Let’s check in with the forest trees, it’s almost like (narrator: it’s exactly like) nature knows what to do with forests. Next up is a report of the first documented non-penetration mating in mammals, which scientists reportedly learned about from unsolicited dick pics videos.
Other news tonight includes
- weather worries for most of the non-Pacific U.S. states this week,
- another assault on voting rights,
- more free covid at-home tests,
- African and Caribbean nations to seek formal apologies (for slavery) from European nations,
- new news about OpenAI’s deposed leader Sam Altman,
- yet another bird species determined to be much smarter than humans expected,
- two climate change stories that put responsibility for carbon emissions in perspective, and
- as usual, the last few stories bring good news
Another nail in the coffin of even-aged single-species tree planting schemes.
Implications for forest management under a changing climate
Climate change is raising the frequency and intensity of chronic stresses and disturbances, not only causing widespread tree mortality in western USA, but also influencing forest health globally44. Forest restoration strategies primarily focusing on protecting big trees45 may not increase the overall sustainability of forest ecosystems. The heterogeneity and diversity of tree sizes and age groups at the forest-stand level are vital for the sustainability of forest ecosystems, particularly in areas with frequent disturbance and drought stress. Tree species diversity often shows a positive relationship with canopy structural complexity26,34, and the higher hydraulic diversity brought by high tree species diversity improves forest resilience to drought46. Our findings suggest that adopting a forest restoration strategy reestablishing heterogeneity in tree species diversity and canopy structural complexity can enhance forest resilience to extreme droughts47.
More than three years after a wildfire devastated Big Basin Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the massive redwood trees in California’s oldest state park continue to recover with surprising speed.
But some wildlife species, particularly salmon and steelhead trout in the park’s streams, and some types of birds, are still struggling and could take many years to bounce back.[...]
The best news: The park’s famed old-growth redwoods, some of which tower more than 250 feet and date back more than 1,500 years, are nearly all green again, showing significant amounts of new growth after the wildfire’s flames charred their bark black and for a while gave them a doomed appearance.[...]
“Ecologically the park is doing just fine,” said Jon Keeley, a senior scientist at the US Geological Survey and biology professor at UCLA who participated in the symposium, in an interview afterward. “The forest is coming back the way it is adapted to. About 90% of the redwood trees are resprouting.”
The NTY story has a video embedded and I removed the paywall so you can check it out. Rumor on BioTwitter is that the researchers were clued in to this novel behavior by “a citizen scientist filming bats in the attic of a church in the Netherlands” who emailed them the videos.
Serotine bats sport abnormally long penises with wide, heart-shaped heads. When erect, the members are around seven times longer than the female’s vagina, and their bulbous heads are seven times wider than the female’s vaginal opening.
“We wondered: How does that work? How can they use that for copulation?” Dr. Fasel recalled.
What they discovered has overturned an assumption about mammalian reproduction, namely that procreation must always involve penetration.
In a study, published Monday in the journal Current Biology, Dr. Fassel and his colleagues presented evidence that serotine bats mate without penetration, making them the first mammals known to do so. Instead of using their penises to penetrate their partners, the scientists found, the male bats use them to push their partner’s tail membrane out of the way so they can align their openings and engage in contact mating, a behavior similar to one found in birds and known as “cloacal kissing.” [...]
While this process took less than an hour for most of the couples the researchers observed, one pair went at it for nearly 13 hours.
Another round of 4 free covid tests available from NIH and USPS
It’s going to be an unsettled lead-up to Thanksgiving in much of the eastern United States, as a large, moisture-loaded storm system sweeps across the region. The storm could slow air and ground transportation on Tuesday and Wednesday, two of the busiest travel days of the year.
The storm could also produce some wintry precipitation over parts of the Great Lakes Tuesday and interior portions of the Northeast Tuesday into Wednesday. Vermont, New Hampshire and interior Maine will see the greatest chances for accumulating snowfall.
By Thanksgiving Day and into Friday, a new storm system will begin to develop over the northern Rockies, which could bring light amounts of snow from western Montana into Colorado.
...AccuWeather meteorologists believe there is a high risk of violent thunderstorms with mulitple tornadoes over the lower part of the Mississippi Valley into Monday evening. Some of the severe weather and tornado-producing storms will linger well after dark, which will add to the danger.
A strengthening storm will tap Gulf of Mexico moisture and jet stream energy as it travels northeastward over the central and eastern U.S. through Tuesday. [...]
Thunderstorms began to erupt during the midday hours on Monday and a number already had already become severe in the afternoon, spawning high winds, hail and torrential downpours in the zone from northeastern Texas to western and central Mississippi to southern Arkansas … "There are likely to be multiple tornadoes on the ground into Monday night from northeastern Texas to the lower part of the Mississippi Valley," AccuWeather Chief On-Air Meteorologist Bernie Rayno said.
AccuWeather has outlined a high-risk area from the northeastern corner of Texas through much of northern Louisiana and into central Mississippi. The most significant risk of tornadoes will occur within that corridor.
A global movement to seek reparations for slavery has been forged during a summit in Ghana this week, with the African Union partnering with Caribbean countries to form a “united front” to persuade European nations to pay for “historical mass crimes”.
The partnership between the 55-member African Union and the Caribbean Community (Caricom) of 20 countries will aim to intensify pressure on former slave-owning nations to engage with the reparations movement. [...]
The “entire continent of Africa deserves a formal apology from the European nations involved in the slave trade”, he said, adding: “No amount of money can restore the damage caused by the transatlantic slave trade and its consequences. But surely, this is a matter that the world must confront and can no longer ignore.”
The future of OpenAI is in jeopardy after more than 700 of its 770 employees signed a letter on Monday saying they may leave the company for Microsoft if the ousted chief executive, Sam Altman, is not reinstalled at the high-profile artificial intelligence start-up. [...]
The ouster of Mr. Altman by the four-member board — which said he had not been candid with it, but did not say how — set off a frantic weekend of corporate jockeying in which Mr. Altman wound up joining Microsoft to start a new A.I. project. Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, essentially has a 49 percent stake in the company. [...]
The upheaval leaves the future of one of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley history in doubt. At a time when the industry was reeling in the wake of mass layoffs, OpenAI’s technology fueled the creation of hundreds of start-ups. Now many of those businesses are concerned about their prospects.
“This is the debacle of the decade,” said Gaurav Oberoi, the founder of Lexion, a start-up that relies on OpenAI to help companies streamline legal, sales and vendor contracts. “It’s a lesson in how to destroy a huge amount of value overnight and their own reputation.”
By adapting a series of tests originally designed to assess cockatoo cognition, Ms. Harrington found that the caracaras can problem-solve as well as parrots. The results were published Monday in the journal Current Biology … Of the 15 Johnny rooks that Ms. Harrington tested, all solved at least one puzzle, and 10 of them figured out all eight — without any prior training. [...]
Some animals are understandably skittish around scientists and their strange equipment, which can make testing their intelligence difficult. With the caracaras, Ms. Harrington had the opposite problem. “I had to literally run defense,” she said, keeping curious birds away while another was being tested with a plexiglass puzzle box that challenged the caracaras to pull, push, swipe, poke or do whatever else they needed to do to access tasty bits of meat … Given how well they performed in this experiment, and their general boldness, striated caracaras represent a promising new model species for studying bird cognition. [...]
Dr. Miller agrees that the bird world overemphasizes certain species — she found that recent studies of avian behavior and cognition have focused on just about 1 percent of 10,000 known bird species. “I’m completely behind research that’s expanding, going to other bird groups beyond the corvids and the parrots,” Dr. Miller said.
I’ve seen this story reported widely today with headlines claiming the world’s wealthiest 10% cause 40 times more carbon emissions than the world’s poorest 10% and accepted this framing thinking Bezos, Swift, Gates, Zuckerberg, etc. The Guardian’s headline seemed like a different story at first, but Bezos et al. are the 1% not the 10%, check out the income level required to be included in the upper 10%.
The richest 10% of people in many countries cause up to 40 times more climate-heating carbon emissions than the poorest 10% of their fellow citizens, according to data obtained by the Guardian.
Failing to account for this huge divide when making policies to cut emissions can cause a backlash over the affordability of climate action, experts say.
The world’s richest 10% encompasses most of the middle classes in developed countries – anyone paid more than about $40,000 (£32,000) a year. The lavish lifestyles of the very rich – the 1% – attract attention. But the 10% are responsible for half of all global emissions, making them key to ending the climate crisis.
Solnit puts the same data in perspective as the richest 1% compared to the poorest 66%.
When you talk about the climate crisis, sooner or later someone is going to say that population is the issue and fret about the sheer number of humans now living on Earth. But population per se is not the problem, because the farmer in Bangladesh or the street vendor in Brazil doesn’t have nearly the impact of the venture capitalist in California or the petroleum oligarchs of Russia and the Middle East. The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%. The rich are bad for the Earth, and the richer they are the bigger their adverse impact (including the impact of money invested in banks, and stocks financing fossil fuels and other forms of climate destruction).
In other words, we are not all the same size. Billionaires loom large over our politics and environment in ways that are hard to understand without taking on the shocking scale of their wealth. That impact, both through their climate emissions and their manipulations of politics and public life means they are not at all like the rest of humanity. They are behemoths, and they mostly use their outsize power in ugly ways – both in how much they consume and how much they influence the world’s climate response.
Green Mountain Power’s former C.E.O., Mary Powell, left three years ago and soon took over Sunrun, which supplies rooftop solar panels and storage batteries for hundreds of thousands of homes nationwide, and serves as a third-party power aggregator for several utilities. “We’re sitting on more than 1.1 gigawatt-hours of installed storage capacities just with our customers now,” she told me recently, much of it in California, where the company is based.
From August through October, as a series of heat waves pushed consumption up in that state, Pacific Gas and Electric was buying up to thirty megawatts of power through Sunrun every evening to keep peak demand down in its grid system. Sunrun’s customers who provided the energy got a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars. “We went from contract to operation in six months,” Powell said. “You simply could not get a resource of that size built and operationalized any other way in that time frame.” And, she added, “it’s not just that we can make a more reliable, resilient grid” by drawing on the scattered resources; “We can also make a much more affordable grid,” because being able to use residential power means not having to build big, new power plants to meet peak demand. Taking in that money saved, she added, “We can shave ten billion dollars a year off the price of the country’s power system.”