Rebuilding the web

One of the (many) ways people can be shortsighted is in their seeming determination to view non-human species as inconsequential except insofar as they have a direct benefit to humans.

The truth, of course, is a great deal more nuanced than that.  One well-studied example is the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park, something that was opposed by ranchers who owned land adjacent to the park, hunters who were concerned that wolves would reduce numbers of deer, elk, and moose for hunting, and people worried that wolves might attack humans visiting the park or the area surrounding it.  The latter, especially, is ridiculous; between 2002 and 2020 there were 489 verified wolf/human attacks worldwide, of which a little over three-quarters occurred because the animal was rabid.  Only eight were fatal.  The study, carried out by scientists at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, stated outright that the risks associated with a wolf attacking a human were "non-zero, but far too low to calculate."

Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and the wolf reintroduction went forward as scheduled, starting in 1996.  The results were nothing short of spectacular.  Elk populations had skyrocketed following the destruction of the pre-existing wolf population in the early twentieth century, resulting in such high overgrazing that willows and aspens were virtually eradicated from the park.  This caused the beaver population to plummet, as well as several species of songbirds that depend on the insects hosted by those trees.  The drop in the number of beaver colonies meant less damming of streams, resulting in small creeks drying up completely in summer and a resultant crash of fish populations.

In the years since wolves were reintroduced, all of that has reversed.  Elk populations have returned to stable numbers (and far fewer die of starvation in the winter).  Aspen and willow groves have come back, along with the beavers and songbirds that depend on them.  The ponds and wetlands are rebuilding, and the fish that declined so precipitously have begun to rebound.

All of which illustrates the truth of the famous quote by naturalist John Muir: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

The reason this all comes up is a recent story in Science News about a project that should give you hope; the restoration of mangrove forests in Kenya.  You probably know that mangroves are a group of trees that form impenetrable thickets along coastlines.  They've been eradicated in a lot of places -- particularly stretches of coast with sandy shores potentially attractive to tourists -- resulting in increased erosion and drastically increased damage potential from hurricanes.  A 2020 study found that having an intact mangrove buffer zone along a coast decreased the damage to human settlements and agricultural land from a direct hurricane strike by an average of 24%.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NOAA]

The Kenyan project, however, was driven by two other benefits of mangrove preservation and reintroduction -- carbon sequestration and increased fish yields.  Mangrove swamps have been shown to be four times better at carbon capture and storage as inland forests, and their tangled submerged root systems are havens for hatchling fish and the plankton they eat.  The restoration has been successful enough that similar projects have been launched in Mozambique and Madagascar.  A UN-funded project called Mikoko Pamoja allows communities that are involved in mangrove restoration to receive money for "carbon credits" that then can be reinvested into the community infrastructure -- with the result that the towns of Gazi and Makongeni, nearest to the mangrove swamps and responsible for their protection, have become economically self-sufficient.

I have the feeling that small, locally-run projects like Mikoko Pamoja will be how we'll save our global ecosystem -- and, most importantly, realizing that species having no immediately obvious direct benefit to humans (like wolves and mangroves) are nevertheless critical for maintaining the health of the complex, interlocked web of life we all depend on.  It means taking our blinders off, and understanding that our everyday actions do have an impact.  I'll end with a quote from one of my heroes, the late Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai: "In order to accomplish anything," she said, "we must keep our feelings of empowerment ahead of our feelings of despair.  We cannot do everything, but still there are many things we can do."

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Apocalypse not

Can I explain something, for what I devoutly hope is the last time?

The Yellowstone Supervolcano is not about to erupt.

This claim has been going around for some time, in various guises.  Once it was because a tourist saw some bison acting oddly and from that jumped to "all the wildlife are leaving the park" and from there to "so it's about to blow sky-high."

Well, this was four years ago, and if the Supervolcano had erupted, I think we would have noticed.  So it's a big "nope" on that one.  Bison may be cool animals, but as geologists, they suck.

Then it got picked up by the conspiracy theorists, who conjectured that NASA or DARPA or FEMA or some other evil government acronym had found out that eruption was imminent, and was conspiring to cover it up so as not to cause mass panic, except some people with websites who really ought to be sedated found out, and were letting us know so we could get the hell out.  All of which was well-meant, I suppose, but it became a moot point when the eruption once again failed to materialize.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Clément Bardot, Grand Prismatic Spring, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The latest iteration, which I have now seen posted as a serious claim at least a half-dozen times on social media, is that (1) Yellowstone is going to erupt, and (2) there's a secret NASA program to drill into it and bleed off the heat so they can prevent it.  At least NASA gets cast as one of the good guys, here; I'm sure the scientists are sick unto death of being portrayed as rubbing their hands together and cackling while plotting to destroy the world.

This comes from the apocalyptic site Breaking Israel News, and includes stuff like the following:

After initially denying that the unusual amount of seismic activity witnessed last year was an indication of imminent danger, NASA scientists are proposing a solution that could save half the world while admitting that their intervention could initiate the explosion it was intended to prevent. 

Last year, increased seismic activity at Yellowstone generated a great deal of concern.  More than 2,300 tremors were recorded between June and September, one of the largest earthquake swarms ever recorded at the site.  Though geologists assured the public that the activity was normal for the site, another series of quakes and unusual eruptions beginning in February, increased fears that the supervolcano was waking up.  An investigation revealed magma filling up in the underneath chamber of the supervolcano.  In July, a massive, 100 ft.-wide fissure opened up in the Grand Teton National Park near Yellowstone, further increasing fears. 

To look only at the most egregious errors in that passage:

1. The solution to "save half the world" was proposed in a theoretical sense only by Brian Wilcox of NASA/JPL.  It involves pumping water down a drill shaft into the rock surrounding the volcano, then pumping the resulting steam back to the surface (and using it for electricity production).  This would "bleed off" the heat from the volcano, which would freeze and no longer be a threat.  The problem with this is twofold: first, it would cost 3.46 billion dollars, and second, the bleed-off of heat would be so slow (and the volcano is so large) that it would take hundreds, possibly thousands, of years to cool it enough to stop an eruption.  Which Wilcox says, right there in his paper.
2. The 2,300 tremors between June and September are completely ordinary.  The Yellowstone area gets shaken multiple times on a daily basis, and most of them are too small to feel.  It's a seismically active area.  Recall what "seismically active" means.
3. The fissure in the Grand Tetons had zilch to do with the Supervolcano.  It happened because mountains have landslides sometimes.  Saying it indicates an imminent volcanic eruption is no more sensible than connecting eruptions to bisons acting weird.

So you don't need to cancel your vacation plans to Wyoming yet.  Scientists assure us that there will be plenty of warning if the volcano shows signs of an eruption.

Anyhow, the woo-woos need to give this one a rest, because we're all safe, from that threat, at least.  You'd think the more imminent threat would be climate change and the fact that Trump and his followers seem to be trying to create Nazi Germany 2.0.  Compared to that, I'll accept the risk of Yellowstone erupting without a second thought.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is something everyone should read.  Jonathan Haidt is an ethicist who has been studying the connections between morality and politics for twenty-five years, and whose contribution to our understanding of our own motives is second to none.  In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics, he looks at what motivates liberals and conservatives -- and how good, moral people can look at the same issues and come to opposite conclusions.

His extraordinarily deft touch for asking us to reconsider our own ethical foundations, without either being overtly partisan or accepting truly immoral stances and behaviors, is a needed breath of fresh air in these fractious times.  He is somehow able to walk that line of evaluating our own behavior clearly and dispassionately, and holding a mirror up to some of our most deep-seated drives.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The return of Nibiru

The world is going to end again.

This is what, two dozen times that the world has ended?  I've lost count, honestly.  But a success rate of 0.00% isn't the least bit discouraging to the Apocalyptoids.  If anything, it encourages them.  Their history of failed predictions means that the next one has to be correct.  This time, they think, this time Lucy won't pull the football away when we try to kick it.

The latest prediction from the End-of-the-World cadre was described over at the site Mysterious Universe, which has that name because Bullshit Universe doesn't have quite the same gravitas.  I'm pleased that from his tone, the author of the page at least seemed to realize that he was telling us nonsense, although it bears mention that other recent Mysterious Universe articles have been "My Very Own Hyperdimensional Resonator" and "Green UFOs Appear in South Africa and Spain."

So right off the bat, we're talking about a source that may not be all that reliable.  But being that this is what we do, here at Skeptophilia, I forged ahead.

The end of the world this time is going to be because the Yellowstone Supervolcano is going to erupt.  But what you probably don't know is that (1) it's going to erupt because of the infamous planet Nibiru, and (2) all of this serious shit is coming down on September 23, 2017.  Yes, as in this coming Saturday.  So we don't have long to prepare, not that there's much we could do about it anyhow.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The main proponent of this idea is one David Meade, who has said that Nibiru is not in orbit around the Sun.  No, that would be ridiculous.  Nibiru is actually in orbit around the Sun's invisible binary twin, and therefore is zooming toward us at incredible speed -- a speed, Meade says, that will "'take it from not visible in any telescope' to 'holy crap, there it is' in only a few days."

Which, of course, brings up the question of how Meade knows about it, if it's not yet visible in any telescope.

Oh, that's because of the masking effects of the Earth's atmosphere, Meade says.  If we only had a telescope that was above the Earth's atmosphere, we'd see Nibiru approaching.

Which, of course, we do. The Hubble.  But we haven't let little things like factual accuracy bug us before, so why start now?

Anyhow, when Nibiru gets close enough, the Yellowstone Supervolcano will go "boom."  Which will, according to Meade, "split the United States in half."  There will be tsunamis (yes, I know, the Yellowstone Supervolcano is nowhere near the ocean.  Stop asking questions), earthquakes, and high winds, and worst of all, the entire electrical grid will go down.

"This will allow our enemies to take advantage of us," Meade says.  Which honestly seems like it would be the least of our concerns at that point.

Of course, there's no theory crazy enough that someone can't add to it in such a way as to make it way crazier.  In this case, the someone is William Tapley, who has been something of a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia, most recently because of claiming that Donald and Melania Trump are members of the Illuminati, and that a Budweiser commercial aired during the Superbowl that featured a cute puppy was a coded Satanic message that the world was going to end.

Which of course, it didn't.  As usual.

Anyhow, Tapley, who calls himself the "Third Eagle of the Apocalypse" (what happened to Eagles #1 and #2, I have no idea), is really excited about this whole September 23 thing, although he's not really too keen on Nibiru.  Tapley says that the End Is Nigh because on the 23rd, both the Moon and the Sun will be in the constellation Virgo, which clearly is a reference to Revelation chapter 12, in which we hear about "a woman clothed with the Sun, with the Moon under her feet and a crown of seven stars on her head."

So the only possible answer is that the Tribulation, Rapture, the Second Coming of Christ, and so on are about to happen.

But even Tapley isn't all.  There's Antonio Mattatelli, "one of the most famous exorcists in Italy," who says that recent floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes are a sign of the start of the End Times, because apparently that stuff has never happened before.

Anyhow, there you have it.  A consensus of three experts that once again, the world is ending.  I don't know about you, but I am sick unto death of having these predictions of apocalypse, and then nothing happens.  If this time we get to September 24, and there have been no Apocalyptic Horsepersons, no Scarlet Whore of Babylon, no Antichrist, no Beast With Seven Heads, and (most of all) no Rivers Running Red With The Blood Of Unbelievers, I'm gonna be pissed.

So go ahead.  Come at me, bro.  Let's see what you got.

I dare you.

Science as gossip

One of the things that really bugs me is when people accept the vague hand-waving fears of laypeople over the hard evidence and research of actual scientists.

I suspect it's because we've been taught to respect common, down-home, folksy talk more than the esoteric vocabulary of the ivory-tower intellectuals.  We read articles online, and they seem to have been written by "ordinary folks like us," and after all, "ordinary folks like us" wouldn't lie, right?  Add that to the fact that scientific papers are often confusing and difficult to follow, many of them using abstruse mathematics to support their conclusions, and I suppose it's not really that surprising that we're more likely to trust The Daily Mail than Nature.

But for criminy's sake, at least try to understand what the scientists are saying.  Otherwise we'll be stuck forever with nitwits like Jenny McCarthy altering national vaccination rates, and mental midgets like James Inhofe driving environmental policy.

This tendency, I suspect, is also why you see articles like the one that appeared a few days ago on Intellihub called "Yellowstone Supervolcano On Verge of Eruption: USGS Suppressing Information."  The title is self-explanatory; we have more fear-mongering over the potential for a catastrophic eruption, one which (according to the article) would "destroy a 1000-mile swath of the United States."

But this article is different, because it claims that the eruption is going to happen in the next two weeks.

Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park [image courtesy of photographer Clément Bardot and the Wikimedia Commons]

First, the article states that the warning came from one Hank Hessler, a park geologist.  This sounds pretty authoritative; and, in fact, Hessler is a real guy with real credentials.  But if you listen to the YouTube video where the whole nonsense started, you find that what Hessler actually said was that regarding what the volcano is doing, he "can't see past two weeks" -- in other words, the conditions in the magma chamber shift quickly and unpredictably, so making a prediction about what this or that hot spring will do is impossible more than two weeks out.  But how this was interpreted by the YouTube commentator, and every other damn blogger and news source that picked this up, was that Hessler couldn't see past two weeks because after that, we'd all be dead.

The Intellihub article goes further; there's a massive coverup by the United States Geological Survey, designed to keep us in the dark about all of this.  Why?  Who knows?  Because it's government, that's why, and obviously government exists only to kill us all.  But this is where it gets interesting, because Shepard Ambellas, author of the article, starts waving his hands around like mad to support the claim.  "Although no one knows for sure if Hessler’s prediction will come true," Ambellas writes, "it does set an eerie overtone for people located within a 1000 mile swath of the park."

Why is it eerie if no one knows if it's true?  How about we check with a scientist that Ambellas hasn't had a chance to misquote, like Ilya Bindeman of the University of Oregon:

Our research of the pattern of such volcanism in two older, 'complete' caldera clusters in the wake of Yellowstone allows a prognosis that Yellowstone is on a dying cycle, rather than on a ramping up cycle. Either the crust under Yellowstone is turning into hard-to-melt basalt, or because the movement of North American plate has changed the magma pluming system away from Yellowstone, or both of these reasons.

Based upon his studies, he believes that the next Yellowstone eruption might actually happen...

... in one or two million years.

But let's go back to Ambellas:

On March 4, 2014, Intellihub came across information, by an unnamed source, who reported that the White House had ordered the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to suppress earthquake swarm data within the region to hide what may be coming from the general public.

Oh, those unnamed sources.  So much more reliable than actual scientists.

And we're already overdue, Ambellas says, because clearly volcanoes are like trains and run on schedules:

In fact reports suggest that ancient Helium4 gas has breached the surface layers of Yellowstone’s crust and is now escaping into the earth’s atmosphere.  Coupled with the recent and abrupt ground level rise in the park we may be looking at a recipe for disaster...  In fact, the last Yellowstone eruption was thought to have happened around 630,000 years ago, meaning we are about 30,000 years overdue, literally putting us in the hot seat, front row.

Ooh, helium-4!  That sounds terrifying.  And "30,000 years overdue" definitely equates to "a catastrophic eruption in two weeks."

But the best part comes right at the end:

And it gets even worse. Although there is no way I can vouch for the information, I simply can’t. But according to a random individual who posted a video on YouTube, the USGS has likely been ordered by Washington to suppress information regarding recent seismic activity and gaseous releases in and around the Yellowstone region as a possible ELE [extinction-level event] is on the way.

Not a "random individual who posted a video on YouTube!"  Those guys know everything.  Certainly more than the evil scientists, who are in the pay of the USGS and the NSF and the NOAA and all sorts of other agencies whose names are made up of a bunch of scary letters.

But the part that jumped out at me was "there is no way I can vouch for the information, I simply can’t."  If you can't vouch for the information, then for fuck's sake, why are you writing about it?  This is science you're talking about, not the latest gossip on the Kardashians.  There are ways to verify science, and you don't do it by looking at what Mr. Random Individual posted on YouTube.  You read scientific papers (like this one and this one).  You (gasp!) learn some actual geology.

So sorry, Mr. Ambellas (because you actually sound like you're looking forward to it): the US is not about to be destroyed by a volcanic eruption.  The only scientist you even considered in your article, you misquoted and misinterpreted (and if I were Hank Hessler, I'd be pissed).  You're getting a lot of non-scientists stirred up, which I have no doubt was your goal.

But I wish you'd stop.  Because the last thing we need is to give the general public a more jaundiced view of science.  And that's what's going to happen, you know?  When two weeks passes, and we're all still here, unvaporized, your average layperson is much more likely to say, "Those dumb scientists, forecasting gloom and doom, and wrong as usual" than the correct response, which is, "Shepard Ambellas lied to us so that we'd click on his website."

Wild West travelogue

Well, I'm back, and many thanks to my patient readers for sticking around during my two-week hiatus.  I'd like to launch this week with some observations from my travels, along with a few photographs taken by my wife (who is the amazing artist Carol Bloomgarden) and me.

Our travels this year took us out into the American West, where we spent some time in the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Park.  First of all, the natural beauty is stunning; while I like to think that we live in a part of the world that has awesome scenery (upstate New York), the grandeur of scale out there is something few places in the world can match.

The Grand Teton Mountains, from near Jackson Hole, Wyoming

There are a few additional things that have always impressed me about the American West, though.  One of them is that the Yee-Haw Attitude is alive and well, both in its positive and negative senses.  There's a feeling that personal freedom is paramount, as long as what you're doing doesn't impinge upon anyone else's personal freedom.  We did a lot of geocaching out there (and if you don't know about this amazingly weird and fun hobby, check it out here) -- and one of the caches we were seeking took us across a construction site up in Glacier National Park.  We started to cross, and were approached by two construction workers.  I expected that they were going to tell us to bugger off, that we weren't allowed there -- but they said, and I quote, "Do what you like as long as you don't mess with the equipment."

As another example of this, consider speed limits.  Near urban centers, even in the west, it's the usual 55 mph.  But as you get further out into the middle of nowhere, it goes up to 60, then 65, then 75 mph, until (in central Montana) they give up entirely.  "All right, go however the hell fast you want to," they seem to say.  "We know you're going to anyhow."

All of which is kind of funny, because our rental car was a Chevy Spark.  If you are unfamiliar with this car, all I can say is that the Chevy Spark is to cars as a pug is to dogs -- small, stubby, cute in a squashed sort of way, and not really particularly well adapted for any useful purpose.  I think that the Spark got its name from the fact that "spark" represents the energy level of which the engine is capable.  I noted that the speedometer went up to 120 mph, which was grimly amusing, because I don't think the Spark could go 120 mph if you dropped it off a cliff.  It went downhill like a boss, but going up (for example) Logan Pass involved lots of encouraging words from us and lots of nasty looks from the drivers of the cars who were in line behind us going 14 mph and who wanted for some reason to get to their destination that day.

Our Chevy Spark, recovering from a long climb

Of course, I spent a lot of time indulging in my favorite hobby, which is birdwatching.  Much of my behavior illustrated Dave Barry's contention that there is a fine line between a hobby and a mental illness.  For example, we were at the LeHardy Rapids on the Yellowstone River, a site of amazing beauty, and there was also a rainbow trout run going on, which is pretty spectacular to see.  But my wife had spotted a Harlequin Duck, a bird I'd never seen, sitting on a rock in the middle of the stream.   The following conversation ensued:

Other tourist:  Wow!  This place is gorgeous! 

Me:  Look.  There's the duck. 

Other tourist:  That water is so blue!  And the trees!  And look at all of the trout in the river! 

Me:  But there's the duck. 

Other tourist:  Yellowstone is one of the natural wonders of the world! 

Me:  I know.  That's one incredible duck.

The duck in question

Which is not to say that I didn't appreciate other stuff.  In particular, Yellowstone is an astonishing place, to the point of parts of it being kind of surreal.  The hot springs, especially, which look like some amateur artist decided to use up all of their supply of brightly-colored acrylics in painting a nature scene.  If you ever get a chance to go to Yellowstone, the must-see (in my opinion) isn't Old Faithful, but Grand Prismatic Spring, which is colored by minerals and brilliantly pigmented bacteria:

Speaking of Yellowstone, it was in the forefront of my mind to consider the possibility of eruption of the hotspot/supervolcano that lies underneath Yellowstone Caldera, largely because over the last couple of years the woo-woos have been running around making little squeaking noises about how an eruption is imminent and you can tell because the bison and elk are fleeing from the park in terror, and also because the evil US government is evacuating the place and herding everyone into FEMA camps.  Well, we saw lots of people who weren't being held prisoner in FEMA camps, not to mention hundreds of bison, and I can say first-hand that the bison showed no evidence of fleeing in terror.  Most of them were simply moseying about in terror, or even snoozing in terror.

A bison, standing around munching on grass in terror

It did occur to me, though, that these might be suicidal bison, who realized that the volcano was going to blow and decided to stick around because they were depressed and wanted to end it all.  And in fact, "Meh, fuck it" seemed to be a common attitude amongst the wildlife we saw.

Which is a good thing, because otherwise the main cause of death in Yellowstone wouldn't be people getting vaporized by a volcanic eruption, but tourists being killed in messy ways because of sheer stupidity.  I have never seen so many people who evidently do not understand that "hot spring" means "so hot that it will boil your skin off," and "wild animal" means "animal that could easily kill you if it wanted to."  A former student of mine, who has worked in the national parks, told me that just a few weeks ago, a guy tried to put his son on the back of an elk so that his wife could take a photograph, and elk bucked and kicked the father in the head.

And killed him.

We didn't see anyone get killed in Yellowstone, but it wasn't for want of trying.  We saw one woman who was jumping up and down in front of a bison, waving her arms and shouting, "Hello, bison!  Hello, pretty bison!" so that it would turn its head for a picture with her.  When it refused to cooperate, she laughed and said, "Bye-bye, pretty bison!" and scampered off.  But the worst was when we saw a bear by the side of the road...

... a grizzly bear.

Okay, I took a picture of it, but using my zoom, and from the safety of my car.  But there were dozens of people who got out of their cars.  Despite the fact that this is clearly the most dangerous animal in the park, and is unpredictable.  And huge.  Which is why you're supposed to carry a whistle and pepper spray with you whenever you hike in the area.

You do know how to tell the different kinds of bear scat apart, right?  Black bears eat a lot of fruit, so black bear poop contains seeds and stems.  Brown bear poop often contains fish bones.  Grizzly bear poop, on the other hand, contains whistles and smells like pepper.

But that didn't stop people from acting like complete raving morons, running up to the wild animals and stepping on unstable ground over boiling hot lakes, despite the multitude of signs and warnings that were everywhere.  And I'm sure that if something bad had happened, the last thing that would have gone through these tourists' minds before being mauled and/or cooked to death would have been, "Why didn't someone warn me of the danger?"

But despite all that, the trip was amazing, and I highly recommend it to any of you who like to travel.  Traveling is, I think, the most eye-opening experience out there, and the natural world is full of beautiful, stunning, awe-inspiring places to visit.

And lots of really incredible ducks.