’s a problem, but it’s probably the biggest. Farmers around the world have developed alternative methods of pest control, including the nurturing of predators and parasitoids. Probably the most infamous failure of this method has been the Australian cane toad debacle, but I think my favorite version comes from cranberry bogs:
I’m sure PZ has been tempted to take up cranberry farming, but I dunno how well I’d fare with wolf spiders on my face. This post really gets at the essence of the technique – the spiders are fellow workers. That attitude is very much how I think we should be viewing most of the rest of life on this planet, so while it needs to be done carefully (see the cane toad documentary I linked above, if you haven’t), I think it’s a brilliant technique.
The problem (you knew there was going to be a problem, didn’t you?) is that unless we actually take a systemic approach to change, those people trying to do better in the context of our current, destructive system, are being undermined by that system. I’ve talked before about how air pollution is bad for humans, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s bad for other critters. Specifically, diesel exhaust and ozone cause problems for parasitoid wasps used to protect plants grown for vegetable oil (apologies in advance for this article being about the worst-named plant in existence):
The team, led by scientists from the University of Reading, used special equipment to deliver controlled amounts of diesel exhaust and ozone to oilseed rape plants. They also added aphids to the plants and measured the reproductive success of parasitic wasps that habitually lay their eggs inside a freshly stung aphid.
Dr James Ryalls, University of Reading said: “Even at the levels we used, which were lower than safe maximums set by environmental regulators, the overall numbers of parasitic insects still fell. This is a worrying result as many sustainable farming practices rely on natural pest control to keep aphids and other unwelcome creatures away from valuable crops.
“Diesel and ozone appear to make it more difficult for the wasps to find aphids to prey upon and so the wasp population would drop over time.”
Fortunately, this study has two bits of good news. The first, which is more an implication, is that efforts to decrease air pollution – which are already necessary for other reasons – will increase the effectiveness of wasp-based pest control. The other is that this doesn’t seem to be a problem for all of the wasps:
While the majority of parasitic wasp species decreased in polluted environments, one species of parasitic wasp appeared to do better when both diesel and ozone were present. However, the researchers found that this combination of pollutants also correlated with changes in the plants that might explain the finding.
With both pollutants present, oilseed rape plants produced more of the compounds that give brassica family crops, including mustards and cabbages, their distinctive bitter, hot and peppery flavour notes. These usually repel insects but in the case of Diaretiella rapae wasps, there was greater abundance and reproductive success associated with diesel exhaust and ozone together.
Dr Ryalls said: “Diaretiella rapae particularly likes to prey on cabbage aphids, which love to eat brassica crops.
“We know that some of the flavour and smell compounds in oilseed rape are converted into substances that do attract D.rapae. So, we could speculate that the stronger smell attracts the wasps and they are more successful in finding and preying upon aphids, that way. It could be that D.rapae is a good choice for pest control in diesel and ozone polluted areas.
“This really goes to show that the only way to predict and mitigate the impacts of air pollutants is to study whole systems.”
As transport shifts away from diesel and towards electric motors, air pollution will change. Knowing how pest-regulation service providers, such as parasitic wasps, respond to these progressive changes, will be essential to planning mitigation strategies to ensure sustainable food security now, and in the future. This research shows that we also must consider the impact of pollution on the plants, wasps, and prey insects, and the interactions between all three.
I think this last point is an important one to end on. In building a better society, we’re not looking to abandon technology. That means, as I’ve said before, that we will keep engaging in resource extraction that is destructive to the environment, and we will keep creating poisonous industrial byproducts. Our project, at this stage, is one of changing which pollutants we create most, and how we manage them. Creating an economic system that does not require infinite growth will help reduce all pollutants, but we will still have to contend with that which is unavoidable. That means that, unlike the present arrangement, we will need to actually clean up the messes we make through industry, just as we do with human waste. In that case, the time and energy put into sewage treatment helps everyone by making the world more pleasant to live in, and by reducing disease outbreaks. Getting a better handle on industrial pollution will yield similar results.
Healthy ecosystems that are beneficial to humans, like food forests and other “edible ecosystems”, is a goal worth working towards, but it’s not something that’s likely to work if don’t actually commit to it. Rising temperatures, pollution, and direct habitat destruction currently keep that future out of reach, which is why it’s so important to maintain a holistic perspective on the situation.
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It’s a question that haunts all of us. It creeps into our minds as we try to fall asleep. It lingers in our minds, sapping attention away from life-changing events.
Whence seahorses?
How did such creatures come to be, and why do they seem to exist everywhere? Are seahorses the proof of supernatural creation that we’ve been looking for all this time? Will I have to give up my atheism for them? Only time will tell, but for now, here’s a video on seahorse evolution, and how it was influenced by the movement of the continents.
While I don’t know a whole lot about the demographics of my readership, I’m going to assume that most of you have at least a passing familiarity with the water cycle. Maybe it’s just me, but when I learned about it as a kid, I learned about it as a description of the movement of water around the surface of the planet. The water cycle is about water. Straightforward, yes?
Then, a few years ago, I was writing a climate science lesson, and I had a minor revelation. The water cycle also describes the movement of energy in our atmosphere. When water evaporates, it effectively absorbs the heat required to keep it in a gaseous state. That cools off the place where the evaporation happens, which is why our own ability to regulate our temperatures relies heavily on evaporation. So now you have that water vapor, kept in that state by a combination of temperature and pressure. It rises up, and after a certain point reaches a low enough pressure and temperature to condense, which turns it into water droplets (clouds, rain, mist, etc), and warms up the air around them. That heat was just transported, as water vapor, from one part of the world to another. Of course, that same bit of water might absorb and release heat like that many times over before it falls back to the ground. If you watch clouds for long enough, on a mostly clear day, you can see some of them forming, or even some that fade in and out of existence as they move through pressure gradients shifting from gas to droplets, and back to gas again.
As I said, this may all be obvious to you, but for some reason it never really clicked in my head until I was actually studying the movement of heat energy in our atmosphere. From that perspective, when enough water fell on Pakistan to submerge one third of the entire country, a huge amount of heat was released into the air above. It’s been interesting to think about, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what predictive value that has for our day to day lives. It could mean that we should expect heat to follow flooding, but if the air warmed is pretty high up to begin with, would that follow? Further, all that water starts evaporating again, sucking up more heat. Fortunately, the world need not wait for people like me to puzzle this stuff out. A team out of Arizona has found that when a tropical cyclone hits a city, it causes a spike in temperature in the days that follow.
Three days after Hurricane Fiona struck Puerto Rico in mid-September, the National Weather Service issued an extreme heat advisory, warning that the heat index – which incorporates humidity to calculate perceived temperature – could reach up to 109 degrees.
Above-average temperatures almost always follow tropical cyclones – which by definition include tropical storms and hurricanes – and may soar to nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than average, according to a new University of Arizona-led study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The study’s authors stressed that their results are likely conservative estimates of just how high temperatures can climb following a cyclone.
Tropical cyclones often cause damage from strong winds, storm surges, intense rain and flooding, but extreme heat is an additional hazard, the researchers found. Above-average temperatures can occur days later and even in nearby areas that were not directly impacted by the storm.
“Multiple extreme events happening within a very short window of time can complicate disaster recovery,” said lead study author Zackry Guido, an assistant research professor in the university’s School of Natural Resources and Environment and the Arizona Institutes for Resilience: Solutions for Environment and Societies, or AIRES. “To medical providers, heat is a concern. Our results suggest that tropical cyclone preparedness should also include public information about heat risk.”
The research team analyzed 53 tropical cyclones in the eastern Caribbean between 1991 and 2020 and 205 interactions between the cyclones and 14 Caribbean cities. They found that the cities’ heat index values were always warmer than average after the storm.
“Everyone’s focus is on the destructive power of tropical storms and hurricanes – the storm surge, winds, flooding – and that’s obviously quite substantial, but our focus is on the combined hazard of storm and subsequent heat,” Guido said. “Hurricanes are massive heat pumps, redistributing heat for a large spatial distance around the center of the storm, and they leave massive destruction in their wake that can knock out the energy grid. That combination is often dangerous because it slows recovery and poses risks to human health.”
While the paper doesn’t explore how climate change may be impacting the phenomenon, the authors expect that high heat index values following tropical cyclones will increase in the future.
“It’s very easy to understand the climate change impacts of this,” Guido said. “Our future will likely have hurricanes dropping more intense rain and have more people in harm’s way. Then, if you drape on top of that a hotter environment, you will therefore expect a greater overall impact.”
That makes a lot of sense to me. The proportion of tropical cyclones that become hurricanes or typhoons is increasing in part because weaker ones are being cut off by increased wind shear, and in part because the oceans are warming so rapidly. The strength of the storm generally ties directly to sea surface temperatures, which means that the amount of heat that that storm pumps into an area is also going to go up.
In terms of impacts, a big storm like that means that in addition to the heat dumped, there’s also an increase in humidity (the other factor in the heat index). That means a higher chance of hitting “wet bulb” conditions, in which people can die fast without artificial cooling. Losing power – as so often happens – becomes that much more dangerous. At the same time, floods can contaminate the water supply, which could leave those trying to survive with a choice between lethal dehydration or drinking water that will probably make them sick.
I get why the water cycle wasn’t taught to me as a way that heat moves around in the atmosphere, but it seems that that’s a perspective we’ll need to keep in mind going forward.
If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!