Will Resume Shortly

 Taking a break from blogging.  Worn out by Trump and his fascist followers, Covid-19 pandemic fatigue, etc.....

February 19, 2021 - SYSKA (Stuff You Should Know About)

 

NASA - Perseverance

We Can Perfectly Execute A Landing On Mars... 

The folks at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory did their usual next-level shit on Thursday. Throwing a dart 128 million miles and hitting the bullseye is really worth celebrating. The new Mars rover Perseverance did exactly what it was supposed to do. It landed, softly, in the Jezero Crater, which is probably an ancient river delta and now, for the next two years, it will look for fossilized pond scum, which would be the most important pond scum in the history of pond scum, which goes back to the beginning of time, both here and there.

It’s hard to explain to people too young to have lived through it what it was like when what was then called The Space Race was going on. It wasn’t just the astronauts, although they certainly commanded the stage...The machines always took the back seat to men, but the machines were our eyes in so many distant, wonderful places. We often need prompting to lift our eyes to the sky, but we almost never regret it when we do.

 

...But Can't Keep the Lights on in Texas

Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.

As millions of customers throughout the state begin to have power restored after days of massive blackouts, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which operates the power grid that covers most of the state, said Texas was dangerously close to a worst-case scenario: uncontrolled blackouts across the state.

The quick decision that grid operators made in the early hours of Monday morning to begin what was intended to be rolling blackouts — but lasted days for millions of Texans — occurred because operators were seeing warning signs that massive amounts of energy supply was dropping off the grid.

The painful decision to implement rolling blackouts saved Texas (and the country) from an even more significant disaster. 

A Song of Fire and Ice

An analysis of Department of Energy data published in September found weather-related power outages are up by 67% since 2000. Climate change is expected to continue fueling hotter heatwaves, more bitter winter storms and more ferocious hurricanes in the coming decades. As both California and Texas have discovered in recent years, power plants, generators and electrical lines are not designed to withstand the catastrophes to come. And all the while, the fossil fuels that both states rely on to power these faulty systems are driving the climate crisis, and hastening infrastructural collapse.

“We’re already seeing the effects of climate change,” said Sascha von Meier, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. “There will be more of this and it will get worse.”

 

 Dogs Have Body Awareness 

Animal intelligence has always been determined with an human bias.  Even as that bias has been diminished, dogs were always consigned to an intelligence below that of a variety of species that passes the "mirror test".

Great apes, elephants, dolphins, corvid birds and a "constantly growing list" of species pass this test, said senior author Péter Pongrácz, an associate professor in the department of ethology at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. But dogs had not.

Scientists lost interest in studying species that didn't show these complex forms of self-representation, Pongrácz said. But in the new study, he and his team decided to take a "bottom-up approach" and investigate whether dogs show a lower level of self-representation — one that would be ecologically relevant to them.

"Dogs are intelligent, large-bodied, fast-moving creatures that move in a complex environment," Pongrácz told Live Science. "Therefore, body awareness would be theoretically important for them when negotiating various obstacles, for example."

 

A Bridge Built of Sponges 

SEAS

Marine sponges like the Venus’ flower basket (Euplectella aspergillum) look like an otherworldly creature one would expect to find on an alien planet. These glassy sponges resemble vases or sculptures but don’t let their fragile appearance fool you — their skeleton is extremely strong. In fact, the structure is so strong that engineers are now mimicking it for the next generation of stronger and taller buildings, longer bridges, and lighter spacecraft.In their new study, which was published today in the journal Nature Materials, researchers at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) analyzed the skeletal structure of Venus’ flower basket.

Similar to today’s tall skyscrapers or bridges, the sponge’s skeleton is arranged in a diagonally-reinforced square lattice-like structure. However, the lattice has an even higher strength-to-weight ratio than traditional lattice designs employed for centuries in architecture and engineering.

February 18, 2021 - SYSKA (Stuff You Should Know About)

Bad place for bikes. Oil companies need reinvention. Wind farms didn't turn off Texas' lights. Biden wants your ideas for public land protection. America's worst Senator - so many to choose from, but Ted Cruz gets my vote.

America's Least Rideable City - Los Angeles is in the Running

“The weather here is so perfect that you really don’t need a car to shelter like you do in other parts of the country,” said Phil Gaimon, a former professional cyclist turned author and YouTube star. “But LA is also the shittiest city in the most beautiful part of the world.”

At least 36 cyclists were killed in Los Angeles county in 2019, according to statistics compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), accounting for about a third of all cycling deaths in California that year. Just last month Branden Finely, 46, was killed while riding his bike through downtown, struck by the driver of a stolen pick-up truck weaving in and out of traffic.

We're Past Peak Oil - What Are the Oil Companies to Do?

Regardless of the arguments over which oil major is doing what, and whether they are doing enough, it is certainly true that fossil fuel companies are becoming increasingly vocal about their lower carbon efforts. That may be in part because some – Shell and BP for example – are headquartered in countries that are signed up to the Paris Agreement. It may also be because they are coming under increasing pressure, both from investors and in the courts.

In the UK, for example, the Supreme Court has just ruled that Nigerian farmers can sue Shell for damage to their land from oil spills. Meanwhile, Nigerian farmers also won compensation from the giant in the Dutch courts. And that’s before we even get started on the potential of young people suing over climate impacts, or major investment groups pulling their money.

Whether or not oil companies can successfully move away from fossil fuels remains to be seen. It seems likely, however, that we’ll be hearing a lot more about their various efforts to try.

It Isn't Wind Farms that Turned Out Texas' Lights

...if your party is hostile to government and exercising regulatory power because it is beholden to a donor class and right-wing ideologues, you will not be prepared for disasters when they strike.

And that brings us to Texas. 
The Post reports, “As millions of people across Texas struggled to stay warm Tuesday amid massive cold-weather power outages, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) directed his ire at one particular failure in the state’s independent energy grid: frozen wind turbines.” There is one problem: That is not remotely true (as you might have guessed from a state with an enormous oil and gas sector). “The governor’s arguments were contradicted by his own energy department, which outlined how most of Texas’s energy losses came from failures to winterize the power-generating systems, including fossil fuel pipelines.”

30 by 30 - Start Making Your List

It was an executive order that made waves in environmental circles: after only a week in office, President Joe Biden pledged to preserve 30% of US lands and waters by 2030.

The so-called 30 by 30 conservation goal has already met with bipartisan support in Congress, and it aligns with science-based global preservation targets to reach an eventual target of 50% by 2050.

The US Geological Survey reports that only 12% of US lands are permanently protected, with roughly 23% of its coastal waters protected. That means that in order to reach Biden’s goals, the country will have to conserve more than 400m acres land and inland waterways alone in the next 10 years.

 

Back in 2018 Texans Decided on Ted Cruz Over Beto O'Rourke

Beto O'Rourke vs. Ted Cruz pic.twitter.com/4Sls4kugx1

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) February 18, 2021

It was a bad decision then and looks worse every day that goes by.

February 17, 2021 - SYSKA (Stuff You Should Know About)

PowerOutage

Racism and Climate Change

When climate change combines with systemic racism it is Black and Latino communities that suffer more significant consequences.

...The roots of systemic racism run so stubbornly deep in the US, recent research has revealed, that global heating harms Black and Latino children before they are even born, as well as in the first years of their lives.

“Unfortunately many children will be marked for life because of what their mothers are exposed to, affecting the brain, lungs, pancreas, everything,” said Susan Pacheco, an associate professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center who co-authored research released last summer that found that pregnant women exposed to heat and air pollution are at heightened risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes.

The climate crisis is shaping the lives of Black children and children of color before they take their first breath, but it doesn’t stop there. Once a Black or Latino child is born, there is a good chance they will live in a neighborhood that gets even hotter than nearby, whiter suburbs. Researchers have found that in US cities including New York, Dallas and Miami, poorer areas with more residents of color can be get up to 20F hotter in summer than wealthier, whiter districts in the same city.

 

We Need More Women In Science - We Can't Depend On Men to Save the Planet

Women represent 50% of the world’s population, and therefore half of its potential. But did you know that, at present, less than 30% of researchers worldwide are women? According to recent data provided by the UN: “Globally, female students’ enrolment is particularly low in computer technology (3%), natural science, mathematics and statistics (5%) and in engineering, manufacturing and construction (8%).”

Even in this day and age, entrenched biases and gender stereotypes are steering women and girls away from scientific fields. But given the current challenges of climate change, nature loss and COVID-19, it’s more important than ever to harness all the talent and innovation we have at our disposal. To do so, we need to promote the participation of all sections of society.

Here's some good advice from a woman scientist:

“I would tell them to pursue their dreams, face the barriers that society imposes and be the best version of themselves every day. The world is facing increasingly complex global challenges and we cannot afford to go without half of the population when solving them. The absence of women in science means giving up all the knowledge, talent and potential that this group can generate.”

End of the World Or We Can All Be Heroes - Does the Climate Change Message Matter?

Which message regarding climate change has the most impact - doomsday or it's time for heroes?

Studies have come to wildly different conclusions. One paper will proclaim that “Fear Won’t Do It” for motivating action on climate change; another will say the exact opposite. The research about hope is similarly mixed. Some studies have suggested that optimistic messages could prod people to behave in more climate-friendly ways and increase support for climate policies, but others found that hopeful appeals actually lowered people’s motivation to reduce emissions.

“It’s really cut down the middle,” said Joshua Ettinger, a PhD student studying public support for climate action at the University of Oxford. “You have study after study finding conflicting results.”

Some research suggests that while fear can prompt us to spring into action, hope actually gives us something to do. In other words, alarming and optimistic messages could simply be two sides of the same coin.

Margaret Klein Salamon, the founder of The Climate Mobilization, argues that “telling the whole, frightening truth” is a powerful asset for the climate movement that could unlock “tremendous potential for transformation” — provided that it’s paired with an ambitious, heroic solution. Her organization calls for “an all-hands-on-deck effort to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions and safely draw down excess carbon from the atmosphere at emergency speed.”

 

Who Turned the Lights Out in Texas?

Texas operates its own power grid independent from the rest of the nation.  And, Texas Republicans have resisted any effort to add resiliency to their grid or to make the improvement necessary to connect to the national power grid.

The reason people in Texas are currently experiencing the collapse of a badly overloaded system, leading to extended outages lasting for hours, is simply because that’s the way the system is designed to work. The incentive in Texas is to provide for exactly as much power as is needed, and not one hamster-wheel-driven watt more. Because in a system that never reached 100% of capacity, power would always be cheap. It’s fighting over the difference between 99.9% demand and 100.1% demand that drives the system and generates profits.

The mayor (now ex-mayor) of a small Texas town explains who is really responsible when Texan freeze to death.  Its those lazy folks just "looking for a handout" who are the cause.

“If you were sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your [sic] lazy is direct result of your raising! Only the strong will survive and the week [sic] will perish,” he wrote.

The mayor ranted “I’ll be damned if I’m going to provide for anyone that is capable of doing it themselves!”

“Bottom line, quit crying and looking for a handout!” he wrote.

On the other hand, another local leader in Texas puts the blame for frozen natural gas pipelines where it belongs.

Judge Clay Jenkins, the chief executive of Dallas County, explained that the problems in Texas could have been avoided. Extreme weather isn't unheard of in Texas and Judge Jenkins explained that ten years of GOP governors have turned the state into one that can't even count on their power grid.

"What went wrong here was the last two governors had policies, the current governor and the one that was before him, had policies that valued rock-bottom prices for commercial large users over all else, including protecting residential customers when there is an extreme weather event," he explained. "And so what you see in Oklahoma they're not seeing that problem because they have regulatory requirements that require you to winterize your equipment if you're a generator, require you to either use a certain material or bury it at a certain depth if you're a gas pipeline company."

Making Bristol Bay Mining Free Forever

That’s why three tribal organizations — UTBB, Bristol Bay Native Association, and Bristol Bay Economic Development Corporation — and many supporters are championing a much more sweeping approach to protections. In addition to calling for EPA action, the coalition wants Congress to declare the broader Bristol Bay region a national fisheries area, says Newman. This legislative proposal, inspired by the fisheries regulations of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, would establish a first-of-its-kind onshore fisheries area. In this case, Newman says, the legislation would reflect similar restrictions on hardrock mining as Section 404(c), but across all of Bristol Bay’s nine major river basins.

February 16, 2021 - SYSKA (Stuff You Should Know About)

 

Tom Murphy - Yellowstone National Park

The Coldest Place on Earth Right Now - 

The Central United States

Climate change is making the planet warmer, but it can also lead to extreme weather events that allow frigid polar air to chill areas that usually have moderate winter weather.

The cold weather is coming directly from the North Pole, via Siberia, following a disruption in the circulation of the polar vortex that occurred in January. It’s helping to spark two major storm systems, the first of which dumped snow and ice on Sunday night and Monday morning, with the second on the way for Wednesday.

There is also some evidence showing that rapid climate change in the Arctic, which is melting sea ice, is helping to disrupt larger-scale weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, which may make incursions of polar air more likely and lead to extreme heat waves during the summer. This is still an area of active scientific research, however.

Global Warming Impacts the Jet Stream -

Leading to Extreme Cold Weather

It's not just the US where warming in the Arctic can result in extreme cold weather.  Europe faces the same conditions.

This is where the disproportionate warming of the Arctic comes into play, said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of the Earth System Analysis research department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Temperatures in the Arctic have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the past 40 years. "These changes are affecting the weather in Europe."

The jet stream usually determines the winter weather in Europe: if it is strong and flows from west to east, it brings mild, windy and rainy weather from the Atlantic, and holds the cold air from the Arctic.

But if the jet stream is weak and wavy, the polar vortex also weakens, and sometimes breaks down completely. The cold snap across Europe is the result of a weak jet stream — more precisely a dip — that has caused a strong and long-lasting collapse of the polar vortex.

So, don't let some Republican member of Congress use extreme cold weather as a rebuttal to the reality of climate change. 

Fish Are Feeding in Plastic Contaminated Seas

The earliest document discover of plastics in sea animals came in 1972.  Now, we know that plastics can be found in hundreds of fish species globally.  And, that doesn't include emerging data on the prevalence of micro-plastics in marine species.

Our research revealed that marine fish are ingesting plastic around the globe. According to the 129 scientific papers in our database, researchers have studied this problem in 555 fish species worldwide. We were alarmed to find that more than two-thirds of those species had ingested plastic.

One important caveat is that not all of these studies looked for microplastics. This is likely because finding microplastics requires specialized equipment, like microscopes, or use of more complex techniques. But when researchers did look for microplastics, they found five times more plastic per individual fish than when they only looked for larger pieces. Studies that were able to detect this previously invisible threat revealed that plastic ingestion was higher than we had originally anticipated.

Habitat Loss Causes Stress

In a new study, researchers discovered higher levels of stress hormones in rodents and marsupials living in deforested parts of the Atlantic Forest in South America compared to those living in more intact forests. The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Studies from across the globe have found that when species undergo habitat loss and fragmentation, some species may go extinct locally, lead author Sarah Boyle, an associate professor of biology and chair of the Environmental Studies and Sciences Program at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, tells Treehugger.

“However, for those animals that may live in a habitat that has been heavily degraded or diminished from the typical habitat of that species, there may be changes in the animal’s diet, amount of space it uses, increased competition for food, and greater risk of disease transmission,” Boyle says.

“Not all species respond in the same way to environmental pressures, and not all habitats have been impacted to the same degree as all other habitats, so we wanted to study this topic with small mammals.” 

February 15, 2021 - SYSKA (Stuff You Should Know About)

 

David Haring - Duke Lemur Center

Manatees and Dolphins Just Hanging Around in Florida

“Dolphins and manatees don’t interact super often, mainly because manatees spend a lot of their time in fresher waters than you find dolphins,” said Mike Heithaus, dean of Florida International University College of Arts, Sciences and Education and professor of the university’s department of biological sciences.

“There’s no particular reason they wouldn’t interact, but manatee numbers are down and that makes it less likely. The more unique part is to see that many manatees from a drone and it’s always cool to see dolphins swimming through them.

“If we are successful in rebuilding manatee populations to where they should be, we could see this more often. It’s a glimpse of what we could do with the oceans if we work really hard to restore them to what they used to be. The threats are still there and the population isn’t where it used to be.”

Post Valentine's Day Insight - Monogamy is a Mystery

To biologists, monogamy is somewhat a mystery. That’s in part because in many animal groups it’s rare. While around 90% of bird species practice some form of fidelity to one partner, only 3% to 5% of mammals do. The vast majority of the roughly 6,500 known species of mammals have open relationships, so to speak.

“It’s an uncommon arrangement,” says Nicholas Grebe, a postdoctoral associate in professor Christine Drea’s lab at Duke University and lead author of the paper, published in Scientific Reports.

Which raises a question: what makes some species biologically inclined to pair up for the long haul while others play the field?

Bitcoin Mining Requires More Energy Than Argentina

"Mining" for the cryptocurrency is power-hungry, involving heavy computer calculations to verify transactions.

Cambridge researchers say it consumes around 121.36 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year - and is unlikely to fall unless the value of the currency slumps.

Critics say electric-car firm Tesla's decision to invest heavily in Bitcoin undermines its environmental image.

The currency's value hit a record $48,000 (£34,820) this week. following Tesla's announcement that it had bought about $1.5bn bitcoin and planned to accept it as payment in future.

But the rising price offers even more incentive to Bitcoin miners to run more and more machines.

And as the price increases, so does the energy consumption, according to Michel Rauchs, researcher at The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, who co-created the online tool that generates these estimates.

Printing paper money is cheap in comparison and, as an added benefit, isn't a pyramid scam.

Hawaii's Beaches Are Being Washed Away

Property owners are legally only allowed to keep the emergency protections in place temporarily, but officials with Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources have liberally interpreted the term “temporary,” allowing walls of sandbags to remain in front of some properties for years, and even decades, after issuing repeated approvals or losing track of them, an investigation in December by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica found.

Coastal scientists warn that the structures can be just as damaging to Hawaii’s beaches as seawalls, which have contributed to the loss of about one-quarter of the beaches on Oahu, Maui and Kauai. As waves hit an armored shoreline, they pull sand off the beach. In addition, the sandbags have blocked public shorelines, created eyesores along picturesque coastlines and littered beaches with heavy fabric and rope that gets torn and whipped around by waves.

Wealthy property owners are destroying the beaches for everyone in order to protect their personal investment in beach front property.  

Coastal Darkening - One More Disaster for our Oceans

LWM/NASA/LANDSAT/Alamy Stock Photo

“It’s affecting the quality of the sea we know,” says Oliver Zielinski, who runs the Coastal Ocean Darkening project at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. These “changes in the physics will lead to biological changes,” he adds.

Some of the causes behind ocean darkening are well understood: fertilizer enters the water and causes an algal bloom, or boats stir up light-blocking silt as they move. But other causes are murkier. During heavy rains, for instance, organic matter—primarily from decaying plants and loose soil—can enter the ocean as a brown, light-blocking slurry. This process is well documented in rivers and lakes, but has largely been overlooked in coastal areas.

February 14, 2021 - SYSKA (Stuff You Should Know About)

California Donut Bar, San Diego

OK.  This is a conservation blog, but today is Valentine's Day and for some reason my thoughts turned to love donuts.  So, today you get conservation and donuts.

51 Sites for your empty calorie fix:

"There's one thing that's really great about waking up early," the comedian Kathy Griffin apparently once said, "and it's not jogging or greeting the day – it's just that that's when they make doughnuts."

Today, doughnuts have become a kind of blank canvas for creative bakers, and are likely to be topped or filled with everything from bacon to jalapeños to foie gras. They’re even sometimes repurposed to serve as burger or sandwich buns – like the Krispy Kreme Sloppy Joes served at the Virginia State Fair. 

Personally, I would have voted for this "best" list to be population adjusted.  I can think of two equally great donut purveyors within minutes of my house - VGs in Solano Beach and Danny's in Vista.

California has always set the nation's trends:

That’s because as bad as California’s affordable housing problem is, it isn’t really a California problem. It is a national one. From rising homelessness to anti-development sentiment to frustration among middle-class workers who’ve been locked out of the housing market, the same set of housing issues has bubbled up in cities across the country. They’ve already visited Boise, Nashville, Denver and Austin, Texas, and many other high-growth cities. And they will become even more widespread as remote workers move around.

Now we Californians can take credit for blowing up real estate markets all across the nation.  Our housing shortage is soon to be yours.  You're welcome.

Trump Doesn't Believe Native American Religions Are Important

In its final days the Trump administration pushed through a controversial land transfer agreement that would give a 2,234 acre parcel of Arizona land to the mining group called Resolution Copper.  The whole process was rigged to insure that the incoming Biden Administration couldn't undo the transfer.  The losers are more than a dozen Native American tribes.  A federal court just ruled that the Apaches have to give up the site.

Called Chi’chil Bildagoteel in Apache, Oak Flat is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its spiritual and cultural significance to at least a dozen south-west Native American tribes. It contains hundreds of Indigenous archaeological sites dating back 1,500 years.

Oak Flat also sits atop one of the largest untapped copper deposits in the world, estimated to be worth more than $1bn. The mining operation will consume 11 sq miles (17 sq km), including Apache burial grounds, sacred sites, petroglyphs and medicinal plants.

“The immediate burden is total desecration of our religion,” said Wendsler Nosie in response to Logan’s decision. Nosie is a member of the San Carlos Apache tribe and leader of Apache Stronghold. He has been camping at Oak Flat for more than a year in protest against the mine. “After March 11, Chi’chil Bildagoteel will become private property and I will be subject to illegal trespassing for praying on my sacred homeland.”

Climate Change, Bats and the Pandemic(s)

"We estimate that, over the past century, climate change caused a significant increase in the number of bat species in the location where SARS-CoV-2 likely originated," study lead author and University of Cambridge researcher Dr. Robert Beyer told CBS News. "This increase suggests a possible mechanism for how climate change could have played a role in the origin of the pandemic."

Scientists think that the bat-borne viruses behind both SARS and COVID-19 emerged in China's southern Yunnan province as well as parts of countries immediately to the south. The researchers discovered that vegetation changes in this area over the last 100 years had led to the introduction of 40 new bat species and, with them, 100 new types of bat-borne coronaviruses, a University of Cambridge press release explained.

 

Will Wyoming Face the Future?

In Wyoming, a top fossil fuel energy producing state — much of which is done on federal lands — the executive order was met by fierce opposition from Wyoming leadership. All three members of Wyoming’s federal delegation have publicly condemned the executive orders and indicated that they will fight as hard as possible to push back through newly introduced legislation. Much is on the line — the jobs that support entire communities and most of the state’s tax revenues. As a laid-off Gillette coal worker stated to Reveal News in 2017: “This community is all rooted in coal, all the way down to the fast food. Everybody relies on the miners.”

However, there is also a growing number in Wyoming who recognize that the energy transition has arrived permanently, and that the best course forward is to plot out a new future. Louise Carter-King, the mayor of Gillette — Wyoming’s coal-producing epicenter — acknowledged as much and stated her desire to work with President Biden to help bring jobs to the community saying: “for one thing, he did say during his campaign ‘I will work with the blue states and the red states.’ Well, we are one of the reddest counties in one of the reddest states in the nation. We are ready to talk.”