Lions Not Always Graceful

 From Africa Geographic

Daily Quick Read - August 30, 2019

The Last Straw

Is replacing plastic straws with the paper version going to save the planet or does it just make us feel good to make a small sacrifice?   We abandon plastic straws, recycle, tote reusable bags into the story, but does any of that really matter when our government works diligently seven days a week to turn more greenhouse gases loose.  

The bright, cold, bitter tang. The soft notes of walnut and dirt. The anticipation of the jolt of electricity. The feeling of wet cardboard in my mouth. Nowadays this is what I get when I grab my morning iced coffee in San Francisco, one of several municipalities that have banned plastic straws in recent months. The paper ones are a necessary corrective, the argument goes. They work just fine, while their plastic cousins choke the oceans and extend our dependence on fossil-fuel products.

Replace plastic straws with paper straws, solve some proportion of the problem, right? Yes, if only a tiny share. Straws make up just 0.025 percent of the plastic that finds its way into the ocean each year; the United States, the biggest per capita producer of garbage on Earth, is not even close to the biggest producer of mismanaged plastic waste. On the one hand, straw bans will lead to thousands and thousands of fewer straws in the ocean; on the other hand, straw bans will not change the underlying environmental calculus at all.

Arguably, it might prompt consumers to think about their consumption, with paper straws and reusable grocery bags and shared urban bicycles acting as a gateway to more meaningful changes. Social norms matter a lot when it comes to the environment, and social contagion is real. Maybe paper straws will persuade people to do the big stuff: stop flying, quit eating cows, give up their cars, have one fewer kid, vote into office politicians who could use the levers of government to do something meaningful, such as impose a tax on carbon.

BAU vs GND

The problems we must overcome in the next decade (or two) are more massive than most people are willing to accept.  The possibility that we will continue with business as usual (BAU) is going to diminish over time as the magnitude of the disaster becomes inescapable.  At the other end of the spectrum is something like the Green New Deal (GND) which is an attempt to solve a global crisis by looking back to solutions from the past.  The original New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression.  World War II ended the Great Depression.  Isn’t that the level of global mobilization we need?

So that’s the choice at your local political theatre. BAU promises a magical future, with some robots and drones thrown in. GND sets out energy goals that could only be possible in some sort of Marvel superhero movie.

And the real unfolding drama — the collapse of a global civilization founded on a highly material culture created by cheap energy — is not a narrative we want to tell ourselves or our children.

They are both energy blind. Neither BAU nor GND, for instance, understand that energy flows underpin economic flows. The more carbon-based energy we use, the more economic growth global civilization experiences.

The less we use, the more our economies contract. 

BAU pretends that expensive fossil fuels like fracked oil or bitumen can replace cheap conventional stuff with no global economic contraction. They can’t.

GND pretends that renewables can provide the same quality of energy as fossil fuels with no global upheaval. They can’t.

“I Feel Your Pain”

Have we failed to adequately address the climate crisis because humans, as a species, lack empathy?  This argument suggests why getting traction is so hard, but it does finally get to the main point, we need to rise up and demand the action our future requires.

Empathizing with the future, alone, will not save the planet. The majority of carbon emissions come from a tiny number of massive companies, which are abetted by government deregulation. Empathy can be a psychological force for good, but climate change is a structural problem.

That doesn’t mean individuals don’t matter. Our behaviors create norms, social movements and political pressure. Newfound awareness of how voiceless, powerless people suffer has sparked enormous change in the past. It can again.

Empathy is built on self-preservation. We watch out for our children because they carry our genes, for our tribe because it offers sex, safety and sustenance. Spreading our care across space and time runs counter to those ancient instincts. It’s difficult emotional work, and also necessary. We must try to evolve our emotional lives: away from the past and toward a future that needs us desperately. Doing so might help us to finally become the ancestors our descendants deserve.

Two More Things

But first a note.
At the end of the day, we need several things to mitigate the climate crisis.  We need a change in human behaviour away from convenient consumption.  We humans need to have a better understanding of the long sweep of human history.  We need to demand of our political leaders a sustained, planet wide effort.  And, we need to aggressively deploy the technologies we have in hand, while working to develop and deploy new technologies.  Below, two experts look at the same data, come to nearly the same conclusion and argue about it. Arguing about the need for both immediate action and scientific research seems petty and helps the deniers who will then argue that we shouldn’t do anything until we have the “right” (magic) technology that will fix everything.

A Reality Check on Ambitious Climate Targets

Says that scientist think we need more science to fix this thing, but that we also have some good technology in place.

An interesting commentary published in Nature this week explores what it would take to achieve California’s ambitious plan to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. It is worth exploring here because it holds lessons that apply far beyond that state.

The piece, “Piecemeal cuts won’t add up to radical reductions,” is by Jane C. S. Long, a principal associate director at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the co-leader of a team of energy analysts who spent two years writing “California’s Energy Future – The View to 2050,” an analysis of what mix of efforts could possibly achieve the required changes in energy and transportation systems.

She writes that a no-holds-barred deployment of known technologies and programs to push energy efficiency to the limit could take the state more than halfway to its goal, but going further would require fundamental leaps in technology.

Long’s bottom line?

California can’t just spend or deploy its way to an 80-percent reduction or beyond — and neither can anywhere else.

Climate Strategy: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy, Research and Develop, Deploy, Deploy, Deploy

Assumes we can do two things at the same time.

This report is an incredibly strong endorsement of the “deploy, deploy, deploy, research & develop, deploy, deploy, deploy,” strategy that I and others have been advocating. In fact, the report explicitly states that failing to adopt “Aggressive efficiency measures for buildings, industry and transportation” and “Aggressive electrification to avoid fossil fuel use” would “significantly increase the 2050 emissions.”

The fact is that California has been pushing efficiency and low-carbon electricity aggressively since the 1970s. It is considerably more efficient in its use of energy than almost every other state. For a long time now the CO2 intensity of its electricity (CO2/Mwh) has been nearly half that of the rest of the nation. So obviously the rest of the country — which is far more coal-intensive and inefficient — has considerably more low-hanging fruit for emissions reductions.

Car vs Rhino

A rhinoceros at the German safari Serengeti Park attacked an animal keeper in her car, overturning the vehicle three times, the park confirmed Tuesday.

A visitor to the park in Hodenhagen, a municipality in the German state of Lower Saxony, filmed the encounter, in which the 30-year-old rhino bull, named Kusini, slammed his horns and body into the animal keeper's car before rolling it over, as seen in a video published by German daily Bild.

The zookeeper, who was driving a small hatchback painted with stripes, emerged mostly unscathed from the attack, only sustaining a few bruises, Fabrizio Sepe, the manager of the Serengeti Park, told the dpa news agency.  -- DW

Daily Quick Read - August 29, 2019

Gassed Up

Free to good home

The Trump Cosa Nostra is going to make it easier and cheaper for the fracking industry to force more natural gas out of the ground.  What’s curious is that there is so much natural gas being harvested that people don’t know what to do with it all.  The US market is saturated so large volumes of gas are being liquified and sold as LNG (liquified natural gas) overseas, but those markets are also saturated.  And, Trump’s trade war has turned off the China market for US produced LNG. 

These are crazy times, when we know that fossil fuels are cooking the planet but hey, there is money to be made. There are few things crazier right now than the natural gas industry, where American producers are fracking so much gas that they can't sell enough of it in North America. So now they are building Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) terminals and trying to export it. Except nobody wants to buy it…

It's crazy. Here we have drilling companies producing gas nobody needs or wants locally, causing massive releases of methane in the process, so they then try and sell it internationally, and nobody wants or needs it there either. Energy is wasted liquifying it and shipping it. The worry now is that natural gas prices will go even lower because the drillers planned for the LNG consumption. But they will just keep drilling and flaring and giving, just to keep busy.

The Good Ol' Wood Fire

Speaking of dangerous fuel.  Fire is pretty much the first human invention and we have been burning wood for millennia.  What for most people is a minor convenience is also a dangerous source of air pollution. 

The gorgeous vistas around Mont Blanc in the French Alps are hidden in haze every winter as residents of the Arve Valley light up their stoves. Researchers in Helsinki reported wood burning accounts for as much as 29 percent of winter particle pollution there; in the suburbs, it reaches 66 percent. Greeks turned to cheap or scavenged wood for heat when economic crisis hit, and air quality plummeted. In California, heating with wood contributes more than 20 percent of wintertime PM2.5 emissions; at one site in Seattle, Washington, it accounted for nearly a third. Wood smoke is why particle pollution in Fairbanks, Alaska, is among America’s worst.

When particulate levels rise, of course, illness and death inevitably follow. Happily, the reverse is true too. A study that highlights wood smoke’s unseen harms found death rates among elderly people in Tasmania, Australia, fell by 10 percent after a push to convert households from wood to electric heat. And when more than 1,000 stoves were replaced in a small Montana town, particle pollution dropped by more than a quarter, and parents reported less wheezing and fewer respiratory infections among children.”

First Fire Then Our Cars 

After we abandon fire, it may be necessary to also get rid of the automobile and, in fact, pretty much all forms of personal transportation, except those exclusively human powered.  According to a report to the UK parliament, private vehicle ownership is incompatible with the nation’s carbon reduction goals.

Reducing car use is a crucial way to reduce transport’s carbon emissions, the science and technology select committee told the U.K. government today. The cross-party group of MPs says switching from internal combustion engines to battery-powered engines is not the game-changing solution the government thinks it is.

And there’s little comfort in the report for electric bicycle fans either because the committee warns that the rare minerals required for electric vehicle batteries are fast running out and are sourced from unstable countries with dire records on workers’ rights.

“In the long-term, widespread personal vehicle ownership does not appear to be compatible with significant decarbonization,” says the blistering parliamentary report.

Keep the Cars, Just Don’t Drive Them

The US could make a substantial reduction in greenhouse gas generation if we cut our light-duty vehicle use by 10%.  EVs aren’t going to save us, but making an immediate effort to reduce our motor vehicle usage would have a substantial impact. 

In 2017, light-duty vehicles in the United States (including cars, S.U.V.s, pickups and most of the vehicles used for everyday life) produced 1,098 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents. That’s about one-fifth of the country’s total emissions footprint.

A 10 percent cut, therefore, would be roughly 110 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or the same as taking about 28 coal-fired power plants offline for a year.

To achieve such a reduction, every American driver would, on average, have to cut about 1,350 miles per year.

While not easy, that target is realistic for most people, said Tony Dutzik, a senior policy analyst at the Frontier Group, a nonprofit research organization.

Not Quite Bartertown

One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.  People like Adrian Paisley are making a living on the left-overs of America’s industrial age.  It’s requires the skills of a detective, patience and an understanding of how the system works.  This is industrial scale recycling with a supply chain the stretches from abandoned junk at the curb to high tech plants that process the junk into valuable material again.

Adrian Paisley spends his days hunting for scrap metal: aluminum, brass and (holy of holies) copper. At 42, Paisley, who weighs just 135 pounds, is wiry and muscular. I once saw him move an old refrigerator by himself, hurling it onto his pickup truck as if it were made of Styrofoam. He lives for this kind of thing. Like the time he found an abandoned car, sawed it in half and hoisted it onto his truck using pulleys. “That’s manly,” he recalled. “What dude wouldn’t enjoy cutting a car in half?”

In truth, Paisley is less a survivalist than an entrepreneur, a small player in an enormous industry. The recycling of scrap metal is a $32 billion business in the United States, according to IBISWorld. As virgin materials become increasingly difficult to mine — and demand soars globally for metals — scrap is more important than ever. When he makes a good find, like discovering a length of copper wire, for example, he immediately checks the current prices using an app on his phone called iScrap, which lists the rates for all types of scrap metal. When it comes to copper wire, there’s “bare bright,” “tin coated copper,” “insulated wire copper,” “computer wire” and many others. Depending on the prices, he may opt to cash in right away or hoard it until prices go up. 

Aurora Over Iceland

                                                                                                                       Miguel Claro

Auroras can be seen in a wonderful variety of colors combined in different ways, forming beautiful and phantasmagoric shapes that can last for several minutes. The vertical panorama above seems to reveal one of these epic moments with the incredible shape of a bird flying with a running rabbit. In the background sky, the constellation Ursa Major (the Big Dipper) is well visible in the top center, with the star Alioth marking the "eye" of the bird. Below is an annotated version of the image with lines drawn over it, which helps to reveal this personal interpretation of the scene.

The vertical panorama consists of three frames captured with a  Nikon D810a DSLR camera, using a wide-angle 14mm lens set to f/2,8, with an ISO 2500 and an exposure time of 15 seconds. – Space.com

Daily Quick Read - August 28, 2019

Riding the Colorado Into the Future

Photo: Oars

150 years ago an expedition traveled down the Green and Colorado Rivers.  In 1869, these two river basins were unknown territory.  The Powell expedition traveled for 1,000 miles along what is the major river system in the American southwest.  This year a new expedition was mounted to travel the rivers that are critical source of water for 40 million.

A century and a half is a mere blip in the life of the Colorado River, but much has changed in its basin since Powell’s expedition. Cities have bloomed in the desert, diversions and pipelines have been built and a complex web of regulations has been written to divvy the water to its 40 million users. What once was a large swath of unknown today encompasses five states, two basin districts, more than a dozen dams and 15 special-management areas. Add to that ever-increasing agricultural and energy development, a nearly two-decade-long drought and wild swings brought by climate change, and the picture of the Colorado River Basin is one of a riverway so overburdened it no longer reaches the sea.

Meet UW’s Sesquicentennial Colorado River Exploring Expedition, which set out on that May 2019 day to follow Powell’s arduous journey. Over 70 days and some 1,000 river miles this summer, its members retraced Powell’s route and mimicked other key aspects of his expedition — like collecting scientific data. But theirs was not to be a simple journey into the past. Instead the team set out with an eye toward the future and solutions for the river system’s modern-day problems. In this way, the expedition conducted a study not only of the geology or hydrology of the Colorado River Basin, but of Western economies, policies, climate, public lands and ideologies as they relate to the overtaxed river system.

Climate Driven Depression

Beside the damage to the planet, the climate crisis is also showing up as a factor in worsening mental health across the globe.  PTSD is common among survivors of large scale disasters.  But, so are symptoms like depression and more general anxiety. 

The climate crisis is manifesting as ever bigger wildfires, hurricanes, floods and heat waves, and cities are just starting to grapple with the mental impact of the emergency. A climate taskforce of the American Psychological Association, citing scores of studies over the last decades, reports that survivors of these human-enhanced disasters are experiencing dramatic increases in depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorders, suicide and suicidal thoughts, violent behavior and increased use of drugs and alcohol. A Rand study found that one-third of the adult survivors of California wildfires in 2003 suffered depression and one-quarter suffered PTSD.

The mental health effects of climate change have been known for quite some time now: a 1991 meta-study found that as many as 40% of those directly affected by climate-enhanced superstorms and fires suffer acute negative mental health effects, some of which become chronic. Puerto Rico, for example, has seen an epidemic of suicide, PTSD and depression after Hurricanes Irma and Maria. After Hurricane Katrina, some people referred to the sense of generalized anxiety and depression common to survivors as “Katrina brain”.

But it’s not just storms that impact mental health. An extensive 2018 Australian study established that extremes of both hot and cold are linked to suicide and mental illness, and the ensuing drought has contributed to a surge in deaths of Australian farmers. Even those not directly impacted by flood or fire can experience a sense of ecological loss termed “eco-anxiety” or “climate grief”.

Speaking of Depression 

Who wants to live in a world without chocolate?  This is really bad news for both producers and consumers.  No chocolate and coffee in danger as well  Yikes.

Picture this: a world where chocolate is as rare as gold. No more five-dollar bags of candy on Halloween. No more boxes of truffles on Valentine's day. No more roasting s'mores by the campfire. No more hot chocolate on a cold winter's day.

Who wants to live in a world like that?

Unfortunately, we all could be if our climate keeps changing.

So how will the climate crisis affect one of the world's most beloved culinary delights? The verdict doesn't look good for chocolate lovers worldwide — and more importantly, it's a threat to the farming communities that depend on cacao for their livelihoods.

Don’t Get Crabby

When supply doesn’t meet demand, then just lie about what’s really in your product.  As fisheries become more depleted more and more seafood products won’t be exactly what the label says.

Beginning in 2012 through 2015, Phillip R. Carawan, owner and president of Capt. Neill’s Seafood Inc., ordered employees to mislabel nearly 180,000 pounds of crabmeat imported from South America and Asia as a “Product of USA.” The retail value of the mislabeled crab products was estimated at slightly more than $4 million. A separate criminal case against Capt. Neill’s Inc. is ongoing.

Fraud is not uncommon when it comes to the prized shellfish. The blue crab, named for its azure-hued limbs, is a popular and iconic species in the Chesapeake Bay region; supply doesn’t always keep up with demand. In 2015, Oceana—a marine conservation nonprofit—tested the DNA of 90 crab cake samples sourced from restaurants in the Chesapeake Bay region and found that 38 percent labeled as locally sourced actually contained imported meat.

Speaking of Labelling Anomalies

There is one of industries great disruptors  – Elon Musk.  His decision to build a big, beautiful plant in Buffalo, New York, even with a massive government subsidy, is turning into a disaster.  When you depend on visionaries to save the world, you better give them an eye test first.

In public, Musk doesn’t talk much about Tesla’s factory in Buffalo—a place he once, in better times, dubbed Gigafactory 2. Gigafactory 1, of course, is Tesla’s much-hyped futuristic electric car plant outside Reno. Gigafactory 2, which is shrouded in silence and secrets, was a controversial side venture: a high-stakes move to dominate America’s growing market for solar energy. Tesla bought the factory’s main tenant, SolarCity, for almost $5 billion in 2016. The plan, in true Muskian hyperbole, was to turn the plant in Buffalo into what was billed as the largest manufacturing facility of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. SolarCity would build 10,000 solar panels per day and install them on homes and businesses across the country. In the process, it would create 5,000 jobs in an area that very much needed them. “This is one of the poorest cities in the country,” Scott says. “You get a big company here, and it’s a big deal.”

But three years after Tesla bought SolarCity, there are serious doubts as to whether the plant will ever fulfill its promises. The website CleanTechnica, which is mostly supportive of Musk, calls SolarCity “a disaster waiting to happen.” A potentially costly lawsuit alleges that Tesla acquired SolarCity at the expense of its own shareholders. And former employees want to know what happened to the massive subsidy Tesla received. “New York State taxpayers deserved more from a $750 million investment,” a laid-off employee named Dale Witherell wrote to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. “Tesla has done a tremendous job providing smoke and mirrors and empty promises to the area." 

Big Enough to Hug a Donut

“When we first spotted them I was in awe, lost for words,” lead author Ranil Nanayakkara of the University of Kelaniya tells National Geographic’s Nadia Drake.

Nanayakkara and his colleagues discovered the unusually adorned arachnid in a section of Sri Lanka’s southwestern rainforest surrounded by tea and rubber plantations. The spider, named after donor and conservationist Joni Triantis Van Sickle, measures around five inches long (Drake notes that it’s “big enough to comfortably hug a donut”) and is a speedy, aggressive predator that darts out from its underground burrow when hapless insects arrive on the scene.

Per National Geographic, C. jonitriantisvansicklei is the first new Chilobrachys species found in the South Asian country since the end of the 19th century. Previously, Sri Lanka’s only Chilobrachys representative was a brown spider called C. nitelus.  --  Smithsonian Magazine

Daily Quick Read - August 27, 2019

Suppression Is Trump's Science

Government scientists wrote a detailed report that outlined the environmental dangers of a Trump decision to divert more water to California's Central Valley farms. As soon as the report was completed, Trumps team scrapped it and the scientists who wrote it were reassigned. A “revised” report was ordered from more compliant, farming friendly sources.

Federal scientists pulled no punches in their report: The Trump administration’s plan to send more water to San Joaquin Valley farmers would force critically endangered California salmon even closer to extinction, and starve a struggling population of West Coast killer whales.

But the scientists’ findings weren’t adopted, nor were they released to the public.

Instead, two days after scientists passed their findings on to the Trump administration on July 1, his officials responded by calling in a strike team to redo the 1,123-page report, documents and emails show.

Environmentalists and salmon fishing groups call it a clear-cut attempt by the Trump administration to whitewash science in order to crank up water deliveries to a group of well-heeled farmers who used to have a top Trump administration official on their payroll — a charge the administration denies.

“The Department of the Interior is once again showing its true colors by subverting the scientific process to serve its clients in corporate agriculture, no matter which endangered fish or whales get in the way,” Noah Oppenheim, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, said in a statement. “Will the state of California let the Trump Administration strike a brutal blow in the water wars, one that it can see coming, or will it take a defensive stand?”

Industrial Strength Denial

More than half of 200 videos that show up in YouTube climate change related searches yield climate change denial videos. Of the 107 denial videos, 91 feature routinely debunked conspiracy theories.   

YouTube searches for climate change-related content are likelier to throw up videos about warming denial than about the climate crisis staring at the world, a study has found.

The study was conducted by a senior researcher at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and published last month in the journal Frontiers of Communication.

The study involved a search for videos on climate change using 10 keywords, including climate change, climate manipulation, and geoengineering. Two keywords commonly used by opponents of mainstream science — chemtrails and climate hacking — were included as well.

“Searching YouTube for climate-science and climate-engineering-related terms finds fewer than half of the videos representing mainstream scientific views,” said study author Joachim Allgaier in a press release.

“It’s alarming to find that the majority of videos propagate conspiracy theories about climate science and technology,” he added. 

Another alarming finding of the study is that both sets of videos received almost the same number of views, 17 million, with those supporting the consensus managing just a slim lead of about 2,000.

Ignorance is Contagious

Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth, who recently got married at one of Trump’s golf properties, lamented the state of education in the US.  On Fox & Friends, Hegseth expressed, to the shows approximately 1.5 million viewer, his amazement that US schools teach climate change, but ignore teaching Islamic extremism.  Trump routinely watches this show.  Is it any wonder that he is getting dumber by the day?

"The left says it all the time, it is their religion," Hegseth said Tuesday morning on Fox News morning show Fox & Friends after a clip of Sanders classifying climate change as the "major national security issue" for the U.S. was played. "They want to fight the weather. The rest of us want to deal with real threats that want to take away our freedoms."

"Whether it's hot or cold, the enemy is here as far as liberals are concerned," he continued. "And it's all about control for them. That's why climate change is the perfect enemy," Hegseth said, lamenting the fact that climate change is currently taught at American institutions of higher education.

"By the way, it's what they're learning at college. They're not learning about radical Islam, they're learning about environmentalism and radical environmentalism," Hegseth said. "That's why these messages catch on, because young kids voting believe it." 

This Is Weather 

Lightning flashes hundreds of miles long that last for more than 13 seconds.  Discovered from space.  Science, that's something we do teach in school.  At least for now.

One Evening while working, Michael Peterson found himself staring at an enormous spider. But Peterson, a remote sensing scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, wasn’t looking at a critter of the eight-legged variety. Instead the form crawling across his screen was a monstrous flash of so-called spider lightning—a twisting network of light stretching hundreds of miles across stormy skies.

His analysis revealed two record-breaking lightning flashes, the longest by length and by duration. One stretched over Brazil some 418 miles from tip to tail—slightly longer than Kansas is across. The second lit up skies for 13.5 seconds over the central United States. A third lightning flash over the southern United States sprawled some 44,400 square miles—nearly the area of Ohio.

What’s more, the identification of such large flashes of light demonstrates the power of NOAA’s newest weather satellites, GOES-16 and GOES-17. And the data is a proving ground for Peterson’s new automated processing system, published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, which tackles the most complex lightning data beamed back from space.

Some People Can't Afford Conservation

Fishers don’t over fish because they hate fish.  Poachers don’t poach because they hate wild animals.  Often they do these things because they have families to support and the countries they live in don’t offer opportunities for them in their economies.  Older Mexican fishers can’t afford to retire.  But, what if we helped them?

In Mexico, a person’s employer pays a portion of their social security payments, which cover things such as healthcare and pensions. But for self-employed people, contributions are optional. Almost 80 percent of local fishers work in the informal economy and many are unable to pay into the country’s social security services. Even if they are part of a cooperative, which can make payments for its members, few are profitable enough to cover the costs. Unable to rely on old-age pensions or medical coverage, many fishers are forced to catch more fish and stick at the job longer, amplifying the pressure on the ecosystem.

The Mexico branch of the Nature Conservancy (TNC), a charitable organization, is working on an ingenious way to address these challenges. The group is exploring using a financial tool called a debt-for-nature swap (DNS) that would pay off fishers’ social security debts if older fishers agree to retire, and younger fishers agree to fish more sustainably. 

Bolsonaro Turns Day Into Night

Afternoon in São Paulo, Brazil                                              Bruno Rocha/Fotoarena/Newscom

There's so much smoke from wildfires in the Amazon rainforest that São Paulo plunged into darkness on Monday afternoon (Aug. 19), with day turning into night. 

The atmosphere, reminiscent of Mordor in "The Lord of the Rings," was a reminder that forest fires in the Amazon have surged 82% this year compared with the same period last year (from January to August), according to data from the Brazilian government's National Institute for Space Research (INPE), as reported by El Pais. 

Daily Quick Read - August 26, 2019

Actuaries Believe in Climate Change

 Paradise, California      Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

Since 1990 the number of homes built in what is called the wildland-urban interface increased by over 40%.  It is estimated that in California nearly 10 million people live wildfire prone areas.  And, some of the most conservative people in the nation are beginning to think the climate change may be a real problem.  No, not Republican politicians – actually it’s insurance actuaries.

Insurance companies dropped more than 340,000 homeowners from wildfire areas in just four years. Between 2015 and 2018, the 10 California counties with the most homes in flammable forests saw a 177 percent increase in homeowners turning to an expensive state-backed insurance program because they could not find private insurance.

In some ways, this news is not surprising. According to a recent survey of insurance actuaries (the people who calculate insurance risks and premiums based on available data), the industry ranked climate change as the top risk for 2019, beating out concerns over cyber damages, financial instability, and terrorism. While having insurance companies on board with climate science is a good thing for, say, requiring cities to invest in more sustainable infrastructure, it’s bad news for homeowners who can’t simply pick up their lodgings and move elsewhere.

“We are seeing an increasing trend across California where people at risk of wildfires are being non-renewed by their insurer,” said California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara in a statement.

“This data should be a wake-up call for state and local policymakers that without action to reduce the risk from extreme wildfires and preserve the insurance market we could see communities unraveling.”

Alaska Burning

Speaking of communities built in the wildland-urban interface unravelling, how about Anchorage, Alaska?  Facing an unprecedented drought and extended fire season, global warming is becoming the new reality.  Will the reality of Alaska burning have any impact on oil extraction in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?  I suspect not.

Major fires are burning this week in south-central Alaska, lengthening the state’s wildfire season, which has usually ended by the beginning of August.

They come after Alaska’s hottest July on record, during which its largest city, Anchorage, had a temperature pass 90F (32C) for the first time. On top of that, the area has seen little rain this summer, resulting in extremely dry conditions.

As firefighters tackle the blazes, officials are facing the longer term challenges of keeping the region safe amid increasing evidence of the impacts of the climate crisis.

“Alaska residents in 2019 have dealt with more fire prone conditions, have dealt with more smoke, and have generally been more concerned and more aware of fire conditions,” said Brian Brettschneider, a climate scientist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

This is the result of multiple factors, he said. Alaska’s fire season is usually earlier than the season in the contiguous US, taking place in late spring and early summer. Humidity is lowest, as well as it being the driest and windiest time of year. What usually helps mitigate those conditions, Brettschneider said, is lingering snow cover. But due to global heating, snow in the Anchorage area is melting earlier, extending the length of the season. And as temperatures go up, conditions are getting even drier.

Ban Cats Not Wind Mills

The idiot in charge of the US, falsely claimed that wind turbines, or as he called them “wind mills,” kill massive numbers of birds, specifically bald eagles.  Wind power is a key component of renewable energy and the effect of wind turbines on wildlife needs careful study and effective mitigation plans.  Those plans are actually being implemented, so Trump can relax about the safety of bald eagles.  I don’t know if we can ever convince him that he will still be able to watch TV when the wind isn’t blowing.

According to the WWEA , wind turbines installed by end of 2018 will account for close to 6% of global electricity demand.  The total share of renewable energy in the power sector is expected to increase from 25% in 2017 to 85% by 2050, mostly through growth in the solar and wind sectors, the International Renewable Energy Agency says.

Wind turbines are often citied as being particularly bad for birds and bats. Birds of prey, for instance,  have a blind spot in front of them, and look down as they search for food. Collision with unseen giant blades can easily prove fatal. The towering structures can also force birds to deviate from their regular routes between breeding and feeding areas, meaning they have to travel longer distances which can ultimately leave them with less energy to raise young.

But numerous other studies have shown that bird deaths caused by wind turbines are much lower than other human-related causes such as power lines or collisions with buildings.

Alex Lenferna, social justice campaigner for 350Africa, agrees that ecological concerns related to wind turbines must be taken into account, but also highlights the broader context of the transition.

"In places like South Africa, where coal is very prevalent, the transition to renewable energy is much more beneficial ecologically than continuous reliance on fossil fuels," he told DW.

In most cases, adequate siting and technological improvements can avoid wind turbines conflicting with biodiversity, experts agree. Selective shutdown of turbines in sensitive areas for migratory birds, for instance, can be very effective.

The American Wind Wildlife Institute examined ten separate studies related to bird fatalities as a result of wind turbines and concluded that restricting blade rotation at low wind speeds could reduce the number of bat fatalities by between 50 and 87%.

Coral Need Low Light and Soft Music

This is a big deal.  Coral don’t reproduce and grow in aquariums – usually.  What the folks in Florida did took years of research, modifications and patient effort.  The result will be healthy coral that can be used to repopulate damage reefs.  Still, it is an uphill battle as ocean conditions such as warming and acidification are constantly killing off healthy coral colonies.

After two years and more than $4.5 million, scientists working with the Florida Aquarium have pulled off something no one else ever has: They coaxed imperiled Atlantic Ocean coral into spawning in a laboratory, aquarium officials announced Wednesday.

The fact that this can be done in a lab, they said, is a hopeful sign for saving the Florida coral reef that stretches along the state’s Atlantic coast from Martin County south to the Keys. The corals there have been suffering from the effects of warming water and acidification due to climate change, as well as a disease that has left them in danger of extinction. Scientists hope to cultivate enough lab-spawned pillar coral to rebuild the reef.

The historic event occurred at 12:45 p.m. Saturday in a 350-gallon tank. The tank sits in a small, dark room on the second floor of a wooden building next to a Tampa Electric Co. power plant. Scientists used computer-controlled lighting and manipulated water temperatures and flow to fool the pillar coral into believing it was just after sunset, the right time to spawn.

In just one day of observing those larvae, she said, they learned more about raising them than they had ever known before. The larvae swam around and eventually will settle onto small, square tiles with algae on them. That’s where they will begin to grow.

At some point when they mature, perhaps in two years, the scientists will explore replanting them in the Keys as part of an effort to rebuild the declining reef system, O’Neil said.

Taking Some Plastic Off the Shelf

Dave Lewis, the CEO of one of largest supermarket chain in the United Kingdom says its stores are going to ban “brands that use excessive plastic packaging” from their shelves.  This is where the battle to reduce packaging plastics needs to be fought.  Individual consumers have little agency to force change, but major retailers have much more economic power to drive this sort of change.

Lewis's words are a breath of fresh air in an industry that is moving glacially in response to consumer concerns about single-use packaging. His decision creates pressure on suppliers that is far more intense than anything shoppers can generate; at worst, they can leave an item on the shelf if they don't like its packaging. But in Lewis's case, non-compliance threatens suppliers' ability to sell in 2,658 large stores across the country.

Tesco is walking its own talk by eliminating hard-to-recycle plastics, such as black takeout trays, from its own store-brand products. It is trialling a loose fruits and vegetables aisle at a location in Cambridge, and offering multi-buys of products without the plastic packaging that used to lump them together. But all of this would be more effective if government got involved, regulating recycling and closed-loop production. Lewis hopes others jump on board, too.

Ventura County Fire Cloud - 2017

Eric Boldt, a forecaster with the National Weather Service office in Oxnard, was tracking the fire cloud on Sunday and says it originated in the San Ynez Mountains of western Ventura County in the Los Padres National Forest on the border of Santa Barbara. Using satellite imagery, he measured it at 30,000 feet tall.

"It's basically like a thunderstorm," Boldt explains. "When we see these clouds billowing so tall, it's the same mechanisms that are happening with a thunderstorm. You're causing updrafts and air that's pushing the smoke higher. It creates its own wind. If it starts to spin, that's where you can get more wind and fast-moving progression of the fire. It can become a dangerous situation for firefighters."  -- SFGate

Dog and Cats

Dogs are incredible. 

Cats are another story.

Koppies Pride Cub

                                                                                                                                                                         Neil Jennings

There is an ongoing war between the lions and buffaloes in the Greater Kruger National Park, and it always depends on the season as to who is winning that war. Right now, the tables seem to be turning in favour of the lions.

It’s the dry season here in Manyeleti Private Game Reserve, and that means the grass is thinning, there is less cover, and hence less food for the buffaloes. As the buffaloes get weaker in the hot sun, the lion prides find it much easier to take down these great big herbivores, which is why we have been seeing a number of buffalo kills in the last few weeks. At the same time we’ve been treated to some great sightings of the various lion prides in the reserve, along with a few leopard sightings as well.

The Koppies Pride – made up of three females and one young male – now has two beautiful little cubs, and we believe that one of the other females also has a new litter of cubs. We are hoping to see them emerge from the bush soon!   -- Africa Geographic

David Koch - His Work Is Done

             David Koch Dead at 79                  

“He deployed his stupendous fortune funding climate denial in the years when the science was clear and there was still time to avert catastrophic warming. He died as fires raged from the Amazon to the Arctic.”  -- Alexander Kaufman

His Legacy

Amazon Aug 23, 2019

Amazon Aug 22, 2019

Alaska July 2019

Greenland Melting - 2019

Russian Wildfires - July 2019