Daily Quick Read - September 25, 2019

Sublethal, Yet Still Deadly

Following last weeks report on the disappearance of three billion North American birds this study provides evidence that neonicotinoid pesticides are a contributing factor.  The Trump administration has rolled back Obama era restrictions on the use of neonicotnoids, although  some states have banned their use.

"The sublethal effects of imidacloprid on food consumption, body condition, and stopover duration have clear links with survival and reproduction and are predicted to negatively affect populations of migratory birds that commonly use agricultural habitats for refueling," the authors wrote in a study published today in Science.

Neonicotinoids—widely used on corn, cotton, sorghum, soybeans and on some other fruits and vegetables—are thought to be at least partially behind bee declines in recent years and also have been linked to widespread impacts on aquatic insects and invertebrates.

Spring migration for birds happens the same time that many farmers are seeding pesticide-treated crops in northern midlatitudes, which is the heart of the Midwest and major U.S. farming regions.

Here is the summary of the study’s conclusions.

Neonicotinoids are neurotoxic insecticides widely used as seed treatments, but little is known of their effects on migrating birds that forage in agricultural areas. We tracked the migratory movements of imidacloprid-exposed songbirds at a landscape scale using a combination of experimental dosing and automated radio telemetry. Ingestion of field-realistic quantities of imidacloprid (1.2 or 3.9 milligrams per kilogram body mass) by white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys) during migratory stopover caused a rapid reduction in food consumption, mass, and fat and significantly affected their probability of departure. Birds in the high-dose treatment stayed a median of 3.5 days longer at the site of capture after exposure as compared with controls, likely to regain fuel stores or recover from intoxication. Migration delays can carry over to affect survival and reproduction; thus, these results confirm a link between sublethal pesticide exposure and adverse outcomes for migratory bird populations.

Defenses Are Failing

The oceans have mitigated the impact of global warming, but now they have reached their limit.  As the oceans warm both the oceans and the land will be subject to the worst effects of our addiction to fossil fuels.

For decades, the oceans have served as a crucial buffer against global warming, soaking up roughly a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans emit from power plants, factories and cars, and absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped on Earth by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Without that protection, the land would be heating much more rapidly.

But the oceans themselves are becoming hotter and less oxygen-rich as a result, according to the report. If humans keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an increasing rate, the risks to human food security and coastal communities will increase sharply, particularly since marine ecosystems are already facing threats from plastic pollution, unsustainable fishing practices and other man-made stresses.

“We are an ocean world, run and regulated by a single ocean, and we are pushing that life support system to its very limits through heating, deoxygenation and acidification,” said Dan Laffoley of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a leading environmental group that tracks the status of plant and animal species, in response to the report.

The report warns that more dramatic changes could be in store. If fossil-fuel emissions continue to rise rapidly, for instance, the maximum amount of fish in the ocean that can be sustainably caught could decrease by as much as a quarter by century’s end. That would have sweeping implications for global food security: Fish and seafood provide about 17 percent of the world’s animal protein, and millions of people worldwide depend on fishing economies for their livelihoods.

The Worst of All Possible Worlds

                                                                                                        Camille Seaman     

There are several climate assessment scenarios that ICONICS (International Committee on New Integrated Climate Change Assessment Scenarios) has developed.  There is growing evidence that the world is on a path to achieve the worst of those scenarios.

Our opening dystopian portrait of the climate-ravaged global order of the next century is only partly a work of speculation. It’s based, in broad outline, on what the climate science community calls the “regional rivalry” scenario. In the suite of now-imaginable climate projections before us, it is known as Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 3 (SSP3). It’s one of five carefully crafted pathways that climate scientists employ to game out what global society, economics, policy, and demographics might look like under longer-term pressures of climate change. Scientific forecasters use these political and economic pathways in climate models to inform their understanding of how greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures will shift amid shifting new geopolitical alliances and confrontations.

SSP3 is the worst possible pathway for the global climate and conflict, according to Bas van Ruijven, the co-chair of the International Committee on New Integrated Climate Change Assessment Scenarios, and a key analyst for the SSP narratives. “It is a world that breaks down on many dimensions,” he said. “Countries have their own interests first, with a narrow definition of what their ‘interests’ are.” Van Ruijven is understandably wary about handicapping the likelihood of SSP3—or any speculative future scenario—coming true, but he very much wants global leaders to have them firmly in mind. The whole idea, he said, is to get policymakers to understand that “if you keep going in a certain direction, [this is] where you end up.”

Some signs already strongly suggest we’re about to head down the SSP3 pathway. After all, the American Republican Party is far from the only political force presiding over the toxic fusion of climate denialism and hyper-nationalism: Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Narendra Modi’s India, and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary are all countries now led by dismal Trumpian comrades in arms. Parties with right-wing authoritarian tendencies now govern or share power in seven European Union nations; such parties have achieved double-digit results in the most recent elections in Finland, Sweden, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom, in addition to numerous former Eastern bloc countries.

We Need A Bigger Boat

                                                                                                  U.S. Geological Survey

Don’t mess with mother walruses.  Just good advice for anyone, but Russian sailors specifically.

"The walruses probably feared for their cubs and attacked the rubber landing craft," the Russian Geographical Society (RGS) said in a Sept. 18 statement reported by The Independent. "The boat sank, but a tragedy was avoided thanks to the prompt action by the squad leader. All landing participants safely reached the shore."

"The incident is another confirmation that no one is expecting humans in the Arctic," the scientists wrote.

However, that doesn't mean that the Arctic is free from human influence. Walruses are considered vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. During the 18th and 19th centuries, they were hunted extensively for their tusks, oil, skin and meat and were even driven to extinction in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and around Sable Island, according to National Geographic. Today, they can only be hunted by indigenous communities, but they are still threatened by other human activities including oil and gas drilling, shipping and air travel, pollution and the way the climate crisis is changing their Arctic habitat.

US Losing the E-bus Race

New Chinese buses for Chile

Buses are a key component in the urban transportation infrastructure.  China leads the world in the implementation of electric buses, but South American cities are adding e-buses at a rapid rate.  In the US, not so much.  Imagine the growing global E-bus market that so far has no meaningful US company engaged.

In Santiago, some 200 battery-powered buses now circulate in the capital city, with 200 more slated to arrive later this year. The Chilean government aims to fully electrify public transport systems nationwide by 2040, a goal that will require deploying thousands more zero-emission buses. In Colombia, the nation’s Green Growth Commission has called for electric buses to comprise 100 percent of future municipal purchases. Bogotá’s mayor recently announced plans to buy nearly 600 electric buses for its bus rapid transit system, and the city of Cali recently purchased 26 units. Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, has bought 20 battery-powered buses.

The region’s fleets still represent only a small fraction of the electric buses in operation globally. Worldwide, nearly 425,000 electric buses were on the roads last year — 99 percent of them in China, where government policies to improve air quality and support manufacturers are accelerating the industry. European cities deployed some 2,245 battery-powered buses in 2018. The United States, meanwhile, had just 300, according to the research firm BloombergNEF.