The wrong fruit fly, in the wrong place, at the wrong time: A tale of rot and ruin

I’ve written before about the problems caused by invasive species. I don’t know how they compare to other forms of habitat destruction for which we are responsible, but I think it’s safe to say that they’re often underrated as a problem. It’s true that the damage caused by the earthworm invasion of North America doesn’t seem as big of a deal as clear-cutting or climate change, but as I’ve said before, wearing away the diversity of an ecosystem wears away at its resilience. It’s like pulling blocks out of a Jenga tower – the ecosystem may be able to retain its basic structure for a long time, but after a certain point, it will be unstable enough that it can collapse at the smallest touch.

And keep in mind that the undermining of our biosphere is happening from multiple directions at once.

It seems that an invasive species of fruit fly is working away at one of those Jenga blocks:

The invasive spotted wing drosophila (SWD), introduced from South-East Asia, is a well-known fruit crop pest. It lays its eggs by destroying the mechanical protection of the fruit’s skin, providing an entry point for further infestation. Egg deposition and inoculated microbes then accelerate decay, and as a result the fruit rots and becomes inedible. While this small fly is known to cause massive economic damage in agriculture, little is known about its ecological impact on more natural ecosystems such as forests.

A recent study by Swiss scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL and the Ökobüro Biotopia, published in the scientific journal NeoBiota, concluded that the SWD competes strongly with other fruit-eating species and that its presence could have far-reaching consequences for ecosystems.

The research team assessed the use of potential host plants at 64 sites in forests from mid-June to mid-October 2020 by checking a total of 12,000 fruits for SWD egg deposits. To determine if SWD attacks trigger fruit decay, they also recorded symptoms of fruit decay after egg deposition. In addition, they monitored the fruit fly (drosophilid) fauna in the area, assuming that the SWD would outnumber and possibly outcompete other fruit-eating insects.

The authors found egg deposits on the fruits of 31 of the 39 fruit-bearing forest plant species they studied, with 18 species showing an attack rate of more than 50%. Furthermore, more than 50% of the affected plant species showed severe symptoms of decay after egg deposition. The egg depositions may alter the attractiveness of fruits, because they change their chemical composition and visual cues, such as colour, shape and reflective patterns, which in turn might lead seed dispersers such as birds to consume less fruits.

Given the large number of infested fruits, significant ecological impacts can be expected. “Rapid decay of fruits attacked by the spotted wing drosophila results in a loss of fruit available for other species competing for this resource, and may disrupt seed-dispersal mutualisms due to reduced consumption of fruit by dispersers such as birds,” says Prof. Martin M. Gossner, entomologist at the WSL. “If the fly reproduces in large numbers, both seed dispersers and plants could suffer.”

This, of course, is on top of the fact that the invasive species is outcompeting, and crowding out those fruit fly species that aren’t able to get an early start on a fruit by penetrating its outer skin. On a long enough timeline, the crises caused by invasive species would probably resolve themselves, if that was the only problem facing those ecosystems.

If only…

When I say that we need to make ecosystem management a priority, this is part of what I’m talking about. We don’t need to return to some imagined pre-industrial “perfect state”, but we do need to have an understanding of what is happening in our ecosystems. In case it hasn’t been clear, this could create many millions of jobs all over the world, and unlike so many jobs that exist today, these ones would be focused on actively making the world a better place for those that come after us. Fewer hedge fund managers, and more hedgerow managers!

This is also another reason why we should move as much of our food production indoors as possible. It may be that with a population as large as ours, there’s still value in monoculture farming for the sake of efficiency. The problem is that that’s an ecologically devastating practice. Completely aside from the damage done to the soil, pollution and runoff, and the land cleared, big farms that grow one crop pull in pests and diseases that can then spread to other crops. They act as an endlessly renewing fountain of pestilence that surrounding ecosystems are forced to absorb. Doing that in a closed system, indoors, would not just protect the crops from the weather and from pests, it would also protect the ecosystem around the farm from being inundated with fertilizers, pesticides, pests, and pathogens.

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Dealing with climate change does not mean an end to air travel.

I’m honestly a big fan of airplanes. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel a fair amount over the last couple decades, and that wouldn’t have been possible without the ability to fly. In my ideal world, I think there would be a lot less air traffic, but I don’t think we should get rid of it entirely. Obviously, the rich and their flying habits must go, and a better world would be a somewhat slower world, in which people can actually take the time to travel by boat, by zeppelin, or by train. When it comes to that, we should also have much more high-speed rail for transportation across continents. Even so, there are times when the speed and versatility of airplanes and helicopters will be indispensable.

That said, the way we do air travel needs to change, just like everything else. It’s possible that if all other fossil fuel use stopped, maintaining current airplane usage would be fine, but that seems very unlikely, and given the greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution coming from fossil fuel extraction, we need that to end. Fortunately, a lot of people have been working hard on finding alternative ways to make things like jet fuel, and they’ve been having real success! The question, with this sort of thing, is how well it can scale up. It may be that we can create this stuff under certain conditions, but will that be worth the energy and resources invested? I’ve generally been assuming so. When my friend was working on this a while back, the company he was with was using sugar beets as their starting point, but there’s a lot of vegetable matter that could be turned into fuel, which means a lot of the “work” is being doing as the plant grows. While my assumptions and anecdotes may hold credibility to some of you, for the others, here’s some research claiming that we can have an aviation industry that runs on plant-based fuel:

New research published today in the journal Nature Sustainability shows a pathway toward full decarbonization of U.S. aviation fuel use by substituting conventional jet fuel with sustainably produced biofuels.

The study, led by a team of Arizona State University researchers, found that planting the grass miscanthus on 23.2 million hectares of existing marginal agricultural lands — land that often lies fallow or is poor in soil quality — across the United States would provide enough biomass feedstock to meet the liquid fuel demands of the U.S. aviation sector fully from biofuels, an amount expected to reach 30 billion gallons per year by 2040.

“We demonstrate that it is within reach for the United States to decarbonize the fuel used by commercial aviation, without having to wait for electrification of aircraft propulsion,” said Nazli Uludere Aragon, co-corresponding author on the study and a recent ASU geography PhD graduate.

“If we are serious about getting to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, we need to deal with emissions from air travel, which are expected to grow under a business-as-usual scenario. Finding alternative, more sustainable liquid fuel sources for aviation is key to this.”

That caveat always looms over discussions of climate change, doesn’t it?

“If we are serious about getting to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions…”

It doesn’t generally feel like the “we” that has the power is serious about much of anything beyond keeping or increasing their power. Still, this research is promising, and I appreciate the bredth of the work they did.

In the study, the researchers used an integrated framework of land assessments, hydro-climate modeling, ecosystem modeling and economic modeling to assess where and under what conditions across the United States energy crops used for biojet fuels could be grown sustainably using criteria that evaluate both environmental and economic performance.

The criteria were extensive. The team first identified and assessed where optimal marginal agriculture lands already existed in the U.S. They then assessed whether one could grow the right energy crops on the land without using additional water.

The team then analyzed whether growing energy-crop feedstocks on these lands would have detrimental effects on the surrounding climate or soil moisture and predicted the potential productivity of yields of two different grasses — miscanthus and switchgrass — as suitable biomass-energy feedstocks. Finally, the team quantified the amount and the cost of biojet fuel that would be produced and distributed nationwide at scale.

“The current way we produce sustainable jet fuel is very land-inefficient and not on a large scale,” said Nathan Parker, an author on the study and an assistant professor in the School of Sustainability. “There are very limited ways that aviation could become low carbon emitting with a correspondingly low climate impact, and this is one way we’ve shown that is feasible and can get the aviation industry to be carbon neutral through agriculture.”

The scientists emphasized that this integrated systems perspective was critical to the study. In the past, research around the potential of biofuels has largely consisted of isolated assessments that have not been well integrated, for example, overlooking key data on how altering the crop cover influences the surrounding climate.

“When you plant crops over strategically designed areas, the planting of these crops has an impact on the climate,” said Matei Georgescu, co-corresponding author of the study and associate professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and director of the Urban Climate Research Center at ASU. “If there is a change in the underlying landscape, for example an increase or decrease in the amount of vegetation, there may be implications for local- to regional-scale climate, including more or less precipitation, or warmer or cooler temperatures.”

To account for these land-atmosphere interactions, the research team took outputs from their hydroclimate model to inform their ecosystem model. The team then evaluated the economic feasibility for farmers to grow these grasses.

Real-world solutions

For any uptake of an alternative-energy pathway, solutions need to make economic sense.

I get that they’re working within the world as it exists, and that makes perfect sense, but boy – “solutions need to make economic sense” is a phrase that makes me see red. So much about how our world is run right now makes zero economic sense, but exists anyway because it’s great for keeping money and power in the hands of the rich and powerful. Ian Danskin framed conservatism and capitalism as developed to protect the aristocracy from democracy, and if you look at the world through that lens, a lot of strange stuff starts to make more sense. Still, if something does “make economic sense” within the current paradigm, it seems likely that it would be at least as functional in the “ideal” scenario I discussed above.

The researchers, in their analysis, benchmarked the financial returns of the existing uses for the lands they identified — some already are used for growing corn, soy or various other crops, and others are being used as pasture — against those from cultivating either miscanthus or switchgrass as biomass feedstock.

Growing miscanthus or switchgrass needed to be more profitable to replace the existing use of the land in each area.

“These lands we identified are owned and operated by real people for different agricultural uses,” said Uludere Aragon, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The cost-effective biofuel potential from biomass feedstocks is influenced largely by the opportunity cost of alternative land uses.”

In the end, researchers found miscanthus to be the more promising feedstock and that biojet fuels derived from miscanthus can meet the 30 billion gallons/year target at an average cost of $4.10/gallon.

While this is higher than the average price for conventional jet fuel — typically about $2 per gallon — the team concluded it is reasonable when considering biojet’s potential to cut emissions. Notably, in 2022 jet fuel prices have varied from $2 to $5 per gallon (not to be confused with retail gasoline) due to changes in supply and demand, showing that prices above $4 per gallon are well within the range of possibility.

A template for the future

The researchers say that in finding further solutions to Earth’s climate crisis, it is important that the scientific community bridges disciplines and moves past incremental reductions in emissions. Rather, the researchers emphasize the importance of realistic solutions that scale.

“This was an interdisciplinary team with expertise from ecosystems sciences, climate modeling and atmospheric sciences and economics,” said Georgescu, who acknowledged this research was a culmination of eight years of modeling work and collaboration. “To truly address sustainability concerns, you need the expert skills of a spectrum of domains.

“As academics, we should remember economics drives people’s decisions on the ground. It is vitally important to find the circumstances when these decisions are also aligned with desirable environmental outcomes.”

The endless subsidies and wars propping up the fossil fuel industry, and the military-industrial complex, demonstrate that we have the ability to determine what is and is not “economical”, for all our leaders babble about “market forces”. Even so, there’s something cathartic about being able to point out that a huge number the changes we need are entirely feasible even within the system that’s resisting that change. At this point, I’m starting to wonder if I should just get a tattoo of this, but – the obstacles are social and political, not technical. There are absolutely technical challenges, and we’ll discover new problems as we work on new ways of doing things. All of that is to be expected, but none of it is why have failed to adequately address climate change.

We can do this. We can end fossil fuel use, and there’s no reason to think that doing so will result in anything other than a better standard of living for most of humanity. We just need to get around the money-hoarding doofuses that are currently in charge.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: Exploring Oregon’s hidden lava caves

I’ve been doing housework and research for my novel today, so I’m sharing a video I found about lava caves. For a bonus, we have a glimpse into the work life of a cave explorer, which appears to be one of the most terrifying jobs in existence. I don’t consider myself claustrophobic, and I’ve been in a few caves – including some that got pretty tight.

But those caves had had people go through them many, many times before, and there was no way I would have been in them had they not been safe. Exploring unknown caves, and wedging myself through a passage that could just keep getting smaller? No thank you. It would terrify me even if I hadn’t read Junji Ito’s horror comic The Enigma of Amigara Fault. Personal discomfort aside, I’m glad that professional cavers like Ken can show us these places I’m too afraid to explore, and get fulfilment from doing it.

 

Air pollution is bad, whether you’re a WASP, or a wasp.

When people discuss the decline in insect populations, the biggest culprit, unsurprisingly, is the over-use of insecticides. Agriculture isn’t the only area where that’s a problem, but it’s probably the biggest. Farmers around the world have developed alternative methods of pest control, including the nurturing of predators and parasitoids. Probably the most infamous failure of this method has been the Australian cane toad debacle, but I think my favorite version comes from cranberry bogs:

https://unauthorizedrhapsody.tumblr.com/post/630276104230518784/why-do-they-always-show-cranberries-in-thos-big

I’m sure PZ has been tempted to take up cranberry farming, but I dunno how well I’d fare with wolf spiders on my face. This post really gets at the essence of the technique – the spiders are fellow workers. That attitude is very much how I think we should be viewing most of the rest of life on this planet, so while it needs to be done carefully (see the cane toad documentary I linked above, if you haven’t), I think it’s a brilliant technique.

The problem (you knew there was going to be a problem, didn’t you?) is that unless we actually take a systemic approach to change, those people trying to do better in the context of our current, destructive system, are being undermined by that system. I’ve talked before about how air pollution is bad for humans, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s bad for other critters. Specifically, diesel exhaust and ozone cause problems for parasitoid wasps used to protect plants grown for vegetable oil (apologies in advance for this article being about the worst-named plant in existence):

The team, led by scientists from the University of Reading, used special equipment to deliver controlled amounts of diesel exhaust and ozone to oilseed rape plants. They also added aphids to the plants and measured the reproductive success of parasitic wasps that habitually lay their eggs inside a freshly stung aphid.

Dr James Ryalls, University of Reading said: “Even at the levels we used, which were lower than safe maximums set by environmental regulators, the overall numbers of parasitic insects still fell. This is a worrying result as many sustainable farming practices rely on natural pest control to keep aphids and other unwelcome creatures away from valuable crops.

“Diesel and ozone appear to make it more difficult for the wasps to find aphids to prey upon and so the wasp population would drop over time.”

Fortunately, this study has two bits of good news. The first, which is more an implication, is that efforts to decrease air pollution – which are already necessary for other reasons – will increase the effectiveness of wasp-based pest control. The other is that this doesn’t seem to be a problem for all of the wasps:

While the majority of parasitic wasp species decreased in polluted environments, one species of parasitic wasp appeared to do better when both diesel and ozone were present. However, the researchers found that this combination of pollutants also correlated with changes in the plants that might explain the finding.

With both pollutants present, oilseed rape plants produced more of the compounds that give brassica family crops, including mustards and cabbages, their distinctive bitter, hot and peppery flavour notes. These usually repel insects but in the case of Diaretiella rapae wasps, there was greater abundance and reproductive success associated with diesel exhaust and ozone together.

Dr Ryalls said: “Diaretiella rapae particularly likes to prey on cabbage aphids, which love to eat brassica crops.

“We know that some of the flavour and smell compounds in oilseed rape are converted into substances that do attract D.rapae. So, we could speculate that the stronger smell attracts the wasps and they are more successful in finding and preying upon aphids, that way. It could be that D.rapae is a good choice for pest control in diesel and ozone polluted areas.

“This really goes to show that the only way to predict and mitigate the impacts of air pollutants is to study whole systems.”

As transport shifts away from diesel and towards electric motors, air pollution will change. Knowing how pest-regulation service providers, such as parasitic wasps, respond to these progressive changes, will be essential to planning mitigation strategies to ensure sustainable food security now, and in the future. This research shows that we also must consider the impact of pollution on the plants, wasps, and prey insects, and the interactions between all three.

I think this last point is an important one to end on. In building a better society, we’re not looking to abandon technology. That means, as I’ve said before, that we will keep engaging in resource extraction that is destructive to the environment, and we will keep creating poisonous industrial byproducts. Our project, at this stage, is one of changing which pollutants we create most, and how we manage them. Creating an economic system that does not require infinite growth will help reduce all pollutants, but we will still have to contend with that which is unavoidable. That means that, unlike the present arrangement, we will need to actually clean up the messes we make through industry, just as we do with human waste. In that case, the time and energy put into sewage treatment helps everyone by making the world more pleasant to live in, and by reducing disease outbreaks. Getting a better handle on industrial pollution will yield similar results.

Healthy ecosystems that are beneficial to humans, like food forests and other “edible ecosystems”, is a goal worth working towards, but it’s not something that’s likely to work if don’t actually commit to it. Rising temperatures, pollution, and direct habitat destruction currently keep that future out of reach, which is why it’s so important to maintain a holistic perspective on the situation.

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!

Video: How plate tectonics gave us seahorses

It’s a question that haunts all of us. It creeps into our minds as we try to fall asleep. It lingers in our minds, sapping attention away from life-changing events.

Whence seahorses?

How did such creatures come to be, and why do they seem to exist everywhere? Are seahorses the proof of supernatural creation that we’ve been looking for all this time? Will I have to give up my atheism for them? Only time will tell, but for now, here’s a video on seahorse evolution, and how it was influenced by the movement of the continents.

It’s not just the flooding: Hurricanes as heat pumps

While I don’t know a whole lot about the demographics of my readership, I’m going to assume that most of you have at least a passing familiarity with the water cycle. Maybe it’s just me, but when I learned about it as a kid, I learned about it as a description of the movement of water around the surface of the planet. The water cycle is about water. Straightforward, yes?

Then, a few years ago, I was writing a climate science lesson, and I had a minor revelation. The water cycle also describes the movement of energy in our atmosphere. When water evaporates, it effectively absorbs the heat required to keep it in a gaseous state. That cools off the place where the evaporation happens, which is why our own ability to regulate our temperatures relies heavily on evaporation. So now you have that water vapor, kept in that state by a combination of temperature and pressure. It rises up, and after a certain point reaches a low enough pressure and temperature to condense, which turns it into water droplets (clouds, rain, mist, etc), and warms up the air around them. That heat was just transported, as water vapor, from one part of the world to another. Of course, that same bit of water might absorb and release heat like that many times over before it falls back to the ground. If you watch clouds for long enough, on a mostly clear day, you can see some of them forming, or even some that fade in and out of existence as they move through pressure gradients shifting from gas to droplets, and back to gas again.

As I said, this may all be obvious to you, but for some reason it never really clicked in my head until I was actually studying the movement of heat energy in our atmosphere. From that perspective, when enough water fell on Pakistan to submerge one third of the entire country, a huge amount of heat was released into the air above. It’s been interesting to think about, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what predictive value that has for our day to day lives. It could mean that we should expect heat to follow flooding, but if the air warmed is pretty high up to begin with, would that follow? Further, all that water starts evaporating again, sucking up more heat. Fortunately, the world need not wait for people like me to puzzle this stuff out. A team out of Arizona has  found that when a tropical cyclone hits a city, it causes a spike in temperature in the days that follow. 

Three days after Hurricane Fiona struck Puerto Rico in mid-September, the National Weather Service issued an extreme heat advisory, warning that the heat index – which incorporates humidity to calculate perceived temperature – could reach up to 109 degrees.

Above-average temperatures almost always follow tropical cyclones – which by definition include tropical storms and hurricanes – and may soar to nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than average, according to a new University of Arizona-led study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The study’s authors stressed that their results are likely conservative estimates of just how high temperatures can climb following a cyclone.

Tropical cyclones often cause damage from strong winds, storm surges, intense rain and flooding, but extreme heat is an additional hazard, the researchers found. Above-average temperatures can occur days later and even in nearby areas that were not directly impacted by the storm.

“Multiple extreme events happening within a very short window of time can complicate disaster recovery,” said lead study author Zackry Guido, an assistant research professor in the university’s School of Natural Resources and Environment and the Arizona Institutes for Resilience: Solutions for Environment and Societies, or AIRES. “To medical providers, heat is a concern. Our results suggest that tropical cyclone preparedness should also include public information about heat risk.”

The research team analyzed 53 tropical cyclones in the eastern Caribbean between 1991 and 2020 and 205 interactions between the cyclones and 14 Caribbean cities. They found that the cities’ heat index values were always warmer than average after the storm.

“Everyone’s focus is on the destructive power of tropical storms and hurricanes – the storm surge, winds, flooding – and that’s obviously quite substantial, but our focus is on the combined hazard of storm and subsequent heat,” Guido said. “Hurricanes are massive heat pumps, redistributing heat for a large spatial distance around the center of the storm, and they leave massive destruction in their wake that can knock out the energy grid. That combination is often dangerous because it slows recovery and poses risks to human health.”

While the paper doesn’t explore how climate change may be impacting the phenomenon, the authors expect that high heat index values following tropical cyclones will increase in the future.

“It’s very easy to understand the climate change impacts of this,” Guido said. “Our future will likely have hurricanes dropping more intense rain and have more people in harm’s way. Then, if you drape on top of that a hotter environment, you will therefore expect a greater overall impact.”

That makes a lot of sense to me. The proportion of tropical cyclones that become hurricanes or typhoons is increasing in part because weaker ones are being cut off by increased wind shear, and in part because the oceans are warming so rapidly. The strength of the storm generally ties directly to sea surface temperatures, which means that the amount of heat that that storm pumps into an area is also going to go up.

In terms of impacts, a big storm like that means that in addition to the heat dumped, there’s also an increase in humidity (the other factor in the heat index). That means a higher chance of hitting “wet bulb” conditions, in which people can die fast without artificial cooling. Losing power – as so often happens – becomes that much more dangerous. At the same time, floods can contaminate the water supply, which could leave those trying to survive with a choice between lethal dehydration or drinking water that will probably make them sick.

I get why the water cycle wasn’t taught to me as a way that heat moves around in the atmosphere, but it seems that that’s a perspective we’ll need to keep in mind going forward.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Forget faith, it’s climate change that’s moving mountains.

Global warming means more extreme weather. By now this is pretty well-established, and we’ve had a look at the implications of that with the increase in droughts, fires, powerful hurricanes, floods, and so on. What does that mean for the landscape around us? Droughts tend to make a place more vulnerable to flooding and erosion, for example, because they kill off the plants that would otherwise stabilize the soil and absorb water during a storm. When it comes to mountains, the main prediction I’ve heard is that they’ll dry up, both from losing seasonal and multi-year snow and ice, and also from warming-fueled increases in both evaporation and transpiration. Beyond that, I hadn’t really thought about it a whole lot. Thankfully, a team of researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand have been thinking about it, and their research has some warnings that we’d do well to heed going forward:

Under the threat of climate change, mountain landscapes all over the world have the risk of becoming more hazardous to communities surrounding them, while their accelerated evolution may bring further environmental risks to surrounding areas.

This is according to a scientist from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, who, on the eve of the COP27 climate meeting, highlights the sensitivity of mountains to global climate change in a new study. Professor Jasper Knight, from the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at Wits University shows how complex mountain systems respond in very different and sometimes unexpected ways to climate change, and how these responses can affect mountain landscapes and communities.

“Worldwide, mountain glaciers are in retreat because of global warming and this is causing impacts on mountain landforms, ecosystems and people. However, these impacts are highly variable. The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) treats all mountains as equally sensitive and responding in the same way to climate change. However, this approach is not correct,” says Knight.

“Mountains with snow and ice work completely differently to low-latitude mountains where snow and ice are generally absent. This determines how they respond to climate and what future patterns of mountain landscape evolution we can expect.”

[…]

The research also shows how climate change will negatively impact on mountain landscapes and human activity. This includes an increasing risk of hazards such as avalanches, river floods, landslides, debris flows and lake outburst floods. These are made worse because of glacier retreat and permafrost warming. Alpine ecosystems and endemic species are already threatened with local extinction and mountain slopes are becoming greener as lowland forests spread to higher altitudes.

“As snow and ice shrink, mountain land surfaces are getting darker and this dramatically changes their heat balance, meaning they are warming up faster than the areas around them. Therefore, climate change impacts are bigger on mountains than they are anywhere else. This is a real problem, not just for mountains but also for the areas around them,” says Knight.

[…]

“Despite not having significant snow or ice, African mountains are also vulnerable. Our work on climate and landscape change and human adaptations in the Maloti–Drakensberg shows how mountains and people are connected together, and these are also threatened. Understanding these connections can help us better protect them against the worst impacts of climate change,” says Knight.

It seems that as the climate becomes less stable, so does the earth under our feet, which is less than comforting. I remember, a while back, when nobody I knew was particularly worried about global warming causing earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. I don’t know if my perception was accurate, or born of ignorance, but at this point I’m of the belief that global warming will cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, if it has not done so already. There’s simply too much mass moving around for it to not occasionally tip the balance. Maybe it will only changing the timing of an earthquake that would have happened anyway, but I honestly expect more than that. We’ve seen how things like fracking can cause earthquakes without the presence of a fault line, and when you consider the amount of weight that’s shifted during a mudslide, landslide. or avalanche, it seems reasonable to me that that could introduce new pressures to the landscape. If those events start happening regularly in a given area, either because of changes in precipitation, or because of melting ice, it seems like that would have to cause something eventually, similar to how glacial retreat has been linked to earthquakes.

Of course, I’m not breaking any new ground here, as this Guardian article from 2016 demonstrates:

In a similar vein, it seems that the huge volume of rain dumped by tropical cyclones, leading to severe flooding, may also be linked to earthquakes. The University of Miami’s Shimon Wdowinski has noticed that in some parts of the tropics – Taiwan included – large earthquakes have a tendency to follow exceptionally wet hurricanes or typhoons, most notably the devastating quake that took up to 220,000 lives in Haiti in 2010. It is possible that floodwaters are lubricating fault planes, but Wdowinski has another explanation. He thinks that the erosion of landslides caused by the torrential rains acts to reduce the weight on any fault below, allowing it to move more easily.

It has been known for some time that rainfall also influences the pattern of earthquake activity in the Himalayas, where the 2015 Nepal earthquake took close to 9,000 lives, and where the threat of future devastating quakes is very high. During the summer monsoon season, prodigious quantities of rain soak into the lowlands of the Indo-Gangetic plain, immediately to the south of the mountain range, which then slowly drains away over the next few months. This annual rainwater loading and unloading of the crust is mirrored by the level of earthquake activity, which is significantly lower during the summer months than during the winter.

And it isn’t only earthquake faults that today’s storms and torrential rains are capable of shaking up. Volcanoes seem to be susceptible too. On the Caribbean island of Montserrat, heavy rains have been implicated in triggering eruptions of the active lava dome that dominates the Soufrière Hills volcano. Stranger still, Alaska’s Pavlof volcano appears to respond not to wind or rain, but to tiny seasonal changes in sea level. The volcano seems to prefer to erupt in the late autumn and winter, when weather patterns are such that water levels adjacent to this coastal volcano climb by a few tens of centimetres. This is enough to bend the crust beneath the volcano, allowing magma to be squeezed out, according to geophysicist Steve McNutt of the University of South Florida, “like toothpaste out of a tube”.

As I like to say, we should be viewing this as though we’re trying to survive on a partially terraformed alien planet. We need to avoid danger zones, relocate when an area becomes hostile, and build with the expectation that the planet is going to to make things harder. I don’t think this means that everywhere is now in danger of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that activity will change where it currently exists, and not out of the question that we might get some new activity. The frightening truth is that the world isn’t as stable as we once thought.

“The land is all too shallow
It is painted on the sky
And trembles like the wind-shook rain
When the Raven King passed by”
-Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

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!

Video: The Insect Tier List

After yesterday’s post, I figured we could use something about insects that’s not all doom and gloom. These tier lists are very much made from a gamer’s perspective (in case that wasn’t obvious), so assignments of value tend to be based on things that translate well to games, so I wouldn’t call this “education”, precisely, but it’s a fun look at an assortment of insect “play styles”.

Scientists give a grim warning on climate change and insect populations

I talk a lot about the need for a climate response that’s centered around ecosystem resilience. Our best defense against the existential crises that face us is to not only stop the destruction of ecosystems, but also to actively work to build them up. The problem is, the longer we take to accomplish the first half of that plan, the harder it will be to carry out the second half. We have a much, much better chance of success if we’re helping struggling, but extant ecosystems survive, than if we’re trying to build up new ones from what’s left after total collapse.

The problem is, we seem to be getting pretty close to the “total collapse” stage. Even without climate change, ecosystems around the world are suffering from chemical pollution, and for a while now pesticides have been the prime suspect in the ongoing decline in insects (PZ did a good post on that recently). We’ve always known that climate change would be rough for many insect species, but it now we’ve got a pretty stark warning. 70 entimologists have cosigned a letter warning that climate change threatens to push us into the “total collapse” scenario, through its effects on insects alone:

In a new scientific review, a team of 70 scientists from 19 countries warned that if no steps are taken to shield insects from the consequences of climate change, it will “drastically reduce our ability to build a sustainable future based on healthy, functional ecosystems.”

Citing research from around the world, the team painted a bleak picture of the short- and long-term effects of climate change on insects, many of which have been in a state of decline for decades. Global warming and extreme weather events are already threatening some insects with extinction—and it will only get worse if current trends continue, scientists say. Some insects will be forced to move to cooler climes to survive, while others will face impacts to their fertility, life cycle and interactions with other species.

Such drastic disruptions to ecosystems could ultimately come back to bite people, explained Anahí Espíndola, an assistant professor of entomology at the University of Maryland and one of the paper’s co-authors.

“We need to realize, as humans, that we are one species out of millions of species, and there’s no reason for us to assume that we’re never going to go extinct,” Espíndola said. “These changes to insects can affect our species in pretty drastic ways.”

Bees are probably the most well-known example of this right now, as they’re famous as pollinators, but there are many other insects that not only pollinate plants, but do a variety of things that, as part of a health ecosystem, make our own lives possible. As the paper explains, the process of responding to climate change as a population – range shifts, body changes, and behavior changes – is one that by necessity puts a strain on those populations, and makes them more vulnerable. Unfortunately, the other well-known problem with climate change and bugs is that some species seem to be fine with the change, and because we cannot catch a break, those seem to be the ones that cause us problems:

On the other hand, climate change may make some insects more pervasive—to the detriment of human health and agriculture. Global warming is expected to expand the geographical range of some disease vectors (such as mosquitoes) and crop-eating pests.

“Many pests are actually pretty generalist, so that means they are able to feed on many different types of plants,” Espíndola said. “And those are the insects that—based on the data—seem to be the least negatively affected by climate change.”

The concern about crop-eating pests is a small part of why I lean so hard on the idea of moving food production indoors. We’ll have enough trouble dealing with war, drought, heat, floods, and so on, without adding in more locust swarms. An added benefit of that would be less exposure to mosquitoes, ticks and the like for farm workers, and less exposure to, and use of pesticides.

When I have bad news to share – which seems like most days – I try to redirect focus to ways people can do something about the systemic problems dragging us towards extinction, and thankfully the authors of this warning do have a pretty clear action plan:

Though these effects are already being felt by insects, it is not too late to take action. The paper outlined steps that policymakers and the public can take to protect insects and their habitats. Scientists recommended “transformative action” in six areas: phasing out fossil fuels, curbing air pollutants, restoring and permanently protecting ecosystems, promoting mostly plant-based diets, moving towards a circular economy and stabilizing the global human population.

The paper’s lead author, Jeffrey Harvey of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said in a statement that urgent action is needed to protect insects and the ecosystems they support.

“Insects are tough little critters, and we should be relieved that there is still room to correct our mistakes,” Harvey said. “We really need to enact policies to stabilize the global climate. In the meantime, at both government and individual levels, we can all pitch in and make urban and rural landscapes more insect-friendly.”

The paper suggested ways that individuals can help, including managing public, private or urban gardens and other green spaces in a more ecologically-friendly way—for instance, incorporating native plants into the mix and avoiding pesticides and significant changes in land usage when possible.

Espíndola also stressed the value of encouraging neighbors, friends and family to take similar steps, explaining that it’s an easy yet effective way to amplify one’s impact.

“It is true that these small actions are very powerful,” Espíndola said. “They are even more powerful when they are not isolated.”

As with the rest of our environmental problems, while it’s good to know how we can work to fix them, that knowledge will not help us without building the power for political change. Do what you can – I’m actually going to set up that pollinator garden this spring – but part of helping save the insects (and ourselves) is building collective power, so that we can create revolutionary systemic change.

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!

Tegan Tuesday: When online mobs turn wholesome

There’s a lot going on this week in personal life, in the wider world, and in the internet world. So I thought I’d share a heartwarming story from tumblr. I’ve been a tumblr user since 2012 or so, as has probably been obvious by the amount of tumblr threads that I’ve shared, and it is a very specific culture. A lot of it is silly, a lot of it is incredibly intelligent, and most of it is anonymous.

On October 27th, tumblr user Aquila Calvitium posted this:

https://aquilacalvitium.tumblr.com/post/699296989413785600/okay-fuck-it-if-this-post-reaches-666k-notes-by

This user had never had a text post of theirs get more than a dozen notes, so betting against almost 700,000 notes felt like a sure bet and a funny little joke amongst their friends. Unfortunately for Aquila Calvitium, tumblr loves a challenge. The first several thousand notes were simply people reblogging the post with the air of ‘haha sucker! We’ll fix you!’ Tumblr user LizLuvsCupcakes stated the general vibe:

Well, OP, I’m officially invested in this shit. Your whiny ass is doing self care if I have to drive to your goddamn house and do it for you.

By October 30th, Aquila Calvitium had moved the deadline to the end of 2022. This still seemed like an unachievable goal.

Then after a discussion about throwing an osage orange at OP between users Headspace-Hotel and TheLeakyPen, user LaineysBucketList offered a gamechanging idea:

We should just fill this post with other interesting things as reasons to reblog it.

Within the versions of this post I’ve seen discussions of hagfish slime used as an egg white substitute; infodumping about beryls; the axial tilt of Venus; and many other interesting random facts from the interesting and random users of tumblr. This collection of smart people with wildly different interests posting informally and anonymously is one of the reasons why I still love tumblr. It’s where academics (formal and informal) go to infodump.

Another update from OP happened on November 4th.

I was going to wait until y’all hit the mark, But I feel like I should say this now
When I made this post, it was supposed to be a joke
I mean, none of my posts ever get more than 20 notes if I’m lucky, so what are the odds of one reaching 666k? Impossible, haha
But then, something happened, something I didn’t expect
People actually began to… like it? And… reblog? And comment?
Before I knew it, my notifications were swarmed with comments after comments after reblogs after comments all on this one post
Then, still in the mindset of this being a joke, I realised I’d made the goal too easy, so I upped the stakes
But… the notes just got more frequent from there
And it started to hit me just what was happening

[Editor’s note: there are inserted screenshots of comments like “i Will reblog this every time i see this. you WILL do self care op,” “how does nihilism still exist. when tens of thousand of people can band together to make a stranger take care of themself,” and “get self care’d idiot <3.”]

For a while, I was overwhelmed with a feeling
A feeling I wasn’t used to
It was like… all of a sudden… I mattered…
My existance was actually noteworthy
People actually… cared?
It wasn’t a game anymore, it was a race to assure a stranger on the Internet that they were actually worth something
Hundreds of people all gathering in one online place to help out
Leaving messages and well wishes
Making me smile
Making me laugh
Funny comments
Jokes
Fun facts
Even simple comments
It all suddenly felt so real
This was never a joke to you
This was important
And I won’t let any of that go in vain
So… stay tuned I suppose
I’ll look after myself, and I’ll post proof of it too
I’ll catalogue every time I put my health first
Physical and mental
I’ll acknowledge my bad days and celebrate my good days
But most of all
I won’t forget this
Any of this
Ever

I am happy to report that today, November 8th, 2022, was the first day of self-care for the original poster. Yesterday, a mere eleven days after the first post, we went over 666,000 notes. As of writing, there are over 697k. Here is OP’s first post about self care.

https://aquilacalvitium.tumblr.com/post/700357376093667329/starting-today-on-the-8th-of-november-2022-the

Aquila Calvitium, who normally has problems eating properly, made themselves a sandwich and hung out with their family. Three cheers to OP! I hope their sandwich was tasty and that their beginning steps for self care and self maintenance take off. And if the news you see in the world is cold and unfeeling, remember how thousands of anonymous people pulled together to convince a stranger that their life matters. The world can be a wonderful place, if we let ourselves see it.