History by proxy

In a study from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we learn something simultaneously fascinating and alarming; humanity's fingerprint on the globe is so clear that it can even track our wars, famines, and plagues -- back twenty-five centuries or more.

The whole thing was done using proxy records, which involve using indirect sources of evidence about the past to infer what conditions were like.  A commonly-employed one is using the constituents of air bubbles in amber and ice to make inferences about the global average air temperature at the time -- a technique that shows good agreement with the measurements of the same variable using other methods.

Here, in a team effort from the Desert Research Institute, the University of Oxford, the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Rochester, and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, researchers studied ice cores from thirteen different locations in the polar northern hemisphere, and found that the levels of one contaminant in the ice -- lead -- was enough to parallel all of the major plagues and wars that occurred in Europe and northern Asia back to 800 B.C.E.

What they found is that lead concentrations in the ice rose when things were quiet and prosperous, probably due to an expansion of smelting operations for items like lead seams for stained-glass windows and impurities in silver ore processing.  If the signature of wars was clear, the signature from plagues was blatantly obvious; the years following the Plague of Justinian (541-542 C.E.) and the two spikes of the Black Death (1349-1352 and 1620-1666 C.E.) were two of the lowest points on the graph.

"Sustained increases in lead pollution during the Early and High Middle Ages (about 800 to 1300 C.E.), for example, indicate widespread economic growth, particularly in central Europe as new mining areas were discovered in places like the German Harz and Erzgebirge Mountains," said study lead author Joseph McConnell of the Desert Research Institute.  "Lead pollution in the ice core records declined during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period (about 1300 and 1680 C.E.) when plague devastated those regions, however, indicating that economic activity stalled."

Silver smelting plant in Katowice, Poland, ca. 1910 [Image is in the Public Domain]

The authors write:

Lead pollution in Arctic ice reflects midlatitude emissions from ancient lead–silver mining and smelting.  The few reported measurements have been extrapolated to infer the performance of ancient economies, including comparisons of economic productivity and growth during the Roman Republican and Imperial periods.  These studies were based on sparse sampling and inaccurate dating, limiting understanding of trends and specific linkages.  Here we show, using a precisely dated record of estimated lead emissions between 1100 B.C.E. and 800 C.E. derived from subannually resolved measurements in Greenland ice and detailed atmospheric transport modeling, that annual European lead emissions closely varied with historical events, including imperial expansion, wars, and major plagues.  Emissions rose coeval with Phoenician expansion, accelerated during expanded Carthaginian and Roman mining primarily in the Iberian Peninsula, and reached a maximum under the Roman Empire.  Emissions fluctuated synchronously with wars and political instability particularly during the Roman Republic, and plunged coincident with two major plagues in the second and third centuries, remaining low for >500 years.  Bullion in silver coinage declined in parallel, reflecting the importance of lead–silver mining in ancient economies.  Our results indicate sustained economic growth during the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, terminated by the second-century Antonine plague.

Of course, there's nowhere in the ice cores that has as high a level of lead contamination as recently-deposited ice does.  "We found an overall 250 to 300-fold increase in Arctic lead pollution from the start of the Middle Ages in 500 C.E. to 1970s," said Nathan Chellman, a doctoral student at the Desert Research Institute, and co-author on the study.  "Since the passage of pollution abatement policies, including the 1970 Clean Air Act in the United States, lead pollution in Arctic ice has declined more than 80 percent.  Still, lead levels are about 60 times higher today than they were at the beginning of the Middle Ages."

As an aside, the Trump administration v. 2.0 has already promised to drastically roll back regulations requiring industry to conform to reasonable pollution standards, including allowable levels of air pollution.  So look for the contaminants in ice -- and in your lungs -- to spiral upward once again.

But hey, if the price of eggs goes down, then fuck the environment, amirite?  

Of course I'm right.  Nothing to worry about.  MAGA FTW!

Ahem.  Back to reality.

As I've pointed out (repeatedly), what we are doing does have a measurable, quantifiable effect on the environment, and studies like McConnell et al. should be a significant wake-up call.  And as I've also pointed out, it probably won't.  It's all too easy for people to say, "Meh, what do I care about a little lead in Arctic ice?  So it bothers a few seals and polar bears.  Too bad for them."  And continue with our throw-away, gas-guzzling, conspicuous-consumption lifestyles.

It's cold comfort knowing that when the aliens come here in a thousand years to find out why the Earth is barren, they'll be able to figure it out by looking at the traces we left behind in the ice, soils, rocks, and air.

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Shattering the records

As I write this, large chunks of the states of California, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida are under NOAA Heat Advisories.  June saw over a thousand temperature records set, and conditions this week are predicted to break at least some of those records in the next few days.

For the third time in the last six weeks, out-of-control wildfires in Canada are dumping smoke across the Midwest and Northeast.  Montana, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Ohio are all under Air Quality Advisories, with many areas posting AQIs of over 200 -- "Very Unhealthy For All Individuals."

The eastern parts of New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, and all of Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine are under Flood Watches.  Last week, storms dumped an unprecedented amount of rain in the area, resulting in floods in much of Vermont, New Hampshire, and eastern New York, the likes of which have not been seen in recent history.  More torrential downpours are expected into this week.

The European Space Agency released an alarming forecast for a huge swath of Europe, including much of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and Poland, where a combination of high heat and humidity is predicted to result in life-threatening conditions.  Sixteen cities in Italy, including Rome and Florence, posted "Extreme Heat Warnings" -- the highest level of heat advisory the ESA issues -- with the temperatures in Sicily and Sardinia predicted to reach 48 C (118 F).  If this forecast pans out, it will be an all-time temperature record for the entire continent of Europe.

A heat wave in India and Pakistan in June crossed what one study called "the limits of survivability," reaching 47 C (116 F) with extreme humidity.  The heat was only broken when it started to rain -- but then it didn't stop.  The resulting flooding has caused damage estimated in the millions.  This followed a "once in two hundred years" heat wave in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and Malaysia in April.

Sea surface temperatures are the hottest ever recorded.  We're talking pretty much worldwide, here.  Antarctic sea ice is at its lowest level for June -- middle of the Antarctic winter -- since measurements began.  The Atlantic Ocean is so hot it's got the scientists struggling to find words to describe how bad things are.  "The temperatures in the North Atlantic are unprecedented and of great concern," said Michael Sparrow, head of the World Meteorological Organization's World Climate Research Department.  "They are much higher than anything the models predicted."  The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting called them "off the charts."  This raises the specter of a bad Atlantic hurricane year, although how the high temperatures will interact with other factors -- such as wind shear and the fact that we're going into an El Niño, usually an Atlantic storm suppressor -- are unknown.

How much evidence do people need?

It's not so hard to say, you know?  Give it a try, climate-change deniers.  "Well, I guess we were wrong, then."  "Maybe we should have listened to the scientists, who have been warning us about this for forty fucking years."  

But no.  Just yesterday I saw someone post a photograph of a buckled road surface in Louisiana...

... and blamed it on the fact that the contractors hired to build roads don't give a damn and are doing slipshod work.

Yes, I know, all of the information I posted above is weather, and "weather is not climate," a phrase the climate change deniers like to trot out when it's convenient and then proceed to forget about when they gleefully point out there's been a cold snap in Minnesota in January.  I'm not exaggerating; James Inhofe, retired (thank heaven) senator from Oklahoma, set a new record himself -- for the stupidest thing ever said in the halls of the United States Senate -- when he brought a snowball inside in December and claimed it was proof that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax.  

Any individual record that's been broken this year is "weather."  Taken all together, what we have is "climate."

Not to mention a crisis that is threatening the long-term habitability of the planet.

Look, it's time we stop playing nice, here.  There's a point at which giving a forum to people who are either ignorant, or else have a vested interest in hoodwinking the gullible, isn't "giving the other side a chance to speak their views," it's a well-nigh suicidal waste of time we don't have.  I've quoted Isaac Asimov many times, but we cannot continue to allow the control of the planet to be hijacked by people who believe that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."  Contrary to what they say, the climate change deniers didn't "do their research;" they were bamboozled by Fox News, Newsmax, and other media in the pockets of the fossil fuels industry.  At best, they spent fifteen minutes cherry-picking websites that agreed with what they already believed and completely ignored the actual research done by actual scientists.

The result?  A populace who sees a buckled road surface in the middle of a catastrophic, life-threatening heat wave, and blames it on inept road workers.

Is it already too late?  I honestly don't know.  Doesn't abrogate our responsibility to do what we can.  I don't know of anyone who, if their house was on fire, would tell the firemen, "Don't bother trying to save it."  At this point, though, I'm sure of one thing; the only solution is to get to the ballot box and vote out the fossil-fuel-funded political hacks who have spent decades pulling the wool over our eyes and fooling us into believing nothing is wrong. 

If we don't, I can nearly guarantee that this blisteringly hot summer will be the coolest one we'll have for a very long time.

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Roots of the problem

It's natural enough to think that humans are the only organisms that damage their own habitat.  We certainly seem to be doing a damn good job of it.  But there have been other times living things have sown the seeds of their own destruction.

One good example is the Great Oxidation Event -- sometimes, justifiably, nicknamed the "Oxygen Holocaust."  It occurred just over two billion years ago, and hinges on one rather surprising fact; oxygen is a highly reactive, toxic gas.

There's good evidence that aerobic respiration -- the set of biochemical reactions that allows us to burn the glucose in our food, and which provides us with the vast majority of the energy we use -- evolved first as a mechanism for detoxifying oxygen, and only afterward got co-opted into being an energy pathway.  The problem was that prior to the Great Oxidation Event, all of the organisms had been anaerobes, which are capable of releasing energy without oxygen.  To the vast majority of anaerobes, oxygen is a deadly poison.  That's why when there was a sudden, massive injection of oxygen into the Earth's atmosphere a couple of billions of years ago, the result was that just about every living thing on Earth died.

The tipping point came with the evolution of yet another energetic pathway: photosynthesis.  Photosynthesis was a tremendous innovation, as it allowed organisms to harness light energy instead of chemical energy, but it had one significant downside.  The first part of the reaction chain of photosynthesis breaks up water molecules and releases oxygen.  So when the first photosynthesizers evolved -- probably something like modern cyanobacteria -- oxygen gas began to pour into the oceans and atmosphere.

Something like 99% of life on Earth died.

The survivors fell into three groups: (1) the handful of organisms that had some early form of aerobic respiration as a detoxification pathway; (2) anaerobes that had a way of hiding from the oxygen, like today's methanogens that live in anaerobic mud; and (3) the photosynthesizers themselves.

From the organisms that survived that catastrophic bottleneck came every living thing we currently see around us.

So we're far from being the only organisms that cause ecological problems.  The reason the topic comes up, in fact, is because of another example I'd never heard of until I bumped into a paper in the Geological Society of North America Bulletin last week; the Devonian mass extinctions, which are one of the "Big Five" extinction events that have struck the Earth.  This particular series of cataclysms wiped out an estimated seventy percent of marine species, but it may have been triggered by the evolution of something that seems innocuous, even benevolent.

Tree roots.

Plants had only colonized the land during the previous period, the Silurian, enabled to do so by yet another innovation; the evolution of vascular tissue.  The internal plumbing vascular plants have (the xylem and phloem you probably remember from your biology classes) allow plants to move water farther and faster, so they were no longer so tied to living in ponds and lakes.  Plus, vascular tissue in many plants doubles as support tissue, so this facilitated growing taller (a significant advantage when you're competing with your near neighbors for light).

But if you're taller, you're also more likely to topple when it's windy.  So then there's selection for who's got the best support system.  The winners: plants with roots.

Devonian Forest by Eduard Riou (ca. 1872) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Like vascular tissue, roots are multi-purpose.  They not only provide support and anchoring, they're good at creating lots of absorptive surface area for water and nutrients.  (Some roots are also evolved to store starch -- carrots come to mind -- but that's an innovation that seems to have come much later.)  So now we have a competition between plants for who's got the best supports, and who can access nutrients from the soils the fastest.

Roots very quickly became good at twisting their way into rocks.  You've undoubtedly seen it; tree roots clinging to, and breaking up, rocks, asphalt, cement, pretty much any barrier they can get a foothold into.  When that happened, suddenly there's an erosive force breaking up bedrock and transporting nutrients (especially phosphorus) into plant tissue.  Phosphorus began to leach out of the rock into the soil, and when the plants died all the phosphorus in the tissue was released into rivers, streams, and lakes.

The result was a massive influx of nutrients into bodies of water.

Have you ever seen what happens when chemical fertilizers get into a pond?  It fosters algal blooms, and when the algae dies and decomposes, the oxygen levels plummet and the entire pond dies.

That's what happened during the late Devonian Period -- but planet-wide.

The huge reef-building rugose and tabulate corals and stromatoporid sponges were wiped out en masse.  Other groups, such as trilobites and brachiopods, which depended on the reefs for habitat and food, got knocked back hard as well.

All, the authors claim, because of a nifty innovation in the structure of land plants.

It's tempting to think that the environment is stable; we look around us and think things have always been this way, and will always be this way.  What more of us need to understand is that while the global ecosystem is resilient up to a point, there is always a tipping point.  The scary part is we can pass that point suddenly, without even realizing it.  Then before we're even aware of what's happened, the last chance to turn things around is gone.

The difference between what happened during the Great Oxidation Event and the Devonian Mass Extinctions, and what's happening now, is that back then there was no conscious awareness on the part of the organisms who created the problem and those that were affected.  Now, we have (or should have) the awareness to see what is happening, and enough knowledge to make some smart decisions and halt the self-destructive path we're on.

Let's hope that it's not too late.

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Modern-day Cassandras

When people think of environmental degradation, usually what comes to mind are urban areas, agricultural land either grazed bare by cattle or sheep or devoted to monoculture farming, and obviously damaged sites like mines, oilfields, and landfills.  It's a little alarming when studies are done that show that an entire country is an example of a severely degraded environment.

Especially when the country is as big as Australia.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Diliff, Koala climbing tree, CC BY-SA 3.0]

My guess is that Australia wouldn't be the first place you'd think of when it comes to ecological damage.  But a two-thousand-page state of the environment report, commissioned by the Australian government, resulted in an overall assessment that the condition of the country's ecosystems is "shocking."  Amongst the findings:

• Nineteen of Australia's ecosystem are "on the verge of collapse."
• Non-native plant species now outnumber native ones.
• More species have gone extinct in Australia in the last two hundred years than on any other continent.  (Not country; continent.)
• Two hundred species endemic to Australia -- found nowhere else in the world -- have experienced upgraded threat status in the last five years.
• In the past ten years, there has been a record number of droughts, wildfires, record-breaking floods, and typhoons.
• There have been six major coral-bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef in the world.

In a dramatic example of how environmental effects don't stop at national borders, a large contributor to the problem has been climate change -- even though Australia's government has committed to cutting carbon emissions by 43% by the year 2030.  Which is lovely, but when there are countries like the United States still thumbing their noses at decreasing fossil fuel use, it's not going to make much difference.

Not that the Australians themselves have done everything right, mind you.  Many of the exotic species -- most notoriously, the European rabbit -- were brought in deliberately.  Previous governments have been much less eco-friendly than the current one, usually citing budget issues as an excuse not to do anything.

It reminds me of a discussion I had with one of my environmental science students years ago.  The question I threw out to the class was, "What would it take for governments to take action on environmental issues, specifically carbon emissions and climate change?"  Her answer was, "Things will have to get a great deal worse.  Bad enough that ordinary people have their lives drastically changed.  When the food starts running out, when the heat starts killing not just poor people in third world countries but middle-class folks right here in the United States.  I hate to put it this way, but until it's bad enough that people living right in our neighborhoods are dying because of it, we'll just keep on doing what we've always done and pretending everything's okay."

I think she's spot-on.  The problem is, once it gets to that point, it's too late to do anything to halt it.  As the Australians have found out, as the Americans and Western Europeans are finding out, once entire countries are sweltering in a pressure cooker, there's not much you can do other than try to survive it -- and accept that some won't.

Of course, developing countries and the third world has known that for decades.  Right now, Pakistan, India, and large parts of central and northern Africa are experiencing record high temperatures as well.  Unlike the United States and Western Europe, though, this is nothing new.  It seems like every year they have a new record-setting heat wave, people die, and it barely is a blip on the radar in the industrialized world.

Yet another reason why we think we're immune to the effects of what we've been doing to the climate for the past hundred years.

It's profoundly maddening when you think about the fact that scientists and environmentally-conscious laypeople like myself have been sounding the alarm about this for decades.  I'd like to hope that this new report out of Australia will shake a few people up, but our history of ignoring the experts leaves me feeling like this will get shoved under the rug, too.

Remember the character of Cassandra from Greek mythology?  She was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, and was given a blessing and a curse by the god Apollo -- that she could see the future, but when she told people about it, no one would believe her.  Even after Troy was sacked and burned, and her parents killed -- just as she'd predicted -- still people discounted what she said.  The environmental scientists are like modern-day Cassandras, telling people what the models said would happen, and even after the models have proved correct over and over (in fact, when they were wrong, it was usually because they underestimated the effects), people still shrug their shoulders and pretend nothing's wrong.

I'd like to find a positive way to end this post, but I'm fresh out of ideas about how to do that.  The situation is dire.  Our only hope -- slim as it is -- is to elect politicians who place the global environment in first place on the priorities list.  Until we do that, I'm afraid the Cassandras will continue their fruitless prophesying, and the rest of us will continue our slide into the pressure cooker.

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The house of cards

I was first introduced to the idea that human history has been shaped by climate swings back in 1990, with British science historian James Burke's prescient two-part documentary After the Warming.  In part one, he tracks the (natural) ups and downs that have occurred because of gradual shifts in the Earth's orbit and rotational axis; in part two, he then looks at the effects humans are having because of our out-of-control burning of fossil fuels and use-it-once-then-throw-it-away culture of consumerism.  From my standpoint now, thirty-two years after the documentary was released, his predictions seem nothing short of uncanny, right down to the United States's steadfast determination not to do a damn thing to address anthropogenic climate change.  But he even got a lot of the more specific effects spot-on.  For example, he predicted the crazy spate of Atlantic storms that caused billions of dollars of damage and resulted in the NOAA running out of hurricane names and having to switch over to "Alpha," "Beta," and "Gamma," even getting it right down to the year it occurred (2005).  Watching it now, it's almost like it was made today by someone with a slight penchant for bending the truth, not by someone three decades ago for whom all of these were merely shrewd forecasts.

If I have one criticism of Burke, it's that he gives the impression that everything in history boils down to the climate.  Part one, entertaining and enlightening as it is, is kind of a ninety-minute long exploration of the single-cause fallacy.  That said, it's still a sobering cautionary tale.  We can't discount the effects that shifts in the climate can have on humanity.  Right now in the central and southern United States we're trapped in a heat wave that has already broken records in an area that's accustomed to summer heat; simultaneously the much-more-poorly-prepared people of western Europe are not only facing record high temperatures but droughts and wildfires.

It remains to be seen how long it'll take before the climate naysayers will finally, grudgingly, admit that we've been right all along.

Another of Burke's oversights is an interesting one; although he considers other natural phenomena, he doesn't look at the effects of volcanic eruptions on the climate.  It may be because these are drastic, but usually short-lived; long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recall a piece I wrote a while back on the effects of an eruption in Iceland in the sixth century C. E. that was the principal cause of "the worst decade in history" -- a series of plagues, famines, and catastrophically cold winters that killed an estimated sixty million people.  It took nearly a hundred years for the effects to abate, and when they did, they led into an unusually warm period (probably because of the injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by the eruption).  An even bigger eruption, this one in Indonesia about seventy-four thousand years ago, is thought by some scientists to have nearly caused the human species to go extinct -- the "Toba Bottleneck" may have reduced the entire human population of the Earth to under ten thousand individuals.  (This conclusion, however, is still under serious debate amongst scientists.)

The reason all this comes up is because of an article at the site Yale Climate Connections sent to me by a loyal reader, which describes the historical impact of an eruption I'd never heard about -- the eruption of the Alaskan volcano Mount Okmok in 43 B. C. E.  

The caldera of Mount Okmok [Image courtesy of photographer Christina Neal and the USGS]

It was another massive one, with global effects.  Tree ring analysis from the White Mountains of California give evidence of the second-coldest winter on record.  Written accounts from Rome describe cold, dry summers that caused agricultural failures several years running; in Egypt, it manifested as the loss of the annual floods of the Nile River three times in a row, resulting in devastating drought and famine.

This, in turn, contributed to the collapse of the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt, then ruled by the famous and charismatic Queen Cleopatra VII.  

It's a little alarming to see how quickly the climate can change, and the havoc such changes can wreak.  It's why people like me have been sounding the alarm for decades, urging caution instead of what we've been doing, which is blundering about as if everything around us is permanent, as if we're guaranteed a clement climate and plenty of food and water.  All you have to do is to look at history to realize how precarious things are.  While I won't go as far as James Burke did in attributing damn near everything to the climate, there's no denying that in many ways the interlocking systems of our planet have the fragility of a house of cards.  Some things -- such as volcanic eruptions and orbital shifts -- we can't do anything about.  But once you see the effects of climate change on the history and habitability of the Earth, I don't see how you wouldn't come away absolutely convinced that we better do everything we can to protect the part of it we can do something about.

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The cost of helplessness

The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction defines disaster to mean:

A serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society at any scale due to hazardous events interacting with conditions of exposure, vulnerability and capacity, leading to one or more of the following: human, material, economic and environmental losses and impacts...  [Disasters] may test or exceed the capacity of a community or society to cope using its own resources, and therefore may require assistance from external sources, which could include neighbouring jurisdictions, or those at the national or international levels.

This comes up because the UNDRR just released its Global Assessment Report, which was (to put it mildly) not optimistic.  The rate of disasters (as defined) has been rising steadily; over the last two decades the world has averaged between 350 and 500 medium- to large-scale disasters a year, but at the current rate of increase we'll be up to an average of 560 by the year 2030.

That's 1.5 disasters a day.

The reason seems to be a combination of factors.  One, of course, is anthropogenic climate change, which is destabilizing the climate worldwide (as just one of many examples, the southeastern and midwestern United States is forecast to have record-breaking heat over the next three days, and summer hasn't even officially started yet).  Sea level rise is not only threatening coastlines, if it gets much worse (and there is no reason to think it will not) there are a number of island nations that will simply cease to exist, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Vanuatu, the Marshall Islands, and the Maldives topping the list.  The combined cost of all these disasters, especially in Asia and the Pacific, is predicted to cost affected nations 1.6% of their GDP every year.

You can't incur these kinds of costs and continue to function as a society.

South Tarawa Island, part of the nation of Kiribati [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Photo taken by Government of Kiribati employee in the course of their work, South Tarawa from the air, CC BY 3.0]

The UNDRR's report found that the primary culprits in our vulnerability were:

• Optimism -- sure, we built our town on the side of a volcano, but I'm sure it won't erupt.
• Underestimation -- if there's a flood, we'll get a bit of water in our basement, but we can manage that.
• Invincibility -- we'll just ride this hurricane out, I'm not afraid of some wind and rain.

I think that's spot on, but I'd like to add three of my own:

• Helplessness -- what can I do?  I'm just one person.  It doesn't matter if I continue to drive a gas-guzzler, because no one else is gonna give them up.
• Corporate callousness and greed -- strip-mining the Amazon Basin produces valuable resources that are absolutely necessary for industry.
• Media disinformation -- there's no such thing as human-caused climate change; Tucker Carlson said it was a myth made up by the radical Left.

Despite the odds, this is no time to give up and accept catastrophes as inevitable.  "The world needs to do more to incorporate disaster risk in how we live, build and invest, which is setting humanity on a spiral of self-destruction," said Amina J. Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations.  "We must turn our collective complacency to action. Together we can slow the rate of preventable disasters as we work to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals for everyone, everywhere."

Which I certainly agree with in principle, but how do you put it into practice?  We've known about humanity's role in climate change, and the potential devastation it will wreak, for more than three decades.  I remember teaching students about it my first year as a public school teacher, which was 1986.  The people who have been the most vocal in advocating a global climate change policy -- my dear friend, the articulate and endlessly courageous Dr. Sandra Steingraber, comes to mind -- have been fighting a Sisyphean battle.

"Disasters can be prevented, but only if countries invest the time and resources to understand and reduce their risks," said Mami Mizutori, who heads the UNDRR.  "By deliberately ignoring risk and failing to integrate it in decision making, the world is effectively bankrolling its own destruction.  Critical sectors, from government to development and financial services, must urgently rethink how they perceive and address disaster risk."

Yes, but how?  Humanity is notorious for valuing short-term expediency and profit over long-term safety -- and even viability.  There are certainly days when I feel like I'm shouting into a vacuum; I've been ranting about environmental issues since I started Skeptophilia in 2011.  But giving up is exactly the wrong response, as tempting as it is some days.  Perhaps we don't know what positive effect we can have if we act, but we do know what positive effect we'll have if we throw our hands up and say, "To hell with it."

Zero.

I'll end with two quotes that I think are particularly apposite.

The first one comes from one of my personal heroes, Wangari Maathai, the amazing Kenyan activist, environmentalist, and women's rights advocate: "In order to accomplish anything, 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."

And I'll give the last word to my friend Sandra: "We are all musicians in a great human orchestra, and it is now time to play the Save the World Symphony.  You are not required to play a solo, but you are required to know what instrument you hold and play it as well as you can.  You are required to find your place in the score.  What we love we must protect.  That's what love means.  From the right to know and the duty to inquire flows the obligation to act."

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Greta of the Yukon

If you needed more evidence of how little it takes to get the woo-woos leaping about making excited squeaking noises, look no further than this photograph, which they're saying proves that Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg is a time traveler.

Okay, I'll admit there's a resemblance.  For reference, here's a photograph of the real Greta Thunberg:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons European Parliament, Greta Thunberg urges MEPs to show climate leadership (49618310531) (cropped), CC BY 2.0]

The first image is real enough; it's not a clever fake.  It's a photograph of children working at a Canadian placer gold mine, and was taken in 1898.  The original photograph resides in the archives of the University of Washington, and carries the description, "three children operating rocker at a gold mine on Dominion Creek, Yukon Territory."

This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.  Previous iterations include an 1870 photograph proving that Nicolas Cage is an undead vampire, and a self-portrait by nineteenth-century French painter Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel showing that he's the same person as Keanu Reeves.  What's simultaneously hilarious and maddening about this last claim is that okay, the painting looks a little like Reeves, but later photographs of Boutet de Monvel (which you can see at the link provided) look nothing like him at all.  Which you'd think would make the woo-woos laugh sheepishly and say, "Okay, I guess we were wrong.  What a bunch of goobers we are."  But that never happens.  I'll bet some of them think Reeves realized people were catching on to his undead-ness and arranged for pics to be taken of some other guy that then were labeled with Boutet de Monvel's name.

Because there's no claim so ridiculous that you can't change it so as to make it even more ridiculous.

Lest you think I'm exaggerating how loony these claims get, back to the non-Thunberg photo, which has generated two explanations, if I can dignify them by that term:

1. Thunberg was a child in late nineteenth-century northern Canada, was forced to work in a gold mine, and was so appalled by the environmental destruction caused by mining that she either time-traveled into the future or else figured out how to achieve immortality and eternal youth (sources differ on which), and is now bringing that first-hand knowledge to us so we can potentially do something about it.
2. Thunberg actually is a twenty-first-century Swedish person, but has figured out how to travel in time so she can go back and sabotage mining operations and save the present from the devastation done by industry in the past.  She got caught at her game by a photographer back in 1898.

What strikes me about both of these, besides the fact that to believe either one you'd have to have a pound and a half of lukewarm cream-of-wheat where most of us have a brain, is that if either of these is Thunberg's strategy, it's not working.  If she's a poor mining kid from 1898 and has come into the future to warn us, mostly what's happening is that government leaders and corporate CEOs are sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "la la la la la la la not listening," while they proceed to continue doing every damnfool destructive thing they've always done, only harder.  If, on the other hand, today's Thunberg is going back into the past to throw a spanner into the works of the mining corporations, it had zero effect, because if you'll look carefully at the history of mining for the last 120 years, you will not find lines like, "Between 1900 and 1950, thirty-seven different mining operations all over North America were shut down permanently, because a mysterious teenage girl with a long braid snuck in and dynamited the entrance to the mining shafts, then disappeared without trace."  

So okay, the girl looks a little like Thunberg.  I'll grant you that.  But the claim that she is Thunberg makes me want to weep softly while banging my forehead on my desk.  It seems like the woo-woos have espoused some kind of anti-Ockham's-Razor; given a variety of explanations for the same phenomenon, let's pick the one that is the most ridiculous and requires a metric fuckton of ad hoc assumptions.  

I'll just end by stating that if I'm wrong, and Thunberg is an immortal time-traveler, I wish she'd stop wasting her time in the hopeless task of trying to convince the money-grubbing anti-science world leaders we need to stop burning fossil fuels, and go back in time with blueprints for high-efficiency solar cell technology.  Give 'em to Nikola Tesla.  I bet he'd know what to do with them.

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I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

... gang aft agley

When I taught environmental science, I frequently ran into what I call the "Why Don't We Just...?" mentality.

Presented with an ecological problem -- say, plastic pollution in the ocean -- someone would inevitably propose something that drastically oversimplified the issue.  "Why don't we just equip ships with giant nets to scoop it all up?"  The problems with this include:

• There is way too much plastic trash in the ocean to feasibly remove by ships with nets.
• A lot of the problem isn't the big stuff, but the microplastics -- fragmentary pieces of plastic debris -- that get into the food chain, clog up the feeding apparatus of filter-feeding animals, cloud the water, and may be directly toxic.  These microplastics would almost certainly slip right through.
• Any scoop operation would inevitably catch and kill marine organisms that got caught up in the nets.
• Even if it was possible, what would we do with the trash once it was scooped up?

It brings to mind the quote by H. L. Mencken: "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong."

The difficulty is, the global ecosystem is an intricate web of relationships that connect to each other in sometimes unexpected ways, meaning that perturbing the balance is easy and fixing it once you've perturbed it is not.  Take, for example, the attempt to eradicate rats from Palmyra Atoll, which was the subject of a paper in Biotropica last month.

The problem seemed simple enough.  Black rats were accidentally introduced to Palmyra during World War II, and as they have done in so many places, they more or less proceeded to take over.  The low-lying island proved to be a smorgasbord for the invasive rodents, with seabird eggs and young and the seeds and fruits of native trees to feast upon.  The result was predictable enough: seabird populations dropped precipitously, and native plant species were in trouble as well, because the rats ate the seeds so voraciously that there were literally no new saplings to replace any that died.

So, what to do?  To save the ecosystem, a trio of agencies overseeing the island -- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, The Nature Conservancy, and Island Conservation -- got the funding for a massive rat eradication program.  It was successful, and amazingly enough, the last rats on Palmyra were killed in 2011.

All better, right?  Pristine wilderness resurgent?

Not exactly.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Let's start with the good stuff first.  The Asian tiger mosquito, another exotic import, didn't last too long after the rats were gone.  They're specialists in feeding on mammal blood, and the rats were all there was, so the bloodsucking little fiends all starved to death.  (I love wildlife as much as the next tree-hugger, but I have to say that in the case of the tiger mosquito, good riddance.)  The seabirds bounced back pretty well, with no predators eating the young.

The forests, however, were a different story.

It turned out the rats were not only eating native seeds and fruit, they were keeping down the population of another exotic -- the coconut palm.  With a flourishing rat population, only a very small percent of the coconuts produced made it to the ground without being gnawed to pieces.  Now that the rats are gone, the palms are going nuts (*ba-dum-bum-kssh*) and outcompeting just about every other kind of vegetation on the island.

"I was on the island in 2012, just after the eradication, and could easily navigate through the open jungle understory," said study lead author Anna Miller-ter Kuile, of the University of California - Santa Barbara, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Two years later when I went back, I was wading through an infuriating carpet of seedlings that were taller than me, tripping over piles of coconuts...  While there was a fourteen-fold increase in seedling biomass, most of these new seedlings were juvenile coconut palms, their proliferation left unchecked by the removal of the rats."

As Robert Burns put it, "The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley."

It brings to mind the Precautionary Principle: it's always easier and cheaper to prevent a problem than it is to fix it afterward.  The classic example of this is the mess down in south Florida created by the straightening of the Kissimmee River, which used to be a slow, meandering stream snaking its way through the Everglades.  Mostly motivated by draining swampland for agriculture and suburban expansion, the Army Corps of Engineers launched a project in the 1940s to change the river's course, reducing its fifty-kilometer pathway by about half.

They succeeded.  In the process, they destroyed wetlands that had been pristine wildlife habitats, reducing bird populations in some places by 90%.  The deepening of the channel caused a faster water flow, draining so much water from the surrounding land that sinkholes started opening up, some of them actually swallowing up houses.  Silt runoff into the Gulf of Mexico caked coral reefs and wiped out shallow-water marine ecosystems, including the ones supporting lucrative fisheries.

So in the 1970s, the Army Corps of Engineers kind of went, "Oops," and launched the Kissimmee River Restoration Project.  The current cost to return the area to where it was prior to trying to improve things: $578 million.  And that's not even considering how feasible it is to actually fix it.  As the study on Palmyra Atoll shows, it's not easy to repair a damaged ecosystem even if you try.  The "Why Don't We Just...?" mentality is almost always tempting, and almost always wrong.

It seems fitting to end all this with a quote from John Muir, the American environmentalist who founded the Sierra Club: "When you try to pick out one thing by itself, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about one of the deepest mysteries in science: the origin of time.

Most physical processes are time-reversible.  If you looked at a video of a ball bouncing off a wall, then looked at the same video clip in reverse, it would be really difficult to tell which was the forward one and which the backwards one.  Down to the subatomic level, physical processes tend to make no distinction based upon the "arrow of time."

And yet our experience of time is very, very different.  We remember the past and don't know anything about the future.  Cause and effect proceed in that order, always.  Time only flows one direction, and most reputable physicists believe that real time travel is fundamentally impossible.  You can alter the rate at which time flows -- differences in duration in different reference frames are a hallmark of the theory of relativity -- but its direction seems to be unchanging and eternal.

Why?  This doesn't arise naturally from any known theory.  Truly, it is still a mystery, although today we're finally beginning to pry open the door a little, and peek at what is going on in this oddest of physical processes.

In The Order of Time, by physicist Carlo Rovelli (author of the wonderful Seven Brief Lectures in Physics), we learn what's at the cutting edge of theory and research into this unexplained, but everyday and ubiquitous, experience.  It is a fascinating read -- well worth the time it will take you to ponder the questions it raises.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The lure of nature

I didn't have an easy childhood.  There were a lot of reasons for this, some stemming from my own issues and some completely outside my control.  But one happy constant in my life, and the high point of every year, was that in the summer my dad and I would go on a three-week car trip to Arizona and New Mexico.

The reason for this was that my dad was an avid rockhound.  Not only did he simply like rocks, he was a talented lapidary -- he had the diamond-edged saws and grinding wheels and all the other equipment to turn agates and jaspers and turquoise into beautiful jewelry.  Our summer expeditions resulted in the car coming back weighing twice as much as it did going out, because the trunk was full of boxes of fist-sized chunks of brightly-colored rocks we'd found while hiking in the canyons.

I loved these trips.  My dad was an interesting guy but not very talkative -- a trait I definitely inherited myself -- so it left me lots of space to wander my own interior world while messing about outdoors.  I liked rocks myself, but my favorite things about the desert were the blue skies and clear air, the stark, pristine beauty of the cliffs and mesas, the weird and wonderful cacti, and -- most of all -- the absolute silence.  Where I grew up, in southern Louisiana, was at the time a quiet, not-quite-suburban neighborhood not on the direct path to anywhere, but even so I was never far away from traffic noise.  In the canyons of southeastern Arizona, however, there was literally no sound but the sighing of the wind, and sometimes the distant call of a hawk.  The rumble of a distant thunderstorm or the howling of a coyote at night sounded otherworldly.  It was a strange, beautiful, harsh, magical place, and I swore as a child one day I'd live in Arizona permanently.  It never happened, but over the years I've been back several times to visit some of my favorite childhood haunts, and the southwestern desert still has an attraction for me that borders on the spiritual.

The reason this comes up is a study that appeared this week in The Journal of Environmental Education called, "How Combinations of Recreational Activities Predict Connection to Nature Among Youth," by Rachel Szczytko (Pisces Foundation), Kathryn Tate Stevenson and Markus Nils Peterson (North Carolina State University), and Howard Bondell (University of Melbourne).  The team of researchers looked into what activities were most likely to lead to kids feeling a lifelong connection to the outdoors, and they found that social activities -- family camping trips, Girl or Boy Scouts, programs like 4-H and Primitive Pursuits -- were good, but far better were activities outdoors that were solitary.  Give a kid time to explore outside on his/her own -- whether in the context of an activity like hunting or fishing, or just for the hell of it -- and (s)he's likely to form a permanent bond to nature.

"We saw that there were different combinations of specific activities that could build a strong connection to nature; but a key starting point was being outside, in a more solitary activity," said study co-author Kathryn Tate Stevenson, in a press release from North Carolina State University.  "Maybe we need more programming to allow children to be more contemplative in nature, or opportunities to establish a personal connection.  That could be silent sits, or it could be activities where children are looking or observing on their own.  It could mean sending kids to the outdoors to make observations on their own.  It doesn’t mean kids should be unsupervised, but adults could consider stepping back and letting kids explore on their own."

My dad certainly did that.  I got good instruction on safety -- always carry water and food, wear sturdy hiking boots, don't stint on the suntan lotion (a rule that had to be reinforced daily, given that as a kid I was kind of the half-naked savage type), stay on established trails, and so on.  I already had a healthy respect for wildlife, having grown up in a place that had water moccasins and copperheads galore, so I kept a good lookout for rattlesnakes and scorpions and the like.  As a result, I never got lost or injured, and spent many a happy hour exploring the desert, fostering a love for the outdoors that I still enjoy.

And we need more people growing up with a love of the natural world, given how much our current activities are imperiling it.  "There are all kinds of benefits from building connections to nature and spending time outside," Stevenson said.  "One of the benefits we’re highlighting is that children who have a strong connection to nature are more likely to want to take care of the environment in the future."

It certainly did that for me.  I never got to live in the desert, as I wanted as a child, but instead made my home in one of the most beautiful places on Earth -- the lake country of upstate New York, where I have 3.5 acres of woods and fields, a nice pond (suitable for skinnydipping), and if that's not enough, I'm five miles from a National Forest with miles of trails for running, hiking, and cross-country skiing.

Which is, to me, a recipe for bliss.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun and amusing discussion of a very ominous topic; how the universe will end.

In The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) astrophysicist Katie Mack takes us through all the known possibilities -- a "Big Crunch" (the Big Bang in reverse), the cheerfully-named "Heat Death" (the material of the universe spread out at uniform density and a uniform temperature of only a few degrees above absolute zero), the terrifying -- but fortunately extremely unlikely -- Vacuum Decay (where the universe tears itself apart from the inside out), and others even wilder.

The cool thing is that all of it is scientifically sound.  Mack is a brilliant theoretical astrophysicist, and her explanations take cutting-edge research and bring it to a level a layperson can understand.  And along the way, her humor shines through, bringing a touch of lightness and upbeat positivity to a subject that will take the reader to the edges of the known universe and the end of time.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Meadow management

My wife and I live on a 3.5 acre bit of land in the hills of upstate New York.  We're lucky to have that kind of space, and the place itself is beautiful; it's crossed by a little stony-bedded creek, and has a swimmable pond and lots of big old trees for shade.

And lots of lawn.  At least it did when we moved in here eighteen years ago.  We've been gradually doing battle with the lawn for most of that eighteen years.  We replaced some with gardens -- which was a net loss of discretionary time, since weeding a garden takes a great deal more time than mowing an equal-sized piece of lawn.  My wife got the idea of replacing a lot of the grass in the back yard with clover, and she was helped out in that endeavor by our large galumphing dog Guinness, who essentially does a hockey stop whenever he's chasing his tennis ball, tearing up large strips of turf and thus earning himself the nickname "Skidmark."  But the clover's finally taken hold in a big way, and it not only looks great and needs way less mowing, it's a happy place for the honeybees.

That last bit was our incentive for turning a chunk of our front yard into a meadow.  A wonderful local nursery, The Plantsmen, specializes in native wildlife-friendly plants, so a couple of months ago we went down and came back with my Honda Element packed with such unusual finds as blue-stemmed goldenrod (Solidago caesia), nannyberry (Viburnum lentago), American scarlet elderberry (Sambucus racemosa), two different kinds of bergamot (Monarda spp.), fragrant sumac (Rhus aromatica), serviceberry (Amelanchier canadensis), and in a corner that has a permanent spring, the charming and water-loving buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis).

The Meadow thus far.  Okay, it doesn't look like much yet, but just you wait until our plants have a couple years' growth behind them.

The reason this topic comes up is because of a study that came out this week in the journal Biological Conservation about the role of verges in preserving valuable pollinators and beneficial insects.  Verges, they tell us, are hotspots for flowers and pollinators, often containing a dramatic diversity of different species (not all of which are native, of course; but then, neither is the white clover we seeded in our back yard, and I still consider it to be on balance a beneficial plant).  

Of course, roads themselves are a necessary evil, replacing and fragmenting habitat, not to mention the never-ending problem of roadkill.  (Don't just think of mammals, here; think of the number of insects killed yearly by windshield collisions, and keep in mind that even the National Pesticide Information Center says that 97% of insect species are neutral with respect to humanity, or else actively beneficial).  So given that roads aren't going anywhere, the best thing to do is to figure out how to maximize whatever's positive about them, and minimize the negative ecological impact.

Verges seem to be the biggest positive feature, as long as they're managed properly.  The key, says the researchers (a group led by environmental scientist Benjamin Phillips of the University of Exeter), is to mow as infrequently as is practical for the spot.  Surprisingly, "don't mow at all" turns out to be a bad idea.  The authors write:

An observational study of 19 road verges in the UK found that mown verges (cut once between May and August, cuttings not removed) had on average 67% fewer flowers and 61% fewer pollinators across the summer than unmown verges, experimentally manipulated mowing frequency (cuts/year: 0, 1 (early autumn) or 2 (early summer and early autumn)) and removal of cuttings (left in the verge or removed) in a single road verge (with a species-rich plant community) in the Netherlands.  Increasing the number of cuts from 0 to 1 cut resulted in 3.5 times greater flower density and 2 times greater flower species richness, but no significant effect on pollinator density, though increasing from 1 to 2 cuts/year resulted in 3.5 times greater pollinator density.

This is good information for our own little meadow, because I wasn't sure if we should mow at all, but it sounds like it's a good idea; in our case, not only for the pollinators, but because in our area, completely stopping mowing is a good way to turn a meadow into a tangle of walnut saplings and nasty, fast-growing exotics like Tatarian honeysuckle and multiflora rose.

So it sounds like mowing once or twice -- maybe once in spring and once in fall -- might be the way to go.  That way the plants that die all the way back to the ground in the winter (like the goldenrod and bergamot) will get a fresh start each year, and we won't have competitors for the woody shrubs (such as the sumac, nannyberry, serviceberry, and elderberry).

I can't mow near where the buttonbush is, however, because the spring keeps that piece of the lawn soggy, and if I try to mow it our lawn mower sinks up to the axle and then I have to tow it out with my car.

Yes, that's the voice of experience, right there.

In any case, this paper was nicely timed from my perspective, as I was wondering what I'd do after the first frost when everything starts to die back.  Since we planted as we did to encourage the bees and butterflies, it's good to know that there's some solid scientific research to back up our choice of how to handle it.

With luck, in a couple of years we'll have something really beautiful to enjoy -- and a nice habitat for wildlife, as well.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is for anyone fascinated with astronomy and the possibility of extraterrestrial life: The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World, by Sarah Stewart Johnson.

Johnson is a planetary scientist at Georgetown University, and is also a hell of a writer.  In this book, she describes her personal path to becoming a respected scientist, and the broader search for life on Mars -- starting with simulations in the most hostile environments on Earth, such as the dry valleys of central Antarctica and the salt flats of Australia, and eventually leading to analysis of data from the Mars rovers, looking for any trace of living things past or present.

It's a beautifully-told story, and the whole endeavor is tremendously exciting.  If, like me, you look up at the night sky with awe, and wonder if there's anyone up there looking back your way, then Johnson's book should be on your reading list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]