It’s only an El Niño

This is the time of year when we start prepping for winter — we put away the window air conditioner, I’ve got to go drain all the garden hoses, we’re just waiting for all the leaves to drop off the trees. Looking ahead to the winter predictions, I see that we’re expecting a mild winter, because it’s an El Niño year. Just an El Niño! Maybe we’ll be a little wetter, a little less frigid, it could be an easy winter, we hope.

Just this little El Niño, in an unexceptional year:

So far, that doesn’t look so unexceptional. That looks dangerous in unexpected ways.

The peak is widely expected to be about 4° C anywhere from November to February, the most powerful El Niño in at least a thousand years. It is so far beyond Super size that scientists are using highly unscientific terms for it: jaw dropping, mind blowing, Godzilla-like.

The boy child? No, this is El Niño Diablo, the devil boy.

Uh-oh. So what do I do now? I’m going to drain the garden hoses, is that not enough?

Plenty of articles offer estimates of how many people will die because of this due to heat, hunger or extreme weather events.

But the truth is that nobody really knows what El Niño Diablo will do.

We know what climatologists’ computer models predict, but it is going beyond what the models are designed to handle. If the models are missing some interactions anywhere—ocean currents, glacial melt rates, atmospheric water vapor load, cloud cover, anything—that leaves us more blind than we are accustomed to being with climate forecasting… and therefore less able to prepare for specific impact on us.

“What do you think of this El Niño?”

El Niño Diablo is a major turning point. I think we will regret it.

BUT WHAT DO I DO?

Life in the duck factory

I live in Morris, Minnesota, which is on the western edge of the state. This part of the state is called the Prairie Pothole region, which isn’t particularly glamorous — “potholes” are not generally regarded as a positive feature — but it’s nicer than it sounds. We’re part of a larger geological feature.

This is a part of the world that was scoured by glaciers, but not deeply. The countryside is full of these shallow dimples that still fit the description of a lake, but they are kind of crappy lakes. Not deep, more marsh than clear open water, not the kind of lake that you imagine building a cabin next to and putting in a dock and cruising around in your bass boat. Don’t get me wrong, tourists, there are also plenty of deep fishing lakes around here, but we also have this thick scattering of dimples. And these dimples are important!

Today, more than 300 bird species depend on the Prairie Potholes, including the endangered Piping Plover, iconic White Pelican, and elegant Marbled Godwit. But the region is best known for sustaining waterfowl: half of North America’s breeding migratory waterfowl are hatched and reared in this region, earning it the nickname “America’s Duck Factory.”

So yeah, I live in a duck factory. Big chunks of the land around us are set aside as “waterfowl production areas” and “wildlife management areas,” which has the advantage that they are left undisturbed and unplowed and are also great “spider production areas” although they are never displayed as such.

But the potholes are under threat. We have regulations to prevent local farms from building what are called “drain tiles” too close to the potholes — these are perforated pipes that facilitate drainage of the land, and which have the potential to suck a shallow lake dry.

One of the biggest threats to these wetlands comes from drain tiles — perforated pipes buried underground to move water within agricultural soils. These systems help farmers manage moisture levels, but when placed too close to Prairie Potholes, they can siphon water away and shorten or eliminate the annual life of these vitally important wetlands.

Existing rules establish minimum safe distances between wetlands and drain tiles to prevent farmland drainage from harming these fragile habitats. This combination of science, site-specific considerations, and good-faith agreements has successfully kept the wetlands wet while allowing landowners to use the rest of their properties as they see fit.

Unfortunately, some people would prefer to have more land for growing corn than “wasting” that acreage on migratory birds and want to squeeze out the potholes by placing more drain tiles next to them.

Now, a new request for information from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signals a departure from 60 years of successful, bipartisan policy by reducing the allowable distance between drain tiles and Prairie Potholes. This proposed change could dry up vitally important wetlands, threatening one of North America’s most important breeding grounds for ducks and other bird species.

You probably don’t live in our duck factory, but if you like ducks and geese and other native birds, you can sign a petition to protect our environment. It’s a good thing to do.

Environmental inanity — it’s a good reason to throw this guy out of office NOW

We’ve had a couple of bad days here in Minnesota — the smoke from the wildfires up north has made breathing uncomfortable, and for a while Minneapolis was ranked somthing like the third most smoggy city in the world. It’s not too bad today, although more smoke is expected, but fortunately, Donald Trump is lurching into action with a solution. Blame Canada!

President Donald Trump on Friday blasted Canada for wildfires enveloping swaths of the United States in a smoky haze and said he would add the costs of that pollution to existing tariffs.

Calling the situation “totally unacceptable,” Trump accused Ottawa of failing to address what he said were the causes of the fires in Canada, whose smoke has sent air quality to dangerous levels in major U.S. cities in recent days.

The billions of dollars in costs inflicted on the U.S. as a result of the air pollution “must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

I am confident that Canada does not like to see their forests on fire, and that Canadians are as incapable of breathing smoke as Americans are. I don’t see the point in punishing Canada further, but all an authoritarian can see is an excuse to punish. This isn’t going to help at all. What does he think Canada needs a punitive incentive for?

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air,” Trump wrote.

Oh, right. This is his weird idea that the proper way to maintain a forest is by raking up all the needles and brush.

“You’ve got to take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forests, it’s very important,” Trump said amid the charred ruins of Paradise — his first stop on the tour.

Trump went on to explain that the president of Finland, whom he met on an overseas trip a week earlier, told him about raking the forest floors. “He called it a forest nation,” Trump said, “and they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem.”

The president of Finland never said any such thing.

But all you Canadians need to get out in 270 million hectares of wilderness and start raking.

(No, not really. I’m sorry, but our president is a goddamn motherfucking freaking MORON.)

Oceanoxia has a much more thorough post on this idiocy.

Kill your lawn

Mary and I were fussing over our “lawn” yesterday. We are required by the city to mow our yard and keep it presentable, as defined by bourgeois expectations, but we’re subverting that. We don’t use any chemicals on it, and we’ve been sowing clover to replace the turf grass. Mary has been most dedicated to replacing the boring stuff with more interesting stuff: she’s got pots of milkweed and other native flora, and yesterday she put me to work tearing up the ‘bad’ grass so she could spend the day transplanting. She’s at work today, and left me with orders to water the new plants.

We have a fenced backyard that would probably be judged criminal, because it’s covered with ‘weeds’ that are a foot or two tall. It’s also full of berry plants. We’re all about feeding the pollinators and birds. This past fall we managed to avoid raking up most of the leaves — leaf litter is an important habitat for overwintering invertebrates.

This video expresses sentiments I share.

You do realize that a thriving population of invertebrates is a necessary prerequisite for vigorous and diverse population of spiders, right? Spiders don’t flourish on endless beds of turf grass.

The nefarious prickly pear

I’ve always taken cactuses for granted — I’ve lived in deserts before, and they’re just there, growing all over the place, and familiar part of the landscape. I didn’t think about the fact that they’re an entirely American clade, or that they could be a destructive invasive species elsewhere. I didn’t know that they were a major pest in Australia, along with rabbits and cane toads (Australians keep bringing in alien species that devastate their ecologies, in desperate attempts to counter the previous wave of invaders). So this was an informative video for me.

It’s also an example of where bringing in yet-another-foreign species, in this case moths and scale insects, defeated the problematic invasive species. For now.

Are insect populations declining or not?

I am so confused…but then science is often confusing. I was reading this article in Science magazine that went against my impressions and biases.

For years, scientists have been warning of a precipitous drop in insect numbers worldwide, driven largely by deforestation, pesticide use, and other human activities. But the first study to survey insect populations on a continental scale—based on radar data typically used to study weather patterns—finds no evidence of widespread decline, at least over a recent 10-year period. Instead, the research—published this week in Global Change Biology—suggests bug numbers tend to be sensitive to the severity of winter weather, with warmer winters posing a problem.

What, no decline? But I’ve seen a dramatic decline here in western Minnesota! Could I be wrong? Maybe. My perspective is narrow and local, and I’ve been looking at a small number of species, just spiders, that I’ve assumed would be a good proxy for overall insect number. I could be totally off, misled by a local variation that fit what I expected to see.

So I read the source paper. First surprise: the title doesn’t say there is no evidence of decline, but rather “Systematic Continental Scale Monitoring by Weather Surveillance Radar Shows Fewer Insects Above Warming Landscapes in the United States“. So there is evidence of decline in areas that show signs of warming. The abstract complicates matters further.

Anthropogenic change is predicted to result in widespread declines in insect abundance, but assessing long-term trends is challenging due to the scarcity of systematically collected time series measurements across large spatial scales. We develop a novel continental-scale dataset using a nationwide network of radars in the United States to generate a 10-year time series of daily aerial insect density and assess temporal trends. We do not find evidence of a continental-scale net decline in insect density over the 10-year period included in this study; instead we find a mosaic of increasing and declining trends at the landscape scale. This spatial variation in density trends is associated with climatic drivers, where areas with warmer winters experience greater declines in insect density and areas with cooling winter trends see increases in density. Winter warming has a stronger negative effect on density at higher latitudes. After assessing temporal trends, we also use the 10-year dataset and atmospheric variables to model insect aerial abundance, finding that on a typical summer day approximately a hundred trillion (1014) flying insects are present in the airspace, representing millions of tons of aerial biomass. Our results provide the first continental-scale quantification of insect density and its response to anthropogenic warming and demonstrate the utility of weather surveillance radar to provide large-scale monitoring of insect abundance.

Right away, I have reservations. If my observations are insufficient because I’m looking at too few species in one locale, this study is using one technique with low resolution on a continent wide scale and one could argue that it could be equally insufficient and misleading. It is data, though, and should be part of any analysis of the problem. Let’s not pretend that their sampling method doesn’t incorporate its own systematic biases. It’s only going to detect flying insects that exhibit swarming behavior, and they’re only looking at daytime numbers. It’s a correlational study that associates declines with only temperatures, but I’d suggest that those other factors (deforestation, pesticide use, and other human activities) are so ubiquitous and difficult to measure discretely that they’d disappear in the analysis.

Also, their own data does show evidence of a decline…in latitudes above 40°.

Temporal pattern of change in insect density as a function of change in winter temperature. (a) 10-year trend in day-flying insect density as a function of the change in local mean winter temperature, colored by site latitude. (b) Temporal trend as a function of winter temperature at latitudes ≤ 40°. (c) Temporal trend as a function of winter temperature at latitudes > 40°. Fitted lines are derived from a least-squares linear regression on percentage change in insect density. Linear model with change in mean winter temperature, interaction with latitude, and longitude explains 18% of variation in insect declines.

They also see some interesting variations, like the effect of land development on the sensitivity of populations to change.

Temporal pattern of change in insect density as a function of developed land cover. (a) 10-year trend in day-flying insect density as a function of the fraction developed land cover in the landscape, colored by the change in mean winter temperature. Line is given by LM. (b) Change in mean winter temperature as a function of the fraction developed land cover. Line is given by LM, correlation coefficient = 0.37 p <  0.0001. (c) Change in mean winter temperature as a function of the fraction grassland in the landscape. Line is given by LM, correlation coefficient = −0.54, p < 0.0001.

Insect populations are actually increasing over developed areas? I’d like to know the baselines on that — this is a study over a short timescale of ten years, and who knows, minor fluctuations over areas where the population has already been decimated by development might appear as a larger percentage change. I also wonder if we might be seeing the effect of adaptation or invasive species on those areas.

I’d also be concerned that native grasslands are hurting.

They do argue that anthropogenic stressors are having a serious effect.

Although we do not observe continental scale declines, the spatial patterns of abundance trends identified in this study can pinpoint potential stressors or drivers of insect declines. Declines in aerial insect density were stronger in regions that experienced increasing winter temperatures. During overwintering, warming can decrease fitness by releasing organisms from cold-induced dormancy, thereby increasing metabolic rates, and depleting energy reserves. Winter warming may also result in increased mortality due to phenological mismatches with resources, and may extend the activity period for natural enemies and reduce pathogen die-off during the winter season. Negative effects of winter warming on insect abundance in temperate regions have been shown in local surveys of beetles, butterflies, and arthropods generally, indicating that winter is a particularly sensitive season for temperate ectotherms.

Sensitivity to winter warming varies across populations and is likely more common in cooler climates where thermal seasonality is strong. Our results show a negative effect of winter warming at high latitudes, with no effect at latitudes below 40°. This latitudinal interaction between winter warming and aerial insect density aligns with theory suggesting that climate warming will have the strongest effect on cool-adapted arthropods. For example, metabolic costs are greater at high latitudes, affecting organisms’ cold tolerance and resulting in greater risks of energy depletion if winters become warmer under global change. Experimental warming has shown that high elevation gall wasp species experience greater decreases in survival and fecundity than those from lower latitudes. These stronger responses from high latitude insects to winter warming are particularly concerning because the magnitude of warming under climate change also increases with latitude.

I definitely live in an area with harsh winters, which would explain how I have a strong impression of declines on the basis of local observations. I don’t understand, though, how the work in this paper can be used to minimize the changes in insect populations. I’m also a little concerned that it’s being used to endorse a hands-off analysis of relatively coarse radar data over expecting entomologists to get their hands dirty and get up close with the organisms.

Spider apocalypse

Last year, I would go outside in the early morning, when the dew was on the grass, and see my yard dappled with grass spider webs. Dozens of them!

My yard was a village full of these little tent-like structures.They would appear in July through August, and I’d also see the grass spiders steadily taking over other micro-environments, creeping up the walls of my house and displacing the Parasteatoda who had been living there in early summer. I wasn’t thrilled about that — grass spiders were ubiquitous and so common that I would rather see more interesting spiders.

But this year…I went outside around 6:30am on a humid (but cool) summer day, and could see all the grass and clover dotted dew. What I didn’t see was grass spiders. Zero spiders. No webs. It’s August! This is prime spider population time, and my familiar little friends are gone. This is the first time in my 25 years here that they’ve been absent.

I missed an opportunity. If I’d been tracking these things all along, I’d have an easy metric to tally a sample of the spider numbers — if I’d counted last year, I’d guess the daily numbers in August would have been between 20 and 30 grass spider webs in my lawn, but I didn’t because I assumed they’d always be there. So I’ll have to start tracking now. The number is…ZERO.

On the bright side, the number can only go up from here. Or stay dead forever.

Maybe it’s just a weird seasonal fluctuation? Why would all the spiders disappear from a lawn with a diverse plant population, never in all these years years treated with pesticides of any kind? WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THIS PLANET?