Catastrophe comes when crises collide: Heat wave in India and Pakistan has global implications

As many of you are probably already aware, India and Pakistan are facing a particularly nasty heat wave. Heat is much more difficult to escape than cold, without modern technology, and unfortunately there are a lot of people in those countries without access to air conditioning. This is one of those situations where wealthy nations have a moral obligation to the rest of the world. Instead of letting a few monsters become cartoonishly wealthy, we should be working to implement carbon-free power generation around the world, and on making sure that everyone at minimum has access to air-conditioned shelters. Heat waves should be treated as seriously as we treat things like hurricanes or tornados, especially since we know that it’s only going to get worse.

Beyond all of that, however, we also have to come back to one of the central themes of this blog: Agriculture.

A record-breaking heat wave in India exposing hundreds of millions to dangerous temperatures is damaging the country’s wheat harvest, which experts say could hit countries seeking to make up imports of the food staple from conflict-riven Ukraine.

With some states in India’s breadbasket northern and central regions seeing forecasts with highs of 120 Fahrenheit this week, observers fear a range of lasting impacts, both local and international, from the hot spell.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told U.S. President Joe Biden earlier this month that India could step in to ease the shortfall created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The two countries account for nearly a third of all global wheat exports, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that the conflict could leave an additional 8 million to 13 million people undernourished by next year.

India’s wheat exports hit 8.7 million tons in the fiscal year ending in March, with the government predicting record production levels — some 122 million tons — in 2022.

But the country has just endured its hottest March since records began, according to the India Meteorological Department, and the heat wave is dragging well into harvest time.

The heat wave is hitting India’s main wheat-growing regions particularly hard, with temperatures this week set to hit 112 F in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh; 120 F in Chandigarh, Punjab; and 109 F in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.
Devendra Singh Chauhan, a farmer from Uttar Pradesh’s Etawah district, told NBC News that his wheat crop was down 60 percent compared to normal harvests.

“In March, when the ideal temperature should rise gradually, we saw it jump suddenly from 32 C to 40 C [90 F to 104 F],” he said in a text message. “If such unreasonable weather patterns continue year after year, farmers will suffer badly.”

Harjeet Singh, senior adviser to Climate Action Network International, said the heat wave would have a “horrific” short- and long-term impact on people in India and further afield.

“[Wheat] prices will be driven up, and if you look at what is happening in Ukraine, with many countries relying on wheat from India to compensate, the impact will be felt well beyond India,” Singh said.

Harish Damodaran, senior fellow at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, said regions that planted earlier tended to escape the worst impacts on their harvests. In other regions, however, the hot temperatures hit during the wheat’s crucial “grain filling” stage, which is critical for producing high yields.

“Temperatures just shot up,” he said. “It was like an electric shock, and so we are talking of yields more or less everywhere coming down 15 to 20 percent.”

What worries me is that this is just a taste of what’s to come. A big part of the reason for this growing global food crisis is that a vicious asshole decided to invade a neighboring country, but the reality is that war is likely to become more common as temperatures increase,  especially if it continues to be so profitable to the ruling classes that tend to start most of the wars. The reality is that war in one region will be increasingly dangerous to everyone else, because the odds grow every year that we’ll have crises collide, as we’re seeing now.

It’s not just the war in Ukraine and the heat wave in India, either. China’s wheat crop is also doing badly right now.

A Chinese agricultural official said on March 5 that this year’s China winter wheat crop could be the “worst in history,” Reuters reported.

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Tang Renjian told reporters at the country’s annual parliament meeting that a survey taken of the crop prior to the start of winter showed a 20% reduction in first- and second-grade winter wheat, due mainly to heavy rainfall during planting that reduced acreage by one-third.

War has never been something we could “afford”, but now more than ever, it’s something that can have a global impact even without its devastating environmental impact, and the threat of nuclear weapons. I don’t think a more democratic planet would see war eliminated altogether, but I think there would be far less of it driven by the greed or bigotry of people whose wealth and power separates them from humanity. That means doing the work of building democracy – something that was never done, despite all the lip service given to it in the past. As always, I don’t have all the answers. I’m trying to figure out some of them, and for others – like agriculture – I’m relying on the basics of what we know is coming for us.

If we want to avoid mass death on a scale never before seen in history, I think it would be a very good idea for us to invest in indoor food production. As I’ve said before, I think a lot of that effort should go into things like bacterial and algal food stocks that can serve as a staple for most people. I also think we should invest in communal greenhouses, as well as more large-scale indoor farming operations.  The more we plan ahead, and act before disaster strikes, the more we’ll be able to work on things like improving quality of life, and even reducing greenhouse gas levels.

And in case it needs to be said, I really, really don’t care whether indoor food production is profitable right now. I can’t think of a clearer indication that our concept of profit is flawed than the idea that humanity’s survival might be “unprofitable”.

This is a warning, as clear and as dire as those issued by climate scientists. At the moment, it seems that all of our “leaders” are either unwilling or unable to hear or act on these warnings, so we need a different way of managing governance. How much longer will people keep believing that our current political and economic systems are up to the needs of the moment?

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Research team develops new theory for studying mountain stream inhabitants

If we’re to have any chance of re-designing our society to exist in some form of stewardship of the ecosystems of this planet, we need as thorough and understanding of those systems as possible. I’ve written about bioindicators before, and I continue to like that perspective on studying climate change ecology. I also think it’s really neat when research comes along that tests how well theory applies to a particular set of circumstances. It’s moments like this that not only teach us new things, but give us hints about how to improve our search for knowledge.

A new tool can better assess an important but overlooked indicator of global warming: the variety of bugs, worms, and snails living in high mountain streams.

Water-based invertebrates are especially vulnerable when the climate swings from historic droughts to massive floods. Because they serve as food for other forms of alpine life, such as birds, bats, frogs and fish, ecologists worry about the insects’ ability to thrive.

Understanding how these small creatures are affected by climate change requires understanding where we ought to find them. Yet, classic ecological theories did not account for what a team of UC Riverside ecologists and their UC collaborators found on a recent survey of aquatic life in California’s Sierra Nevada.

As a step toward protecting them, the team applied a new theory for predicting biodiversity to high mountain streams. That theory, and the results of the field survey that gave rise to it, are now detailed in an article in the journal Ecological Monographs.

“We’ve come up with new ways of thinking about biodiversity in high mountain Sierra streams, because the old ways weren’t successful for us,” said Kurt Anderson, associate professor of evolution and ecology, and article co-author.

“Classic theories of stream ecology weren’t developed in the Sierras, so we are adapting a new set of ideas to better explain what we’re seeing up there,” Anderson said.

One such classic theory is the River Continuum Concept, which discusses how stream ecosystems function as they move from the stream sources down to bigger, more open rivers. According to the continuum concept, there should be a smooth gradient of change from high to low elevations. The team surveyed for stream biodiversity along a gradient, to test concepts like this one.

“We saw a change, but only partially and not for the reasons the theory said we should,” Anderson said. “For example, we found that lakes tended to interrupt the smooth change we were supposed to have seen.”

The UCR team observed that diversity of invertebrates generally increased in waters headed down and was lowest in steams situated immediately below lakes.

“We believe the lakes may have a disconnecting effect and are causing the downstream waterways to have to start over again in building diversity,” said Matthew Green, UCR ecologist and first author on the new paper.

The team also found a great variety of life forms in cold, isolated streams high up in the headwaters. Despite the general trend toward an increase of diversity moving downstream, sometimes, differences in species among isolated headwaters could be as great as those between upstream and downstream.

“These are the aquatic life forms that are at the edge of the precipice of climate change,” said Dave Herbst, a researcher from the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory, a UC Natural Reserve, and co-author on the paper.

The areas just below lakes were dominated by only a few species of invertebrates and insects with the ability to filter food particles. Other sites with mixed food sources had more species present.

The team recommends that interconnected systems of flowing water be protected from diversions, and from habitat damage caused by unrestrained land development. When waters are allowed to flow as they should, the number of resources available to creatures that live in them support higher diversity.

“That is what will permit these small, but crucially important life forms to thrive,” Anderson said. “Where intact habitats have been compromised, restoration efforts may be key to providing the entire ecosystem with resilience to the coming adversities of climate change.”

Also, for sentimental reasons, I like hearing about benthic macroinvertebrate research.

When you count the fish, the fish may be counting you…

Once Upon A Time, in a land far, far away from where I’m writing this, I worked for a non-profit science education research corporation called TERC. I did a number of different kinds of work there, but my favorite was designing lesson plans and activities to help people learn about ecology and climate science. One of teams I was on did a lot of outreach to schools, museums, nature centers, aquaria, and other organizations that dealt with science education in New England, with the goal of building connections between schools and “informal” educational institutions, so that kids could do actual research activities as part of their science education.

Climate change ecology is a field that spends a lot of time on phenology – the study of seasonal behavioral patterns. The first lessons in our Climate Lab project involved spring leaf-out, and bird migration, for example, and some of the first research I dug up for a list of recorded changes due to climate change was fish moving north earlier in the season, because the water was getting too warm. It makes sense, right? With the temperature rising, and the weather getting more unpredictable, plants and animals have been getting mixed signals from their environment, and it’s been throwing everything into chaos for at least a couple decades now. Insects and plants come out early because it’s warmer. That’s fine for the insects, but it’s terrible for the plants and the birds. A lot of migratory birds rely on things like day length or some evolved internal clock or sense of Earth’s orbit. That means that they can’t change their timing in response to changes in weather – climate change doesn’t affect that.

So the birds arrive late, because the bugs were out early, and their offspring either starve, or don’t get as good a start on life. More than that, the annual horde of caterpillars are no longer kept in check by birds, so they do a lot more damage to the plants they eat, which in turn makes them less resilient.

And that’s just one set of relationships. It doesn’t touch on how mammals fit in, the effects on things like pollination, or how the damage to the migratory bird population affects the ecosystems in South or Central America where they spend their winters. As I studied this stuff, I got a distinct feeling that although I couldn’t see it, the entire surface of the planet was seething around us, like the ripples on the surface of a pot of water just about to boil. Plants and animals are evolving – changing their shapes and sizes in response to their changing environment. The birds I mentioned before are changing their migratory timing, but they’re doing it the hard way; the individuals who migrate too late often can’t keep their young alive, and those that migrate earlier do a little better. Generation by generation, death by death, everything around us is changing; but it’s not changing fast enough.

If we ever get our act together, politically, and start trying to actually clean up our mess, we’re going to want to know what’s been happening in the ecosystems around us. That will give us the tools we need to help shore up their weaknesses, and help rebuild the ecosystems on which we depend. That’s why it’s essential that the sciences continue to be a priority as we deal with this chaotic new world, and why I was so proud to be part of a project that was teaching people how to participate in that research, even without any actual training in science.

The activities I helped design were often based on the specialties and resources of the nature center in question, be it fish or fowl, and at the tail end of my time at TERC, I started working on materials connected to the Mystic River Watershed Association (MRWA. In particular, we were focused on fish migration. Salmon are probably the most famous (and in my opinion best-tasting) anadromous fish, but the waters of the world are teeming with fish that live most of their lives in the ocean, but swim up streams and rivers to breed. Probably the second most famous, at least in the Boston area where I used to live, is the Alewife. The Alewife is an anadromous herring that historically ran in streams along the northern Atlantic coast of North America. It’s the name of the northernmost station on the MBTA’s Red Line, and the name of a nearby brook. Alewife brook used to be filled with the fish every year, but in living memory, it has been a polluted roadside canal inhabited by algae and invasive carp.

That said, there have been conservation efforts along the coast, in contrast to the control efforts further west, where canals and shipping have turned them into an invasive species. The MRWA is responsible for one of the conservation successes, and they oversee a fish ladder to allow Alewife and their cousin species the blueback herring to get over a dam and into the Mystic Lakes, where they spawn. In this case, “oversee” is literal, as they’ve got a camera to record the fish during their seasonal runs, to help track the population.

The problem is, the only way to be sure of their numbers is to literally count them. It’s a monumental task, and one that’s ripe for counting errors. They’ve found a brilliant solution, and it gets back to the kinds of educational activities I mentioned at the beginning. There’s a website where anyone in the world can look at sections of video, count how many fish they see, and enter that number. The video presented is random, and your count is considered along with everyone else who entered a count for that same video. That means that if I count a leaf as a fish, your more accurate count basically cancels out my error. When you have a dozen different people looking at each video, the odds are pretty good that an accurate consensus will emerge. There’s no need for a supercomputer or for someone to spend countless hours watching blurry fish go by a window, and trying to stay focused enough to get an accurate count.

Some poor intern, or maybe a graduate student, working late into the night for far too little money, running on cheap coffee and food from the vending machine down the hall. Everyone else is in bed by now, but he has to count the endless stream of fish, and every time he loses track, he has to restart the video, until time seems to blur together and his Sisyphean task becomes a surreal daydream. And now the fish aren’t just swimming by. They’re looking at him through the window. No. It’s a video. He’s in the computer lab but… They see him. He’s certain of it. Are they- could they be counting him?

The image shows Ancient Aliens producer Giorgio Tsoukalos saying,

This brings us to the reason I wrote this post.

Suppose there are some coins on the table in front of you. If the number is small, you can tell right away exactly how many there are. You don’t even have to count them – a single glance is enough. Cichlids and stingrays are astonishingly similar to us in this respect: they can detect small quantities precisely – and presumably without counting. For example, they can be trained to reliably distinguish quantities of three from quantities of four.

This fact has been known for some time. However, the research group led by Prof. Dr. Vera Schluessel from the Institute of Zoology at the University of Bonn has now shown that both species can even calculate. “We trained the animals to perform simple additions and subtractions,” Schluessel explains. “In doing so, they had to increase or decrease an initial value by one.”

Blue means “add one,” yellow means “subtract one”

But how do you ask a cichlid for the result of “2+1” or “5-1”? The researchers used a method that other research groups had already successfully used to test the mathematical abilities of bees: They showed the fish a collection of geometric shapes – for example, four squares. If these objects were colored blue, this meant “add one” for the following discrimination. Yellow, on the other hand, meant “subtract one.”

After showing the original stimulus (e.g. four squares), the animals were shown two new pictures – one with five and one with three squares. If they swam to the correct picture (i.e. to the five squares in the “blue” arithmetic task), they were rewarded with food. If they gave the wrong answer, they went away empty-handed. Over time, they learned to associate the blue color with an increase of one in the amount shown at the beginning, and the yellow number with a decrease.

But can the fish apply this knowledge to new tasks? Had they actually internalized the mathematical rule behind the colors? “To check this, we deliberately omitted some calculations during training,” Schluessel explains. “Namely, 3+1 and 3-1. After the learning phase, the animals got to see these two tasks for the first time. But even in those tests, they significantly often chose the correct answer.” This was true even when they had to decide between choosing four or five objects after being shown a blue 3 – that is, two outcomes that were both greater than the initial value. In this case, the fish chose four over five, indicating they had not learned the rule ‘chose the largest (or smallest) amount presented’ but the rule ‘always add or subtract one’.

Computing without a cerebral cortex

This achievement surprised the researchers themselves – especially since the tasks were even more difficult in reality than just described. The fish were not shown objects of the same shape (e.g. four squares), but a combination of different shapes. A “four”, for example, could be represented by a small and a larger circle, a square and a triangle, whereas in another calculation it could be represented by three triangles of different sizes and a square.

“So the animals had to recognize the number of objects depicted and at the same time infer the calculation rule from their color,” Schluessel says. “They had to keep both in working memory when the original picture was exchanged for the two result pictures. And they had to decide on the correct result afterwards. Overall, it’s a feat that requires complex thinking skills.”

To some it may be surprising because fish don’t have a neocortex – the part of the brain also known as the “cerebral cortex” that’s responsible for complex cognitive tasks in mammals. Moreover, neither species of fish is known to require particularly good numerical abilities in the wild. Other species might pay attention to the strip count of their sexual partners or the amount of eggs in their clutches. “However, this is not known from stingrays and cichlids,” emphasizes the zoology professor at the University of Bonn.

She also sees the result of the experiments as confirmation that humans tend to underestimate other species – especially those that do not belong to our immediate family or mammals in general. Moreover, fish are not particularly cute and do not have cuddly fur or plumage. “Accordingly, they are quite far down in our favor – and of little concern when dying in the brutal practices of the commercial fishing industry”, says Vera Schluessel.

I’m afraid it’s true; the whole science education and alewife thing was just a red herring.

Aside from all the other ways this kind of research is useful and interesting, I think it makes a good reminder of how evolution actually works. Contrary to popular mythology, no species on this planet is more or less “evolved” than any other. We’ve all been here the same amount of time, and we all evolved as conditions guided us. When being able to do just a little math helps something survive and reproduce, then that ability will stick around. It’s the same as light-sensitive cells evolving into eyes. Natural selection isn’t random, but the fact that we ended up where we are as a species is random.

As sapient animals, we’re in this weird position where we survive by killing and consuming other life forms, but we can also recognize that those life forms are literally our relatives. I have yet to square this feeling with the fact that I’m not a vegetarian, but when I learn something like this about a fellow animal, I just want to cheer on my “cousin” for being smarter than we realized.

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Weep for Cassandra if you must, but heed her warnings, for humanity’s sake

It’s April of 2022. We’ve had a couple years of disruption, primarily caused by the collision of late capitalism and SARS-CoV-2, which itself followed a couple years of unrest in the United States, and the growing realization that fascism was still a real threat. And in the background of all of this, we’ve had a steady march of disasters fueled by global warming, and scientific reports quantifying exactly how screwed we are.

Small wonder, then, that superstition seems to be on the rise. Every headline about black goo in a sarcophagus, or climate change revealing ancient artifacts was met with a lot of joking-not-joking about curses, or Pandora’s Box.

For myself, I have to wonder if some early climate scientist broke an indecent agreement with Apollo, so that all future climate scientists would be cursed to speak the truth about the growing threat of climate change, and to be disbelieved or dismissed by everyone with the power to do anything about it. Worse, an entire industry has formed around attacking and discrediting climate scientists. If you want to get a taste of that frustration, you can check out things like The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, by Michael E. Mann.

I once heard someone say that the more you learn about nuclear power, the less it scares you, but the more you learn about climate change, the more it scares you. Imagine, then, the life of someone whose full time job is monitoring this unfolding catastrophe, and reporting on it to what often seems like an indifferent world.

The reality, of course, is that most of humanity is not indifferent. Most of us care very much about what’s happening, we just don’t currently have the power to change anything. That’s something we should be working on, but in the meantime, at least part of our efforts do need to go towards convincing the ruling class to at least stop accelerating towards the proverbial cliff. Climate scientists have been making that case for decades now, and it has been a thankless task.

Among the many attacks levied against them, one that always irked me especially was the claim that climate scientists were “getting political” by describing the implications of their research, and by urging action. It is so obviously insincere, and yet it has hung around. I think part of its longevity is the fact that it does double duty. It casts doubt on the science, and it communicates to the audience that “being political” is an inherently bad thing. That’s dangerous, of course, because if we’re going to have any hope of a better world, we must get political , and at a scale the world has never seen before.

I am nowhere close to being alone in making the Cassandra comparison, and unfortunately it seems to be just as unpleasant as you’d think. Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist, published this letter in association with a protest carried out by him and his colleagues:

I’m a climate scientist and a desperate father. How can I plead any harder? What will it take? What can my colleagues and I do to stop this catastrophe unfolding now all around us with such excruciating clarity?

On Wednesday, I risked arrest by locking myself to an entrance to the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles with colleagues and supporters. Our action in LA is part of an international campaign organized by a loosely knit group of concerned scientists called Scientist Rebellion, involving more than 1,200 scientists in 26 countries and supported by local climate groups. Our day of action follows the IPCC Working Group 3 report released Monday, which details the harrowing gap between where society is heading and where we need to go. Our movement is growing fast.

We chose JP Morgan Chase because out of all the investment banks in the world, JP Morgan Chase funds the most new fossil fuel projects. As the new IPCC report explains, emissions from current and planned fossil energy infrastructure are already more than twice the amount that would push the planet over 1.5°C of global heating, a level of heating that will bring much more intense heat, fire, storms, flooding, and drought than the present 1.2°C.

Even limiting heating to below 2°C, a level of heating that in my opinion could threaten civilization as we know it, would require emissions to peak before 2025. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in the press conference on Monday: “Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness.” And yet, this is precisely what President Biden, most other world leaders, and major banks are doing. It’s no exaggeration to say that Chase and other banks are contributing to murder and neocide through their fossil fuel finance.

Earth breakdown is much worse than most people realize. The science indicates that as fossil fuels continue to heat our planet, everything we love is at risk. For me, one of the most horrific aspects of all this is the juxtaposition of present-day and near-future climate disasters with the “business as usual” occurring all around me. It’s so surreal that I often find myself reviewing the science to make sure it’s really happening, a sort of scientific nightmare arm-pinch. Yes, it’s really happening.
If everyone could see what I see coming, society would switch into climate emergency mode and end fossil fuels in just a few years.

I hate being the Cassandra. I’d rather just be with my family and do science. But I feel morally compelled to sound the alarm. By the time I switched from astrophysics into Earth science in 2012, I’d realized that facts alone were not persuading world leaders to take action. So I explored other ways to create social change, all the while becoming increasingly concerned. I joined Citizens’ Climate Lobby. I reduced my own emissions by 90% and wrote a book about how this turned out to be satisfying, fun, and connecting. I gave up flying, started a website to help encourage others, and organized colleagues to pressure the American Geophysical Union to reduce academic flying. I helped organize FridaysForFuture in the US. I co-founded a popular climate app and started the first ad agency for the Earth. I spoke at climate rallies, city council meetings, and local libraries and churches. I wrote article after article, open letter after open letter. I gave hundreds of interviews, always with authenticity, solid facts, and an openness to showing vulnerability. I’ve encouraged and supported countless climate activists and young people behind the scenes. And this was all on my personal time and at no small risk to my scientific career.

Nothing has worked. It’s now the eleventh hour and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity. I feel deep grief over the loss of forests and corals and diminishing biodiversity. But I’ll keep fighting as hard as I can for this Earth, no matter how bad it gets, because it can always get worse. And it will continue to get worse until we end the fossil fuel industry and the exponential quest for ever more profit at the expense of everything else. There is no way to fool physics.

Martin Luther King Jr said, “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” Out of necessity, and after exhaustive efforts, I’ve joined the ranks of those who selflessly risk their freedom and put their bodies on the line for the Earth, despite ridicule from the ignorant and punishment from a colonizing legal system designed to protect the planet-killing interests of the rich. It’s time we all join them. The feeling of solidarity is a wonderful balm.

As for the climate scientists? We’ve been trying to tell you this whole time.

This was one part of a multinational protest by over 1,000 climate scientists, aimed specifically at the big banks that are funding – and profiting from – our destruction. The notion that scientists ought to be non-political has always been a lie that could only ever benefit the powerful. In a world that seems to only value the sensational, we need acts of civil disobedience like this, and we need to build the capacity to wield collective power for the collective good. These scientists are in the right when they aim for the heart of our capitalist system, and while I really, really want to be wrong about this, I have little hope that our corporate overlords will suddenly decide to do the right thing.

One thing I think we should be doing, beyond organizing and protesting, is finding ways to bring up climate change with politicians and their representatives. Not just climate change, but the ways in which our system – working as it was designed – is making it profitable to turn this planet into a sweltering hellscape. Make it impossible for them to ignore, and when they respond with talking points, challenge those, and the ones that come after them. Individually, we’re limited in how much time and energy we can spend on this. Anyone with a sense of perspective realizes that the mightiest effort of one person is a drop in the bucket, compared to the size of the problem. If we can get enough of us moving in the same direction, those drops can become a relentless storm, and if we can’t force our rulers to at least go with the flow, then maybe we can wash them away.

Thanks to StevoR for requesting the topic.

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 this. 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!

What’s with all those big green and brown things that sway in the wind? Are they actually worth anything?

The way our society determines value is deeply flawed. It’s not that there’s no relationship between what things cost, and the resources expended to produce them, but a great many things are vastly over-valued, and many other things – including most life forms on the planet – are vastly under-valued. Those flaws are compounded by the fact that we seem to be increasingly encouraged to view every aspect of our lives through the lens of capitalism, in which things are generally deemed to have no value unless it’s proven someone will pay money for them. Unfortunately, that’s the world we’re still stuck in, so there’s probably some merit to calculating the economic value of life. When it comes to wildlife, the ways in which it benefits humanity are called “ecosystem services“, as part of what I view as a failed attempt to get capitalism to assign any value to a habitable environment. Quantifying their value to us may not do much to change policy or stop environmental destruction, but it does put things in terms to which we’re accustomed:

Trees sequester and store greenhouse gasses, filter air pollutants, provide wood, food, and other products, among other benefits. However, the service value of 400 individual tree species and tree lineages growing in forests and plantations in the contiguous U.S. was not previously known. To determine the ecosystem services value of U.S. trees, researchers mapped the value of trees and calculated the economic contributions to these services of every US tree species and lineage. They measured the net value of five tree-related ecosystem services by calculating the value of benefits provided, minus the direct costs incurred to produce these services. The five key ecosystem services included climate regulating services from carbon storage, filtration of particulate matter from the air that harms human health, and provisioning services from production of wood products, food crops, and Christmas trees.

The researchers found that the value of these five ecosystem services generated by trees totaled $114 billion annually. Carbon storage in tree biomass comprised 51% of the net annual value, while preventing human health damages via air quality regulation, contributed to 37% of the annual value. The remaining 12% of the net annual value came from provisioning services. Trees in the pine and oak families were the most valuable, generating $25.4 billion and $22.3 billion in annual net benefits, respectively. The study had several limitations that likely contributed to an undervaluing of ecosystem services since the researchers did not have access to data for many ecosystem services such as erosion control, flood regulation, and shade-related energy savings. They also did not evaluate disservices of trees. Future studies may provide more accurate estimates of the monetary value of these benefits.

According to the authors, “This study shows that the ‘hidden’ value of trees — the nonmarket value from carbon storage and air pollution filtration — far exceeds their commercial value. Sustaining the value of trees requires intentional management of forests and trees in the face of myriad and simultaneous global change threats. Our study provides information and an approach that can contribute to precision forestry practices and ecosystem management.”

Cavender-Bares adds, “The fact that tree lineages have evolved to inhabit different ecological niches across the continent is important for sustaining the ecosystem services that we depend on for our life support systems. These benefits from trees, however, are increasingly at risk. Our research team found that climate change threatens nearly 90 percent of tree species, while pests and pathogens put 40 percent of the combined weight of all U.S. trees at risk. We also found that the species and lineages of greatest ecosystem service value are the most at risk from pests and pathogens, climate change, and increasing fire exposure.”

One of the most irksome parts of this environmental collapse is that we know what’s happening, why it’s happening, and how to stop it. That’s not even a general “we know what’s happening”. We have thousands of scientists all over the world studying everything. That’s why we’re able to do things like putting a dollar value to trees, or wetlands. Day after day, week after week we hear the relentless accounting of everything that’s going on around us, and yet we still have to try to dress up reality with dollar signs and big numbers in a hopeless effort to get the tiny-minded ghouls who run the world to pay attention to what’s being lost.

It’s draining. But hey – at least we know roughly what trees are worth!

Do your droughts take too long to dry up the land? Try new and improved Flash Droughts!

Flash droughts have always been a thing – the term refers to a drought that dries out the landscape to a given point within five days – and they don’t seem to be getting more frequent right now.

But.

What they are doing, is getting faster.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Texas Tech University found that although the number of flash droughts has remained stable during the past two decades, more of them are coming on faster. Globally, the flash droughts that come on the fastest — sending areas into drought conditions within just five days — have increased by about 3%-19%. And in places that are especially prone to flash droughts — such as South Asia, Southeast Asia and central North America — that increase is about 22%-59%.

Rising global temperatures are probably behind the faster onset, said co-author and UT Jackson School Professor Zong-Liang Yang, who added that the study’s results underscore the importance of understanding flash droughts and preparing for their effects.

[…]

Flash droughts are relatively new to science, with the advancement of remote sensing technology during the past couple of decades helping reveal instances of soil rapidly drying out. This serves as the telltale sign of the onset of a flash drought and can make drought conditions appear seemingly out of the blue.

As the name suggests, flash droughts are short lived, usually lasting only a few weeks or months. But when they occur during critical growing periods, they can cause disasters. For example, in the summer of 2012, a flash drought in the central United States caused the corn crop to wither, leading to an estimated $35.7 billion in losses.

In this study, the scientists analyzed global hydroclimate data sets that use satellite soil moisture measurements to capture a global picture of flash drought and how it has changed during the past 21 years. The data showed that about 34%-46% of flash droughts came on in about five days. The rest emerge within a month, with more than 70% developing in half a month or less.

When they examined the droughts over time, they noticed the flash droughts happening more quickly.

The study also revealed the importance of humidity and variable weather patterns, with flash droughts becoming more likely when there’s a shift from humid to arid conditions. That makes regions that undergo seasonal swings in humidity — such as Southeast Asia, the Amazon Basin, and the East Coast and Gulf Coast of the United States — flash drought hot spots.

“We should pay close attention to the vulnerable regions with a high probability of concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity,” said Wang.

Mark Svoboda, the director of the National Drought Mitigation Center and originator of the term “flash drought,” said the advancement in drought-detecting technology and modeling tools — such as those used in this study — has led to growing awareness of the influence and impact of flash droughts. He said the next big step is translating this knowledge into on-the-ground planning.

“You can go back and watch that drought evolve in 2012 and then compare it to how that tool did,” said Svoboda, who was not part of the study. “We really have the stage well set to do a better job of tracking these droughts.”

I think what this means, from the point of view of agriculture, is that it’s very possible that without maintaining a reserve supply of water against flash droughts, a crop could be destroyed before there’s time to organize an emergency response. As with so many other aspects of living with climate change, it seems to me that step one is to create a society that values storing up resources against need, rather than using as much as we produce, as we produce it. It’s not a guaranteed solution to all problems, but it is a way to make it likely that you’ll have the time and energy to come up with a more tailored solution to whatever your problem is, because you’re less likely to be focused on bare survival.

Luck favors the prepared.

Pebbles Preceding an Avalanche: COVID and Climate Change

Since the pandemic began, I’ve heard people discuss it as a microcosm for climate change. It’s global problem that can be addressed in a number of pretty straightforward ways, but greed, paranoia, and bigotry stand in the way of doing that, and so vast numbers of people just have to die. I think it’s a good comparison, and I think it’s one that can be of further use here. When the pandemic first started killing people, a lot of our information about the death toll came from indirect data. Some of that was looking at shipments of urns for cremated remains, which far exceeded the official death numbers from Wuhan, China. Some of it was looking at hospitals running out of beds, or morgues running out of space. Some of it was by looking at the total number of dead people by any cause, and comparing that to what happens under normal conditions.

In any case, these millions of deaths from COVID-19 didn’t happen all at once. Multiple waves, multiple variants, different communities responding in different ways – but as the months passed by, the scale of what was happening, plus all the other factors that affect disease mortality, meant that even the low death rate we’ve heard so much about added up to a lot of death.

The same is true of climate change.

Food prices rise a little, and a few thousand people die, scattered around the world, who wouldn’t have died otherwise. The global temperature has risen by an amount that would be barely noticed beside daily local temperature fluctuations, but over time, heat waves have gotten longer, and stronger. More days of lethal heat means more people dying, again disbursed around the globe. Most climate change deaths are unlikely to make headlines because they’re generally so spread out in both time and space. Take this recent example reported by Radio Havana Cuba:

Ecuador, March 28 (RHC) — An unusually long, intense, and destructive rainy season in Ecuador has left 52 people dead and more than 100 injured, officials have said.

In addition, more than 27,000 people were affected by flooding, landslides, and building collapses over the past six months, according to the National Risk Management Service.

Every one of Ecuador’s 24 provinces was affected — with the exception of the Galapagos archipelago, 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) off the coast, the service said.

It said exceptionally strong and prolonged downpours had damaged or destroyed more than 13,000 acres (5,400 hectares) of farmland, as well as 6,240 homes, schools or health clinics.

A January 31 flood and landslide in the capital city Quito, caused by the most torrential rainfall seen in two decades, left 28 people dead and 52 others injured.

Scientists say climate change is intensifying the risk of heavy rain around the world because a warmer atmosphere holds more water.

The image shows several rescue workers carrying a stretcher up a steep road covered in mud and debris. You can see bits of cinder blocks and other construction material strewn around, as well as marks and splashes from the flood.

Really, the story’s not much different from one about a tornado, hurricane, or wildfire hitting an area. Each of these events is almost the same as they would have been in a slightly cooler world. Maybe only a couple people die who wouldn’t have, but it’s the same with the slow accumulation of heat from greenhouse gases, or the slow rise in sea levels.

Going back to the pandemic metaphor, we’re in the early stages still – maybe March 2020? We’ve got rising numbers, but they’re still low enough that some people can claim it’s no big deal, and those desperately seeking comfort might believe it. Just as we knew then that it would get worse, because of the science, we also know that climate change is going to get worse, and I very much fear it’s going to have a similar pattern of escalation. We’ve been getting those first few deaths, scattered around the world, but the numbers are increasing, storm by storm and heatwave by heatwave, and they’re increasing all around the world. At some point soon, the changes to the climate are going to exceed our capacity to respond. Just as hospitals were overwhelmed, so too will the various other systems that make up our “civilization” begin to get overwhelmed.

That is not, however, a prophecy of inevitable doom. Just as with COVID-19, the fact that we know that in advance means that we also have the ability to increase the capacity of those systems.

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 this. 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!

Video: How climate change is affecting the habitability of the U.S.

There were a number of reasons why Tegan and I decided to leave the U.S. and seek our fortunes across the ocean. Better quality of life (like having a real healthcare system) was a big factor, but climate change was as well. We settled on Scotland as a place with good politics (if it can get free of England), good healthcare, and a climate that’s likely to remain reasonably comfortable – at least for me – for my lifetime. If nothing else, it’s almost certain that moving bought Raksha a couple more years of life, because I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have been able to survive a couple more Boston summers.

That said, we were – and are – lucky. Not everyone has the freedom or resources to make a move like this, and for all the benefits we’ve gotten, there are also downsides. While I think we should have open borders and freedom of movement around the world, we’re not there yet, so what can folks in the U.S. expect the climate to do in the coming decades? Here’s what PBS has to say:

Wherever you are in the US, the summers are going to get worse, so regardless of where you live, definitely make sure you have plans for surviving heat waves!

Climate science for all! A new science journal to keep an eye on

I’ve written before about the problem of paywalls in academia. I view them as a needless barrier to people’s ability to learn about pretty much all topics, or to do things like check the veracity of claims made by dishonest actors. It’s especially galling given how much research is publicly funded, and the inherently collaborative nature of science. Not to sound like an anarchist or anything, but when it comes to knowledge especially, I believe that all belongs to all. Science has always been a collaborative effort, even when some scientists treat their colleagues as competitors or enemies. Research is done based on the work of those who came before us, and any contributions we make will be just one stone in the foundation of what our descendants will create, if we can manage to give them that change.

All of this is to say, I’m pleased to tell you all about a new, open-access climate science journal.

Oxford Open Climate Change is a broad reaching interdisciplinary journal that aims to cover all aspects of climate change, including its impacts on nature and society, as well as solutions to the problem and their wider implications.

The journal will publish research from physical and biogeochemical aspects to social impact and response assessments; from economics and integrated assessments to health, politics, and governance; and from natural to technical solutions. The journal will play a key part in disseminating research findings across traditional fields, and removing siloes in readership seen in more traditional discipline specific journals.

Oxford Open Climate Change embraces openness principles which will further contribute to both the dissemination and the reuse of the published materials. The journal will include both invited contributions and regularly submitted contributions, as well as special issues that consider key problems from a wide range of disciplines. Article types will range across multi-disciplinary reviews, research articles, research letters, short communications, and editorials. Rigorous peer review is central to all content.

Hat tip to my dad for making me aware of this.

When I say the journal is new, I do mean new. It’s had a grand total of two issues so far. Their Rationale and Opening Remit makes a good case for the nature of the climate crisis, and while it doesn’t link that to the fact that the journal’s open access, I think it’s a point worth making. Leaving aside my earlier-mentioned beliefs about paywalls, it is outrageous that there is a financial barrier to accessing information about what may be the biggest crisis ever to face our species. We cannot adapt to climate change, or meaningfully slow its advance, if we keep treating everything in life as part of a competition.

Beyond that, I like what I’m seeing so far. The fact that it’s so new means I can actually read through everything they’ve got in a reasonable amount of time, and even give you an overview! The editorial section, in addition to their rationale and remit mentioned above, includes a clear call to go beyond the inadequate emissions targets currently set by most nations, and for wealthy nations to actually use their wealth to deal with this global emergency.

In particular, countries that have disproportionately created the environmental crisis must do more to support low and middle income countries to build cleaner, healthier, and more resilient societies. High income countries must meet and go beyond their outstanding commitment to provide $100 billion a year, making up for any shortfall in 2020 and increasing contributions to and beyond 2025. Funding must be equally split between mitigation and adaptation, including improving the resilience of health systems.

Financing should be through grants rather than loans, building local capabilities and truly empowering communities, and should come alongside forgiving large debts, which constrain the agency of so many low income countries. Additional funding must be marshalled to compensate for inevitable loss and damage caused by the consequences of the environmental crisis.

The fact that our “leaders” continue to obsess over profits and private property is a clear symptom of a mental rot spread throughout our ruling classes. Looking at history, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising to see how little they value human life, but this blind charge towards extinction honestly makes me worry about the possibility of nuclear war in the near future. In the meantime, we continue to do what we can to take power away from these people, so we can save ourselves, and give them the treatment they apparently need.

The “Short Communication” discusses the geopolitical issues surrounding geoengineering technologies like reflecting a significant portion of sunlight away from the Earth. Obviously, that’s something that would affect the entire planet, and thus everyone on the planet, or at least every nation, should have a say in whether or how it’s done. Given our current inability to cooperate at a global scale, I think it’s worth thinking about how we might go about building coalitions like that.

The research articles make for a good introduction to the breadth of topics that Open Oxford Climate Change means to tackle. The first article has everything you might need to know about the diets of a particular Canadian polar bear population,  followed by a discussion of “sustainability” in fast fashion, and the use of a fashion show as a vehicle for climate communication. I doubt there’s much interest in me going through everything they’ve published so far, but it seems that they intend to publish research that covers every aspect of climate change, from the study of past climate shifts and analysis of current climate sensitivity, to politics and culture.

I count this journal as a little bit of good news, both in terms of access to research, and in terms of the ability for the general public to actually see the work that’s being done. It’s not much, but I’ll take it.

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 this. 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!

Simmering seas: “extreme” heat is now normal for a majority of the ocean’s surface.

As the planet warms around us, a lot of predicted changes are being confirmed by science. The drought forecast I wrote about a little while back is just one indicator of how the world around us is seething. Those of us who’ve paid even a little attention have been able to see and feel the changes around us, and anyone keeping up with ecological research knows that every other life form on the planet can see and feel the change as well, even if they lack the capacity to understand what’s going on.  To the complete surprise of nobody, oceans continue getting hotter. Research from the Monterey Bay Aquarium now indicates that “extreme heat” is starting to become part of normal conditions:

Researchers conducted the study by mapping 150 years of sea surface temperatures to determine a fixed historical benchmark for marine heat extremes. The scientists then looked at how often and how much of the ocean surpassed this point. The first year in which more than half of the ocean experienced heat extremes was 2014. The trend continued in subsequent years, reaching 57 percent of the ocean in 2019, the last year measured in the study. Using this benchmark, just two percent of the ocean surface was experiencing extremely warm temperatures at the end of the 19th century.

“Climate change is not a future event,” said Dr. Kyle Van Houtan, who headed the research team during his tenure as chief scientist for the aquarium. “The reality is that it’s been affecting us for a while. Our research shows that for the last seven years more than half of the ocean has experienced extreme heat.”

“These dramatic changes we’ve recorded in the ocean are yet another piece of evidence that should be a wake-up call to act on climate change,” he added.” We are experiencing it now, and it is speeding up.”

The study grew from separate research into the history of kelp forest changes throughout California. Van Houtan and team discovered that sea surface heat extremes, which are key stressors for canopy kelps, needed to be quantified and mapped along the California coast throughout the last century. The researchers then decided to expand the investigation beyond California to better understand the long-term frequency and location of extreme marine heat across the global ocean surface.

Using historic records, aquarium scientists first determined the average temperatures for the ocean’s surface over the period spanning 1870 to 1919. Then they identified the most dramatic ocean warming that occurred during that period — the top two percent of temperature increases — and defined that as “extreme heat.” The team then mapped the extremes over time, examining whether they occur regularly or are becoming more frequent.

“Today, the majority of the ocean’s surface has warmed to temperatures that only a century ago occurred as rare, once-in-50-year extreme warming events,” Van Houtan said.

The fact that I’m able to maintain this blog means that we still have time and resources to make changes that would both slow down the warming, and improve everyone’s ability to survive and thrive. That said, it’s hard not to think of the proverbial frog in its slowly warming pot of water.