tingilinde

plants and changing climates

Plants require some mechanism if they're to migrate. That's a problem with deforestation and population declines in some mammals and birds,

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For decades scientists have been tracking which birds and other animals eat fruits and the seeds they contain, how far those seeds are transported and whether they germinate wherever they are deposited. These are what ecologists call mutualistic interactions. “The animal gets some fruit, and the plant gets to move,” Fricke explains. He says he has spent hours sitting in a hammock, eyes trained on a piece of fruit, to see which local birds stop by for a snack.

From examining specific ecosystems, such as the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, ecologists have concluded that the loss of birds and other animals from deforestation and other pressures has been curtailing trees’ ability to disperse their seeds. “But zooming out to the global scale, there hadn’t been an analysis,” Fricke says. So he and his colleagues “were going in trying to understand how big this problem is.”

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the great thaw

Siberia melts.

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When I was in Chersky, Zimov took me out to the lake. We walked through shrubs and felt the crunch of bright-red cloudberries under our feet. At the water’s edge, Zimov asked, “You see the bubbles?” Once I knew to look for them, they were impossible to miss. It was as if the lake were a giant cauldron on the brink of a very slow, barely perceptible boil, with a pop of air here and there. Methane.

Zimov explained that, even during Chersky’s frigid winters, temperatures under the lake’s surface remain above freezing. Unfrozen water allows microbes to keep digesting organic matter long after the surrounding landscape is covered in snow. Water also has a powerful erosion effect. “The bank is slowly thawing and collapsing, taking with it fresh pieces of permafrost into the lake,” Zimov said—more fuel for the release of methane. As Walter Anthony, who is now a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, put it to me, “Once permafrost thaws to the point where it creates depressions filled with water, the thaw starts to go deep and fast and expands laterally—you can’t really stop it.”

The mean annual temperature in Chersky has risen by three degrees Celsius in the past fifty years. An equally pressing problem is snow cover. “Snow is like a warm blanket—it doesn’t allow the wintertime cold to penetrate all the way into soil,” Zimov said. One of the effects of climate change is more precipitation in the Arctic ecosystem around Chersky. Yearly snowfall has increased by as much as twenty centimetres since the early eighties, adding two more degrees of warming effect. As a result, Zimov explained, permafrost that used to be minus seven degrees Celsius is now on the verge of thawing, if it hasn’t already.

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changing times in france

French car ads must promote alternative forms of transportation.  

 

bbb and the energy landscape

How might the energy landscape change if Build Back Better passed

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

watching the snow

A snow lab on Donner Summit.

 

the (huge) finger on the scale

Fossil fuel subsidies are enormous.

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The IMF found the production and burning of coal, oil and gas was subsidised by $5.9tn in 2020, with not a single country pricing all its fuels sufficiently to reflect their full supply and environmental costs. Experts said the subsidies were “adding fuel to the fire” of the climate crisis, at a time when rapid reductions in carbon emissions were urgently needed.

Explicit subsidies that cut fuel prices accounted for 8% of the total and tax breaks another 6%. The biggest factors were failing to make polluters pay for the deaths and poor health caused by air pollution (42%) and for the heatwaves and other impacts of global heating (29%).

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the snow monsters of mt zoo

An impressive natural phenomenon. 

 

on e.o. wilson

An interview from a few years ago

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Contentious or not, Wilson’s books have mostly addressed one theme: that we must know natural history and evolutionary theory to fully understand humanity’s future on the planet. In his 1986 manifesto Biophilia, for example, he suggested that humans have an innate biological need to be in nature and to “affiliate with other forms of life.” In Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (2016), he offered his personal prescription to end the destruction of the world’s biodiversity: Governments should set aside half the planet as a nature reserve.

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And an unpublished video interview in the NY Times

 

the snowiest cities

Three are in Japan and one has a population of two million.

 

coal use goes up

Coal burning just keeps increasing.