Now that the effects of climate change are unmistakably present in our daily lives—myriad wildfires around the globe, 100-year floods occuring every few years, eerily warm winters, hurricane warnings in California, and much more—people have studied their thesauruses for increasingly dramatic alarming horrifying, terrifying, dire descriptions for these events. Even we who haven’t been gazing at our navels (investment portfolios) saying “la la la,” we who have seen climate change reality all along and work to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, we, too, are dragged into “it’s too late doomerism” by the media, corporations responsible for a large amount of carbon emissions, and our peers. While we’ve been acting with agency because we recognize the urgency of climate chaos, we, too, need the doomerism reality check that Michael Mann has been providing all along.
Check out this interview from 2021—“Urgency and Agency”: Michael Mann on Conquering Climate Despair—where Mann discusses how to sidestep the attempts to stall our actions.
One way to get past that feeling of being overwhelmed by the scale of the problem is the agency that we feel when we actually start acting. If you lead people down a path of engagement, there’s a snowball effect that can lead to greater and greater engagement … and we really do need systemic change.
I think there are a lot of really good, well-meaning, well-intentioned, good-hearted people who fall into doom and despair. And they are not the enemy! They are not our opponents. They are victims of this framing that has taken hold … The problem is that these false narratives, this idea that we’re already experiencing runaway warming and there’s nothing we can do and all life on earth will be extinguished within a decade … is premised on bad science.
The best available science tells us that we can avoid catastrophic warming. I’ve boiled it down to something even simpler in my messaging these days, which is the pairing of urgency and agency.
Covering science news requires that dire information be reported, but as you read these stories, don’t forget that reporting might add “alarmism,” and that we have agency in this urgent climate change reality.
I try to clarify the difference between alarm and alarmism. There is reason for alarm. But alarmism carries other connotations. You know, if you look up the dictionary definition of it, it is an exaggerated level of concern. It carries this connotation of irrational overreaction. Don’t call yourself an alarmist, because the other side will use that to dismiss you—but own the fact that you’re alarmed, because you should be. We do face great risk, and there is great urgency.
Urgency
The rainforest is starting to release its carbon.
Is it heading towards a tipping point?
Gatti is part of a broad group of scientists attempting to forecast the future of the Amazon rainforest. The land ecosystems of the world together absorb about 30% of the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels; scientists think that most of this takes place in forests, and the Amazon is by far the world’s largest contiguous forest.
Since 2010, Gatti has collected air samples over the Amazon in planes such as this one, to monitor how much CO2 the forest absorbs. In 2021, she reported data from 590 flights that showed that the Amazon forest’s uptake — its carbon sink — is weak over most of its area1. In the southeastern Amazon, the forest has become a source of CO2.
Ice-age humans may have set megafires in what is now Southern California, making the region uninhabitable for a thousand years, new research suggests.
These massive wildfires may have been a major contributor to the extinction of megafauna in the area, fossils from the La Brea tar pits suggest. The findings were published Aug. 18 in the journal Science.
"When fires like this happen, it's almost like a bomb has gone off. It was like a wasteland for 1,000 years," study lead author F. Robin O'Keefe, a biologist at Marshall University in West Virginia, told Live Science.
O'Keefe and colleagues used a complex array of data to model the changing ecosystem in California following the retreat of glaciers in North America during the late Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), which included the last ice age. Key to their analysis was the carbon dating of fossils deposited in the La Brea tar pits, a paleontological research site in Los Angeles. The bones of numerous large mammals have been extracted from these asphalt seeps, providing an extensive record of the animals that once inhabited the region.
The author discusses risks of geoengineering (solar radiation management; removing carbon dioxide from the air), the legal void (“who gets to decide which projects can go ahead”), and striking the right balance.
Fossil-fuel vehicles and power plants, deforestation and unsustainable agricultural practices have been putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the Earth's systems can naturally remove, and that's heating up the planet.
Geoengineering, theoretically, aims to restore that balance, either by removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or reflecting solar energy away from Earth.
But changing Earth's complex and interconnected climate system may have unintended consequences. Changes that help one region could harm another, and the effects may not be clear until it's too late.
As a geologist and climate scientist, I believe these consequences are not yet sufficiently understood. Beyond the potential physical repercussions, countries don't have the legal or social structures in place to manage both its use and the fallout when things go wrong. Similar concerns have been highlighted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations Environment Program, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among others.
As Riley Duren, a systems engineer from NASA, said in an interview with the space agency: "Geoengineering is not a cure. At best, it's a Band-Aid or tourniquet; at worst, it could be a self-inflicted wound."
Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as scientific evidence shows many offsets they have bought have no environmental worth and have become stranded assets.
Amid growing evidence that huge numbers of carbon credits do nothing to mitigate global heating and can sometimes be linked to alleged human rights concerns, there is a growing pile of carbon credits equivalent to the annual emissions of Japan, the world’s fifth largest polluter, that are unused in the unregulated voluntary market, according to market analysis.
Agency
The migratory monarch butterfly might not be as endangered as previously thought, according to a new study published in Current Biology. Humans may have artificially inflated the monarch population by making changes to the habitat of Eastern and North America. The numbers we see now may reflect an expanded population from precolonial sizes.
In this new paper, researchers widened their focus to the past 25,000 years. Using five different data sets, as well as sequenced DNA from milkweeds and monarchs, they tested several hypotheses using Approximate Bayesian Computation via Random Forests, a machine learning method for reconstructing demographic histories.
What the study did not detect was an effective population decline in both monarchs and milkweeds over the past 75 years, a period that corresponds to an expanded use of chemicals in agriculture. This reduction may have been either too small or too recent to leave a signal in the researchers' data set, but the easiest explanation, as the study suggests, is that it simply did not happen.
The decline observed over the past 40 years may reflect a mismatch between the monarch population that overwinters in Mexico and the species' effective population size. However, the authors reiterate that their study should not directly impact current conservation efforts.
The tiny forest lives atop an old landfill in the city of Cambridge, Mass. Though it is still a baby, it’s already acting quite a bit older than its actual age, which is just shy of 2.
Its aspens are growing at twice the speed normally expected, with fragrant sumac and tulip trees racing to catch up. It has absorbed storm water without washing out, suppressed many weeds and stayed lush throughout last year’s drought. The little forest managed all this because of its enriched soil and density, and despite its diminutive size: 1,400 native shrubs and saplings, thriving in an area roughly the size of a basketball court.
Healthy woodlands absorb carbon dioxide, clean the air and provide for wildlife. But these tiny forests promise even more.
They can grow as quickly as ten times the speed of conventional tree plantations, enabling them to support more birds, animals and insects, and to sequester more carbon, while requiring no weeding or watering after the first three years, their creators said.
In Miami, extreme heat is a deadly concern. Rising temperatures now kill more people than hurricanes or floods, and do more harm to the region’s economy than rising sea levels. That’s why, in 2021, Florida’s Miami-Dade County hired a chief heat officer, Jane Gilbert—the first position of its kind in the world.
Heat has been a silent killer in Miami, says Gilbert: “The number-one cause of weather-related death is from excess heat. It’s been this underrecognized issue that needs to be elevated.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are an average of 67,512 emergency department visits in the US due to heat each year, and 702 heat-related deaths. [...]
Inform, prepare, protect: Gilbert’s focus is on those least able to protect themselves and their families against high heat—poorer communities and Black and Hispanic people tend to bear the brunt. Her collaborative efforts to keep homes, facilities, and neighborhoods affordably cool include everything from creating programs that protect outdoor workers to planting trees that help mitigate heat-island effects.
The relationship between fish, water, and fire hasn’t always been so fraught. As core components of landscape and culture, these things are inextricably and beautifully connected. Some might see fire in opposition to water—competing elements that cancel each other out—but in reality, they’re two sides of the same coin. For example, check out the research that UCLA’s Park Williams published last year, which looked at patterns of streamflow in burned versus unburned watersheds in the West. They showed that streamflow in burned watersheds increased by an average of 30%, and that effect lasted an average of six years post-fire. Thirty percent, for six years! There are plenty of localized examples of this pattern, too (ask Toz, who monitors stream flow in Karuk country, or Josh Smith, who has examples from nearby Trinity County, where I grew up). Fire begets water.
And this all makes complete sense: in the West, where forests are overly dense and the evaporative demand of vegetation is higher than ever, fire could be a key process for restoring flows. Maybe it’s not just that fire begets water—it may be that water (and fish) actually need fire.
There’s a similar connection between water and smoke. Even in the hottest inland parts of northern California, summer smoke can block the sun and have a significant cooling effect on streams … Of course, local tribes know these patterns best. I’ve heard stories from the Klamath River tribes about river villages using fire and smoke to bring the fish upstream in the fall. The smoke tells the fish that temperatures are cooling, flows are increasing, and it’s time to swim up—time to come home. Fire is calling.
A pair of ospreys has successfully bred in Ireland for the first time in 200 years, according to a statement from local conservation organization Ulster Wildlife. The birds produced at least two—possibly three—chicks at a confidential location in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. [...]
In Ireland, ospreys are thought to have been driven to local extinction around the late 18th century because of “systematic persecution,” per Ulster Wildlife. Across the U.K., hunters killed ospreys for taxidermy, collectors gathered their eggs and the birds’ nests were destroyed. The last recorded osprey nesting attempt in Ireland was in 1779 … In an attempt to build back the raptors’ breeding population, Ireland’s National Parks and Wildlife Service moved forward this summer with its osprey reintroduction program, which will relocate 50 to 70 chicks from Norway over a five-year period.
The new breeding pair of ospreys, however, is not the result of a reintroduction initiative. “The ospreys have returned by themselves and restored another lost icon of the Irish landscape,” writes the Golden Eagle Trust.
Australia’s colonial history is dotted with fires so enormous they have their own names: Black Sunday (1926), Black Friday (1939), Black Tuesday (1967), and Ash Wednesday (1983). The worst, Black Saturday, struck the state of Victoria on February 7, 2009. Fifteen separate fires scorched the state over just two days, fueled by a record-breaking heat wave, strong winds, and a desiccated landscape [...]
In fact, while Australia is notorious for spectacular blazes, it actually ranks below the United States, Indonesia, Canada, Portugal, and Spain when it comes to the economic damage caused by wildfires over the past century.
There is one significant difference, however. While other nations argue about the best way to tackle the issue, the horrors of Black Saturday led Australia to drastically change its response. [...]
Code Red is an admission that there are some blazes rescuers and firefighters simply cannot tackle, and that the vast majority of homes are not designed to withstand. It signals that leaving your property well before the fire front approaches is the best option for survival; two thirds of the victims of Black Saturday perished in or near a house. Code Red means Get out early.
COVID
A CDC advisory group met this week but did nothing to assuage concerns that it will further roll back protections for patients and healthcare workers in nursing homes and hospitals.
As noted in an earlier post, the Healthcare Infection Control Advisory Committee advises the CDC on guidelines for infection control in healthcare settings. HICPAC met in June and initially published slides outlining its draft guidelines, which include suggesting that N95 masks are no more protective than surgical masks (aka “baggy blues”). The guidelines caused an uproar within the medical community over concerns that the CDC would put workers and patients at increased risk by weakening infection control measures. [...]
In addition to raising concerns about the guidelines themselves, several speakers also criticized HICPAC’s seemingly secretive processes.
Citing a July letter by 900 public health experts to Mandy Cohen, M.D., CDC director, Deborah Gold, M.P.H., C.I.H. said they “are seriously concerned about the lack of transparency.” She added, “Despite repeated requests, we have not seen a draft of the proposed guidelines. We have not seen the minutes of working groups or even of the previous meeting.” Gold, retired Deputy Chief for Health, Cal/OSHA, also criticized the draft guidelines for not including early identification and isolation of infected people.
Everything Else
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) staff have documented cougars killing six collared wolves since 2013—almost 30 percent of the 21 documented natural wolf mortalities in the state. "That's huge if that trend holds and is representative of the entire population [in the state]," says Trent Roussin, a WDFW biologist. The kills involve multiple wolf packs in different areas of Washington.
Such kills are rare elsewhere in the U.S. West, where more wolves are on the landscape since their reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park, which is mostly in Wyoming, and central Idaho in 1995. Today Montana and Idaho have over five times more wolves than Washington. [...]
Without a large enough sample size to draw more definitive conclusions, Roussin suggests habitat differences could help explain Washington's higher wolf mortality from cougars. The state has steep mountains, tight ravines, and fewer open rolling meadows—which might give cougars an upper hand. Experts say other factors could be at play too, like cougar density, wolf pack size, or even wolves' relative newness to an area. Roussin plans a formal analysis if more incidents occur.
OOPS
Scientists in California and beyond have discovered an "Octopus Garden" of up to 20,000 eight-armed creatures living in the deep sea about 80 miles southwest of Monterey. Researchers say it's the largest known gathering of octopuses in the world.
Saturn will be located directly opposite of the Sun – at opposition – on August 26-27, 2023, as the Earth orbits between the two. From our vantage point, the Sun’s illumination will allow Saturn to appear bigger and brighter in the sky in the weeks leading up to and after the opposition.
Saturn is the farthest planet from Earth easily visible by the unaided human eye. It will appear on the southeastern horizon at sunset and you can spot the bright yellowish “star” all through the night until sunrise.