Well, ain’t that just the sea’s bees?

Because of the way things can drift around in water, a lot of different aquatic organisms use a sort of “immersion” strategy for reproduction. Rather than going through all the bother of finding a mate and copulating, they just produce such massive amounts of gametic material that it’s guaranteed to encounter its target, just drifting around. This is particularly a good strategy for species that are either stuck to the sea floor, or that are themselves drifting without direction. Another version with which you’re probably familiar is the clouds of pollen released by trees and some other plants in the spring.

I had long assumed – and I wasn’t alone in this – that aquatic plants of all sorts relied on this dispersal method. It seems obvious, right? With water being an ever-present resource, why would any sort of “pollinator” relationship develop? Well, as always with evolution, the adaptations that provide immediate, short-term benefits are the ones most likely to stick around.

In this case, it turns out that red algae “pollen” is a bit sticky (as gametes are wont to be), and there are tiny creatures that make their living on and around the algae in question:

Are sea animals involved in the reproductive cycle of algae, like pollinating insects on dry land? Dispersal of the male gametes, or spermatia, of red algae generally relies on water movement, and up until now, scientists did not recognize the role played by animals.

Yet an international team led by Myriam Valero, a CNRS scientist affiliated with the Evolutionary Biology and Ecology of Algae research unit (CNRS / Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile / Sorbonne University / Universidad Austral de Chile) and Roscoff Marine Station (CNRS / Sorbonne University)1 , has revealed that tiny marine creatures called idoteas act as ‘sea bees’ for the red alga Gracilaria gracilis.

 

The image is a black and white microscope photograph of an Idotea isopod. It has a segmented body, with at least eight legs. It’s shaped a bit like a pill bug or a prawn – longer than it is wide, with what appears to be two long, thick, segmented antennae on its head. The only color in the photo is little green dots, highlighting the places where algal gametes are stick to the Idotea’s exoskeleton. There’s a circle around two of its legs, corresponding to a zoomed-in circular photo showing a more detailed image of the Idotea’s clawed feet, and the “pollen” dusting them.

Idoteas contribute to the fertilization of G. gracilis as they swim amid these algae. The surfaces of the male algae are dotted with reproductive structures that produce spermatia coated with mucilage, a sticky substance. As an idotea passes by, the spermatia adhere to its cuticle and are then deposited on the thalli of any female alga the crustacean comes into contact, thus helping G. gracilis reproduction.

But idoteas also stand to benefit in this arrangement. The seaweed gives them room and board: idotea cling to the algae as a protection from strong currents, and they munch on small organisms growing on their thalli. This is an example of a mutualistic interaction—a win-win situation for plant and animal alike—and the first time that an interaction of this kind between a seaweed and an animal has been observed.

While these initial findings do not indicate the extent to which animal transport of gametes contributes to algal fertilization relative to the role of water movement—previously thought to be the sole means of gamete dispersal—they do offer surprising insight into the origin of animal-mediated fertilization of plants. Before this discovery, the latter was assumed to have emerged among terrestrial plants 140 million years ago. Red algae arose over 800 million years ago and their fertilization via animal intermediaries may long predate the origin of pollination on land. Valero’s team now aim to focus on several other questions: Do idoteas trigger the release of spermatia? Are they able to distinguish male G. gracilis algae from female individuals? And most importantly, do similar interactions exist between other marine species?

First off, I just want to appreciate the way the authors take time to flesh out the historical implications of this discovery. Underwater ecosystems, as far as I know, tend not to have plants that evolve organs specifically to attract animals as pollinators. I could imagine a number of reasons for this, but at the same time, I could imagine reasons why it might not be a beneficial strategy on land. For one, if the current decline in insect populations continues, wind-pollinated plants are probably going to fare a bit better in the coming century or two.

Part of me wants to assume that if there were underwater organisms that used something like scent to attract “pollinators”, we’d have noticed that behavior in the animal in question. That said, our oceans are vast, treacherous deserts, with brutal, unyielding conditions that make study extremely difficult and dangerous at times. At the end of the day, I love reminders that there’s still so much to discover, and when I get a chance to throw in a fun pun for the title, well, that’s just the sea bee’s knees!

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Good news! Scientists have made progress on safely destroying PFAS!

For those who don’t know, PFAS are a category of so-called Forever Chemicals:

  • They can be found in many everyday products – outdoor clothing and equipment, textiles, paints, food packaging, photographic coatings, non-stick coatings on cookware as well as fire-fighting foam.
  • They can have harmful effects on human and animal health and stay in the environment and in our bodies for long periods of time where they can increase in concentration. They are often referred to as “forever chemicals”.
  • Some PFAS have been linked to an increased risk of cancer, high cholesterol, reproductive disorders, hormonal disruption (also known as endocrine disruption) and weakening of the immune system.
  • Human and environmental exposure to PFAS can arise from contaminated water and food, PFAS-containing consumer products, household dust and air as well as the reuse of PFAS contaminated sewage sludge as fertiliser resulting in PFAS pollution in soil and crops.

The most recent headline that drew attention was the fact that even the rain is contaminated with this shit.

This is one of the many forms of cleanup we need to do, if we want to take our reliance on nature, not to mention public health, seriously. As with plastic (which is now eaten by several kinds of bacteria), there’s been a fear that these PFAS will continue building up indefinitely, bringing new, and potentially devastating health problems to all life on Earth. That’s still a valid concern, in my opinion, but now researchers at UCLA and Northwestern have developed a method to break down at least some of these chemicals.

Northwestern chemistry professor William Dichtel and doctoral student Brittany Trang noticed that while PFAS molecules contain a long “tail” of stubborn carbon-fluorine bonds, their “head” group often contains charged oxygen atoms, which react strongly with other molecules. Dichtel’s team built a chemical guillotine by heating the PFAS in water with dimethyl sulfoxide, also known as DMSO, and sodium hydroxide, or lye, which lopped off the head and left behind an exposed, reactive tail.

“That triggered all these reactions, and it started spitting out fluorine atoms from these compounds to form fluoride, which is the safest form of fluorine,” Dichtel said. “Although carbon-fluorine bonds are super-strong, that charged head group is the Achilles’ heel.”

But the experiments revealed another surprise: The molecules didn’t seem to be falling apart the way conventional wisdom said they should.

To solve this mystery, Dichtel and Trang shared their data with collaborators Houk and Tianjin University student Yuli Li, who was working in Houk’s group remotely from China during the pandemic. The researchers had expected the PFAS molecules would disintegrate one carbon atom at a time, but Li and Houk ran computer simulations that showed two or three carbon molecules peeled off the molecules simultaneously, just as Dichtel and Tang had observed experimentally.

The simulations also showed the only byproducts should be fluoride — often added to drinking water to prevent tooth decay — carbon dioxide and formic acid, which is not harmful. Dichtel and Trang confirmed these predicted byproducts in further experiments.

“This proved to be a very complex set of calculations that challenged the most modern quantum mechanical methods and fastest computers available to us,” Houk said. “Quantum mechanics is the mathematical method that simulates all of chemistry, but only in the last decade have we been able to take on large mechanistic problems like this, evaluating all the possibilities and determining which one can happen at the observed rate.”

Li, Houk said, has mastered these computational methods, and he worked long distance with Trang to solve the fundamental but practically significant problem.

The current work degraded 10 types of perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids (PFCAs) and perfluoroalkyl ether carboxylic acids (PFECAs), including perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). The researchers believe their method will work for most PFAS that contain carboxylic acids and hope it will help identify weak spots in other classes of PFAS. They hope these encouraging results will lead to further research that tests methods for eradicating the thousands of other types of PFAS.

This is good news. As with plastic pollution, having the means to destroy these chemicals is not a substitute for cutting off the source of the pollution, but every bit of cleanup that we know is possible reinforces the fact that we can make things better. Our vast collective knowledge really does mean that we can change what we do and how we do it. I also like that the ingredients required are ones that should be accessible to any nation on Earth, so it won’t require expensive, high-tech facilities. This seems like something that pretty much any water treatment plant in the world could set up, for a pretty reasonable cost. Just a couple weeks ago, it was looking like we were gonna be stuck with PFAS in our food, water, and bodies. It may be that you and I, dear reader, will never be rid of the stuff, but we’re very close to having the means to stop the buildup, even if we can’t yet force corporations to stop making it. I want to end with a quote from near the beginning of the press release, because I find the potential scalability of this reaction very encouraging:

In a paper published today in the journal Science, the researchers show that in water heated to just 176 to 248 degrees Fahrenheit, common, inexpensive solvents and reagents severed molecular bonds in PFAS that are among the strongest known and initiated a chemical reaction that “gradually nibbled away at the molecule” until it was gone, said UCLA distinguished research professor and co-corresponding author Kendall Houk.

The simple technology, the comparatively low temperatures and the lack of harmful byproducts mean there is no limit to how much water can be processed at once, Houk added. The technology could eventually make it easier for water treatment plants to remove PFAS from drinking water.

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!

Fun direct action against corporate energy waste

It’s been said before that the French have a lot to teach U.S.ians about protesting. For all folks back home love to claim that the United States is “the land of the free and the home of the brave”, to quote our obnoxious national anthem, it seems to take a lot more for people to take to the streets. What’s more, those few who do directly fight back when the police attack tend to be condemned as a radical minority that “goes too far”.

For contrast, here’s French firefighters responding to police attempts to put down their fight for better treatment:

Now, we’ve got another bit of direct action that’s available to anyone with the requisite athletic ability, and doesn’t even require fighting police.

Have you ever walked through a city at night, and noticed lots of business signs are still lit up, even though the businesses are closed?

Have you ever thought about how much electricity is wasted, and carbon dioxide emitted, just to keep those lights on?

Does it feel like the status quo has us begging our overlords to let us save ourselves, while being forced to watch them keep screwing us over because they can’t be bothered to act like decent human beings?

Well, a group of French activists are once again showing us the way, in an action that is not only direct and effective, but I would say is also rather hard to argue is doing any harm that would merit a societal reprimand.

They’re unplugging or switching off those signs.

Honestly, I only see one downside – it seems like this might save money for the businesses in question, and they’ve already demonstrated that they don’t deserve to have that money. This is right up there with wheatpasting or tearing down fascist propaganda (always use your keys, they sometimes hide razors behind their posters) as a method of direct action that’s within reach of most people.

Being able to do parkour obviously makes this sort of thing easier and faster (speed is important if you’re doing something and you don’t want to have unpleasant conversations), but it seems like careful use of a long stick or slower climbing could work just as well.

As I keep saying, the people in charge, at every level, very clearly don’t see climate change as an emergency. They don’t seem to feel any urgency about it at all, except perhaps for some concern over how they’ll keep the rabble in line as climate change starts killing us off.

Businesses and governments have been chiding us for years for not turning our lights off enough, and I think it’s past time to turn that advice back on them.

 

Video: Hard work is a grift.

Hey, so because of personal reasons I’ve had trouble writing the past couple days. It is very fortuitous that Thought Slime put up this video today. I’m about 2 minutes in, and this feels uncomfortably like a description of me, or at least some aspects of my life. At around 4 minutes, it just starts describing my work process, which feels a little rude to do without consulting me first! Fortunately, this video is about more than how my brain works (and nobody else’s). It’s about the concept and history of “laziness” in general, and how it just destroys people; not in isolation, but in conjunction with everything else in society.

Oceanoxia has an index now! Also new patron perks!

Ok, so it occurred to me a little while back that I’ve written a lot of blog posts, and while some are basically content to keep the blog afloat. Many are more than that. It’s getting harder to find the ones I want, when I want to re-share or refer back to them, and I actually have an internal search function the rest of y’all can’t access.

So.

I decided to make an index, and because I hate having a pinned post at the top of my blog, I’ve made it on my patreon. Basically, the goal is to have all my blog posts on it, organized by topic. Some posts are relevant to multiple topics, so they’ll show up in each topic index. The posts in each topic are ordered newest to oldest, like your standard blog, but it’s just links, so it’s easier to scroll through. This is currently free to anyone – patron or not – and I intend to keep it that way.

For my patrons, well, I’ve not been great so far at making content just for them, so most of them are currently there just because they want to support my work. That said, I want to offer patron rewards that I can actually deliver, so here’s the new deal:

I’m working a lot more on fiction now, so my patrons – at $5 and above – get to name characters in my fiction. The higher your tier, the more influence you get over the character’s personality, backstory, appearance, and so on. This being the internet, I’m obviously retaining editorial control, so there won’t be any “Longrod Von Hugendong” in a story where it just wouldn’t fit. Joke names will have to wait for joke stories, I’m afraid. Beyond that, my economic future kinda depends on both happy patrons, and on publishing the novel I’m working on, which means this is the perfect opportunity for you to slip something for yourself into a subversive sword and sorcery epic!

I’ll be updating the index fairly regularly, not just to fill out new topics and keep up to date, but also to improve the index as a resource. That means that if you have an opinion about how it’s organized, if there’s a post you think should or should not be in a category, or anything constructive feedback, feel free to send it my way!

And finally, thank you all for reading, commenting, and sharing. I’m finding this work more fulfilling than I honestly expected to even this time last year, and a lot of that is because of you folks. Hopefully enough people will sign up that I can afford to keep doing it when my current situation ends in a couple years.

Things remain chaotic and scary out there, and it still looks like that’s going to keep getting worse before it gets better. Take care of yourselves and those around you.

Nature will help clean up plastic pollution, we just need top stop adding to the problem

For most of my life, the conventional wisdom has been that because nothing eats plastic, it will last for thousands of years, so we need to clean it all up. I can’t back this up with numbers, but I feel like this approach is why people have been so taken with things like Ocean Cleanup. Rebecca Watson has pointed out the problems with that particular endeavor, and as with most pollution, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Our energy would be far better spent reducing the amount of plastic waste generated in the first place.

But when it comes to cleanup – which I do think we should do – it’s encouraging, and a little concerning to know that Earth’s bacteria have been evolving to take advantage of this strange, calorically dense food we’ve been leaving all over the place:

A study of 29 European lakes has found that some naturally-occurring lake bacteria grow faster and more efficiently on the remains of plastic bags than on natural matter like leaves and twigs.

The bacteria break down the carbon compounds in plastic to use as food for their growth.

The scientists say that enriching waters with particular species of bacteria could be a natural way to remove plastic pollution from the environment.

The effect is pronounced: the rate of bacterial growth more than doubled when plastic pollution raised the overall carbon level in lake water by just 4%.

The results suggest that the plastic pollution in lakes is ‘priming’ the bacteria for rapid growth –  the bacteria are not only breaking down the plastic but are then more able to break down other natural carbon compounds in the lake.

Lake bacteria were found to favour plastic-derived carbon compounds over natural ones. The researchers think this is because the carbon compounds from plastics are easier for the bacteria to break down and use as food.

The scientists caution that this does not condone ongoing plastic pollution. Some of the compounds within plastics can have toxic effects on the environment, particularly at high concentrations.

The findings are published today in the journal Nature Communications.

“It’s almost like the plastic pollution is getting the bacteria’s appetite going. The bacteria use the plastic as food first, because it’s easy to break down, and then they’re more able to break down some of the more difficult food – the natural organic matter in the lake,” said Dr Andrew Tanentzap in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences, senior author of the paper.

He added: “This suggests that plastic pollution is stimulating the whole food web in lakes, because more bacteria means more food for the bigger organisms like ducks and fish.”

The effect varied depending on the diversity of bacterial species present in the lake water – lakes with more different species were better at breaking down plastic pollution.

That mention of compounds within plastics is especially important, I think. I expect more and more bacteria to be eating plastic the world over, and from what I can tell that means a couple things for the those more toxic compounds. Some of them may bio-accumulate – becoming more and more concentrated in the bodies of creatures higher on the food chain (like us). Some may end up just mixing with the sediment, or floating around in the water causing trouble. It’s hard to know.

And as with so many other forms of pollution, the scale at which we’re pumping out this stuff far exceeds the biosphere’s ability to handle it. There’s an important role for active cleanup, especially if we want to remove that plastic from the food web, but it will be useless if we don’t stop dumping new plastic faster than we could ever clean it up.

In the meantime, it seems like plastic could take up an increasingly important role in ecosystems around the world.

The new study also found that bacteria removed more plastic pollution in lakes that had fewer unique natural carbon compounds. This is because the bacteria in the lake water had fewer other food sources.

The results will help to prioritise lakes where pollution control is most urgent. If a lake has a lot of plastic pollution, but low bacterial diversity and a lot of different natural organic compounds, then its ecosystem will be more vulnerable to damage.

“Unfortunately, plastics will pollute our environment for decades. On the positive side, our study helps to identify microbes that could be harnessed to help break down plastic waste and better manage environmental pollution,” said Professor David Aldridge in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, who was involved in the study.

The study involved sampling 29 lakes across Scandinavia between August and September 2019. To assess a range of conditions, these lakes differed in latitude, depth, area, average surface temperature and diversity of dissolved carbon-based molecules.

The scientists cut up plastic bags from four major UK shopping chains, and shook these in water until their carbon compounds were released.

At each lake, glass bottles were filled with lake water. A small amount of the ‘plastic water’ was added to half of these, to represent the amount of carbon leached from plastics into the environment, and the same amount of distilled water was added to the others. After 72 hours in the dark, bacterial activity was measured in each of the bottles.

The study measured bacterial growth – by increase in mass, and the efficiency of bacterial growth – by the amount of carbon-dioxide released in the process of growing.

In the water with plastic-derived carbon compounds, the bacteria had doubled in mass very efficiently. Around 50% of this carbon was incorporated into the bacteria in 72 hours.

“Our study shows that when carrier bags enter lakes and rivers they can have dramatic and unexpected impacts on the entire ecosystem. Hopefully our results will encourage people to be even more careful about how they dispose of plastic waste,” said Eleanor Sheridan in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences, first author of the study who undertook the work as part of a final-year undergraduate project.

This appeals a great deal to the cyberpunk dystopia fan in me, but have to say I’d rather we had just dealt with these environmental problems when discovered them decades ago.

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!

We must learn to channel our inner pocket gopher

Biomimicry is a fascinating concept in a lot of ways. The basic idea is pretty straightforward – evolution is a process of trial and error that’s been doing on for billions of years, and there are certain physical or behavioral patterns that show up repeatedly, or hang around for eons, because they work. So, we study those things, figure out how and why they work so well, and then find ways to apply them to technology. It has been pretty popular for while now, and I’ve seen it applied to renewable energy, architecture, military tactics, medicine, and more.

This is not a new process for our species. If I had to guess, I’d say we were learning how to do things by watching other animals long before our ancestors were human. Watching and trying out things done by other organisms seems to be a basic part of the “monkey” operating system in general. Myths, legends, and fables from around the globe are filled with people learning important lessons from nature, and that’s one of those ancient traditions that I think is absolutely worth keeping.

This time, however, it’s a little different. There are lessons for us to consider for our society, but they’re not new lessons for us. In pocket gophers, we find an example of evolution finding a useful approach to agriculture that matches one we’ve discovered for ourselves before:

“It really depends on how ‘farming’ is defined,” says Putz. “If farming requires that crops be planted, then gophers don’t qualify. But this seems like a far too narrow definition for anyone with a more horticultural perspective in which crops are carefully managed — such as fruit trees in forests — but not necessarily planted. With this perspective, the origins of agriculture included Mesopotamian annual cereal and pulse crop cultivation as well as maize cultivation in the Americas, but many cultures around the world developed agriculture based on perennial crops, many of which they didn’t plant but did tend.”

I don’t think that this approach to subsistence is a viable way to generate food for all of humanity, but I do think that it would be a brilliant way for us to both add variety to our diets, and to repair the harm we’ve done to ourselves by trying to separate ourselves from “nature”. Because of the changes we’ve made to Earth’s biosphere, we desperately need to prioritize ecosystem management, if only out of self-preservation. I think that this approach is one we should strongly consider. That said, I think it is time to learn what the gophers have to teach us:

“Southeastern pocket gophers are the first non-human mammalian farmers,” says F. E. “Jack” Putz of the University of Florida, Gainesville. “Farming is known among species of ants, beetles, and termites, but not other mammals.”

Veronica Selden and Putz report that pocket gophers don’t just eat roots that happen to grow in the paths of new tunnels they excavate. Instead, they provide conditions that favor root growth, by spreading their own waste as fertilizer. As a result, the authors argue that — by promoting root growth in their tunnels and then harvesting or cropping those roots — southeastern pocket gophers have stumbled upon a food production system that qualifies as farming.

[…]

Selden and Putz suggest that root cropping may explain why gophers keep and defend such extensive tunnel systems. The tunnels are comparable to rows of crops. If indeed what they’re doing counts as farming, then the gophers are the first non-human mammal known to farm.

“Pocket gophers are great examples of ecosystem engineers that turn over soil thereby aerating it and bringing nutrients back to the surface,” says Putz. “They eat only roots, some of which they grow themselves, and seldom interfere with human activities.”

They note that further study may reveal whether gophers eat fungi and how seasonal variation in the energetic contributions of roots growing into tunnels relates to their activity cycles. It’s not clear yet how their underground activities affect vegetation at the surface.

“Whether or not [pocket gophers] qualify as farmers, root cultivation is worth further investigation,” the researchers write.

I hereby declare that they qualify as farmers. Glad I could clear that up.

The article also mentions that these roots make up anywhere from 20% to 60% of the gophers’ daily calories. That’s a pretty broad range, at least to my eyes, but it wouldn’t surprise me if studying creatures like this is pretty difficult, especially if you don’t want to harm them and their farms in the process. Regardless, I think this is really cool!

I also think it’s worth underlining the fact that they are not necessarily incompatible with human agriculture – just the way we do it right now. Youtube is full of videos about how to kill pocket gophers, but I could see them actually being extremely useful for the “edible ecosystem” approach.

I also, as a science fiction writer, am fascinated by the possibilities that could be uncovered by modeling ourselves more after the humble gopher. Specifically, I think we should live underground, and farm in tunnels.

Sort of.

Underground cities have been discussed as a way to adapt to climate change for a while now. I’ve dabbled in the concept a bit – I’ve got a stalled novel about a solar-powered steampunk society living under the vast, lethally hot desert of the American Midwest, a few centuries in the future. Maybe if I hit a future patreon goal I’ll patch some of it up and publish it here for fun (sign up at patreon.com/oceanoxia, featuring new content and rewards starting in August!). I think there are a lot of problems with underground living – especially at the scale of a modern city – of which we can see only those on the surface. Even so, as I keep saying, we’re facing the end of the world as we know it, and that means that we need to be open to modes of living that would not have been worth the effort in the past.

I also don’t think that we need to resort to living in tunnels and farming indoors or underground to take advantage of this. Farming from tunnels could also be a way of doing it safely in extreme heat, as well as irrigating crops without the evaporative water loss from spraying. Subsurface irrigation is a thing that’s been used for a while now (though less than it should be in these days of shrinking water supplies), but I think it’d be interesting to see it combined with things like hydroponics or aeroponics as a way to continue taking advantage of direct sunlight, without putting farmers at risk.

Also we should store things in our cheeks.

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!

Morbid Monday: Heatwave edition

It is far too hot. Over the last three years, the cool climate of these islands has spoiled me a little, but at 31.1°C/88°F, I’d be suffering even if I was more accustomed to the heat. It’s at times like this that I find it hardest not to think about what the rest of my life might look like. A fair amount of attention has been paid to the fact that this heat wave is almost identical to a hypothetical 2050 forecast run two years ago to raise awareness about climate change.

One of the most consistent themes in climate science over the past couple decades has been the ways in which the temperature is rising faster than expected, and the ways in which that’s causing problems faster than expected. The current heat wave has already killed over one thousand people on the Iberian Peninsula, and it is an absolute certainty that it has killed a great many people in the other affected countries. And, in case you need reminding, there are other heat waves happening around the world at the same time, and we are only halfway through July.

This is at 1.2°C over pre-industrial temperatures.

The rate of warming has been increasing, and it’s pretty much certain that that acceleration will itself accelerate in the coming decades. We are currently on track for a whole host of worst-case scenarios, and what do our political leaders do? Toady up to the same vicious monsters they’ve always aligned with, and push for more fossil fuel extraction.

Either these people actively want to bring about the extinction of humanity, or they are so senile, pampered, ignorant and arrogant that they truly cannot comprehend what is happening. Whether through malice or incompetence is irrelevant – these people are on track to getting us all killed.

In case it wasn’t clear, that’s not hyperbole. The path we’ve all been forced to take will lead to our extinction if we don’t make extremely big changes extremely soon. That extinction could happen a lot faster than a lot of people seem willing to consider.

And it’s going to be a miserable death. I’m writing this at 2am because I decided to just sleep through the hottest part of the day. The sun set a few hours ago, and it has cooled down a little, though there’s still depressingly little breeze. I’m irritable in the heat, and physically uncomfortable. It feels like it’s tiring just to exist, let alone work. Year after year, decade after decade, it’s going to just keep getting hotter. Heat waves are going to keep getting longer, and more intense, which means more and more people are going to suffer and die, and all of this was preventable.

Never forget that.

Never forget the future that these fuckers have stolen from us, and never forgive them for their crimes.

In spite of it all, I still think a better world is possible. I think we can reforge our civilization into one that can actually last, and can uplift everyone. What we can’t do is build that world in the image of the one we’ve got today. Obviously that means a more just and equal society, but it also means radically different infrastructure.

Take this heat wave, for example. Even without melting pavement, the way we live will not work in the climate we’re creating. If we want to avoid massive death from heat, we’re going to need to make air conditioning available to everyone. We also have to end fossil fuel use as soon as possible. Part of the reason scientists have been pushing for a proactive approach to climate change is that the energy transition will itself require a huge amount of energy. That means more emissions. The longer we delay it, the more we’re adding momentum to an avalanche that’s already set to destroy us.

But let’s say we end all fossil fuel use by 2030. The temperature is still going to keep rising. Even if greenhouse gas levels stayed the same, it would be at least 20 years before we reached thermal equilibrium. Ending fossil fuel use will also cause a drop in aerosol pollution, which will cause a spike in temperature, as that pollution will no longer be reflecting sunlight. And greenhouse gas levels are going to keep rising, because amplifying feedback loops, from permafrost to forest fires, are already active.

You know how futurism in the mid-20th century had everyone expecting flying cars and futuristic cities by this point in history? Well, the cars don’t seem practical, but I think we’re going to increasingly going to need cities that allow people to navigate without having to go outside.

I’ve been called alarmist a number of times by a number of people over the last decade, but I think most people have caught up to the idea that this really is an emergency. We really are facing ever-worsening heat waves and storms. We really are facing massive crop failures leading to planet-wide famine. This is happening, and it’s killing us.

And as it does, we have to keep paying rent.

Keep paying taxes to a government that funnels all that money into death and profit, while scolding us for “not doing enough”.

So we have to keep going. We have to keep surviving so we can change things. Personally, I highly recommend shaving your head. When I realized my immigration status didn’t allow me to get normal work, I decided to try out a mohawk, and I honestly like how it looks. I also am a huge fan of how much it helps  me stay cool. I sharpened my razor and shaved yesterday, and I can feel every breeze leeching a little heat off of my scalp. I honestly don’t think I can ever go back to having a full head of hair. It’s just too hot.

That’s the one upside, if you can call it that. The meme going around is that we live in a cyberpunk dystopia, but without any of the cool fashion or gadgets, and medical technology. Well, we’ve got some of the gadgets, and I know a number of wonderful people who’ve been able to make incredible changes to their bodies, to improve their lives. Mainly it feels like what we’re missing is the aesthetic and the organized resistance movement.

Fortunately, both of those are under our control.

Support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia for more uplifting content like this! It’s a little sparse there right now, but I’m working on a couple things to make it a  more useful resource in its own right, as a sort of supplement to this blog.

Video: Slavery is still legal (for cops)

I want to (belatedly) thank Abbey over at Impossible Me for making me aware of That Dang Dad. He’s an ex-cop who’s now a police and prison abolitionist, and someone that I think everyone should check out. You are all probably aware of the fact that the 13th amendment was written to protect convict slavery, shortly before the country was filled with laws designed to convict newly freed black people of crimes. That has been the state of things ever since, even as the laws stopped explicitly targeting black people. This video is a good look at both the history of convict slavery in the U.S., and the current state of things. Here’s a teaser – it’s not good, and it’s a “bipartisan” problem.