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Living within a living, loving planet
Global Warming
The Flight from Nature
Dec 24th
The Flight from Nature
“Nobody is going to come and get rid of anthropogenic climate change, either—not without putting a full stop at the end of the entire galaxy of extravagant energy-wasting habits that are treated as normal by modern industrial society. That this obvious conclusion is far from obvious to the people who do most of the talking about climate change—that it is in fact unthinkable to them—is, I think, a direct result of the way that modern lifestyles distance people from nature, and especially members of the well-to-do classes that play so central a role in climate change activism. The fact remains that a conclusion can be unthinkable and still be quite true.”
The Flight from Nature December 19, 2018
John Michael Greer
https://www.ecosophia.net/
Tipping Points
Dec 23rd
“Policymakers “have severely underestimated” the risks of ecological “tipping points” – feedback mechanisms that could occur if certain thresholds are passed – a new study has found. Research published in the journal Science suggests that 45% of potential environmental collapses are interrelated and could amplify one another, highlighting ‘how overstressed and overlapping natural systems are combining to throw up a growing number of unwelcome surprises’, the Guardian writes. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/20/risks-of-domino-effect-of-tipping-points-greater-than-thought-study-says
Just 19% of the 30 types of ecosystem transitions studied were happening in isolation.”
Carbon Brief Daily | 20/12/2018
There is no “could occur” about it. The tipping point has occurred and the feedback mechanisms are spinning away with runaway increases in greenhouse gasses. At the moment, greenhouse gasses are increasing at a rate of over 50% per decade and this rate is also increasing.
http://www.earthenspirituality.com/tippingpoints/tippingpoints.pdf
First Fern Genome Shows Unique Bacterial Partnership
Aug 21st
Discover magazine
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/07/02/first-fern-genomes/#.W3vFpc5KiM_
First Fern Genome Shows Unique Bacterial Partnership
This article and research further supports James Lovelock and the Daisyworld hypothesis. Question? What probable action that we know of will lower the CO2 such that we won’t skip another ice age? If we don’t have another ice age, then what property or force that we know of will curtail the non-linear increase in CO2.
My previous post about the CO2 and methane being produced under and around thawing permafrost lakes will increase CO2 and with rising oceans, there will be more swamp and more vegetation under water which will increase CO2 and methane from rotting plants. Why should we not be very, very afraid on behalf of Gaia?
“Though it’s little, the tiny fern Azolla may have changed the world 50 million years ago. Fossil records from the Arctic suggest that these fast-growing, carbon-sequestering ferns removed enough carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere to cool the then-greenhouse globe and allow today’s polar ice caps to form.
In more recent Earth history, rice farmers in Asia have been using Azolla as a natural fertilizer for over 1,000 years. Nostoc azollae, a cyanobacterium species that lives inside Azolla leaves, captures nitrogen from the air and converts it into a form that the ferns — and rice plants — can use.
Many plants have symbiotic relationships with the bacteria living inside them, but Azolla’s partnership with Nostoc is unique because the bacterium lives inside the fern for its whole life and transfers from parent to child when Azolla reproduces. It’s a microbial inheritance that most plants don’t get — they must start fresh with bacteria from the environment.
Evidence hinted that the Azolla fern and its cyanobacterium partner might share a long evolutionary past together. Unraveling the details of their evolutionary history was one reason Li and his team wanted to sequence the Azolla genome.”
“Ferns may have been overlooked partly because they have a reputation for massive genomes that would be expensive to sequence — the average fern has about four times the genetic information of a human — and because the benefits of sequencing fern genomes is not immediately obvious compared to sequencing the genomes of other plants, like agricultural crops.”
“Comparing the new Azolla genome with the previously-sequenced Nostoc genome confirms that the fern and the cyanobacterium have been partners for as long as 100 million years, evolving and branching into new species together. From experiments with the fern’s genome, Li’s team found that the cyanobacterium’s ability to capture nitrogen from air keeps the fern nourished when other nitrogen sources aren’t available.”
“Li’s team studied the fern genomes to track down the origin of the natural pesticides and found evidence that in Salvinia, the pesticide protein might have come from bacteria rather than from plant ancestors. Transferring genes between species is fairly common among bacteria (this is what makes bacteria so good at resisting antibiotics) but rare in more complex life, like plants.”
Melting Permafrost Below Arctic Lakes Dangerous NASA Warns
Aug 21st
Melting Permafrost Below Arctic Lakes Is Even More Dangerous to the Climate, NASA Warns
https://www.space.com/41533-abrupt-permafrost-melting-carbon-climate-impact.html
Scientists have worried for years that rising temperatures will free carbon trapped in frozen soil in the Arctic, accelerating the pace of climate change — but now they believe abrupt thawing below lakes is even more dangerous.
That’s the finding of a new paper published as part of a 10-year NASA collaboration to study how climate change will play out in the icy Arctic region.
“We don’t have to wait 200 or 300 years to get these large releases of permafrost carbon,” lead study author Katey Walter Anthony, an ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said in a NASA statement about the research. “Within my lifetime, my children’s lifetime, it should be ramping up. It’s already happening but it’s not happening at a really fast rate right now, but within a few decades, it should peak.” [Climate Change Strengthens Earth’s ‘Heartbeat’ — and That’s Bad News
The Truth Sometimes Hurts
Aug 12th
The Truth Sometimes Hurts
We scientists need help to communicate in a post-truth world
By Kate Marvel on August 8, 2018
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/the-truth-sometimes-hurts/
“More seriously, every time I talk about the uncertainties inherent in climate projections, I feel attacked from all sides of the climate mitigation debate. I admit that in the current landscape, any expression of uncertainty is immediately weaponized by those who want to delay climate action.”
Stop and think a minute. Many of our professionals work in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Take, for instance, our medical profession. Despite their utmost efforts to “get it right” all the time, the human body doesn’t react to medicine in the same way every day. Why? We are a complex, living organism, not a machine. Earth is a complex, living organism also. As a living organism, our usual measuring instruments miss the mark because they were designed to deal with a machine-like inanimate “things.” Thus there has to be some uncertainty with climate change predictions. Consider weather. The weather forecasts are full of uncertainty and often off centre. So, we live with that. Climate is just weather over a long period of time.
Consider our dedicated and compassionate medical workers do their best with the tools they have available yet they work daily with uncertainty and we accept that.
Climate scientists are often in the best position to analyse and make responsible moral judgements re: climate change. Who knows better? When it comes to risk, I’d sooner believe a few climate change researchers than a spokesperson for an industry that takes profits from CO2 emitting activities.
We ARE the Planet
Aug 8th
“Professor Johan Rockström, a co-author of the new paper from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, told BBC News. ‘What we are saying is that when we reach 2C of warming, we may be at a point where we hand over the control mechanism to Planet Earth herself.’”
Carbon Brief Daily | 07/08/2018
I don’t seem to be on the same page here. When did anyone ever dare to think that (1) That we were ever “in control” of Earth’s survival mechanisms and (2) That we have anything to “hand over” to “Planet Earth.” We and all our brethren are first and foremost “Earthlings.” We are not “on” this planet, we ARE the planet – inseparable.
We have not “lost” our connection. That’s impossible. We have either lost consciousness of it or perhaps never were conscious of being part of the, so to speak, eyes, ears, nose and throat of our greater beingness, the marvellous planet Earth.
Society as Ecosystem in a Time of Collapse, Part I
Aug 1st
Society as Ecosystem in a Time of Collapse, Part I
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-07-30/human-predators-human-prey/
By Richard Heinberg, July 30, 2018
First of three parts
Richard Heinberg is the author of thirteen books including: – Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy, co-authored with David Fridley (2016) – Afterburn (2015) – Snake Oil (July 2013) – The End of Growth (August 2011) – The Post Carbon Reader (2010) (editor) – Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last…
The Climate Change Denial Industry
Jul 30th
The Climate Change Denial Industry
“ExxonMobil gave more than $2.3m to members of Congress and a corporate lobbying group that deny climate change and block efforts to fight climate change – eight years after pledging to stop its funding of climate denial, the Guardian has learned.”
“Last week Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute wrote that the Earth’s carrying capacity for humanity is not fixed. Apparently, we’re living in a magical world that is immune to ecological laws.
As you might imagine, I disagree.
My response to his article was published today in Undark Magazine.
https://undark.org/article/ted-nordhaus-carrying-capacity-ecology/
What warning signs would you expect to see if we humans were pressing at the limits of global carrying capacity? Resource depletion? Check. Pollution? Check. Dying oceans? Check.” Richard Heinberg
Sky: Further – The Breakthrough Institute’s Inconvenient History with Al Gore
April 14, 2014, by Paul D. Thacker
“While sometimes functioning as shadow universities, think tanks have been exposed as quasi lobbying organizations, with little funding transparency. Recent research has also pointed out that think tanks suffer from a lack of intellectual rigor. A case in point is the Breakthrough Institute run by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, which describes itself as a “progressive think tank.”
https://ethics.harvard.edu/blog/breakthrough-institutes-inconvenient-history-al-gore
Too many businesses are treating the Earth like a huge candy store
Jul 29th
Too many businesses are treating the Earth like a huge candy store
“We’re dealing with ‘a highly degraded ecosystem of forests that just get continuously logged over and over again.’”
Danna Smith of the Dogwood Alliance, a nonprofit organization.
“…trees cut down in the Southeast are usually replanted. But it can take a sapling decades to grow large enough to absorb and store as much carbon as the tree it replaced.”
Ten percent Sahara expansion
Jul 29th
Ten percent Sahara expansion
“The desert (Sahara) has expanded southward during summer by about ten percent, so it’s a fairly significant increase in the desert expanse over this 93-year period that we analyzed. Most people in the region depend on the food they grow on small family farms. So losing farmland could have grave consequences, especially as populations continue to grow.”
“Nigam is a professor at the University of Maryland. He says decreasing rainfall is likely a result of both natural cycles and human-caused global warming.”
So there we have the kernel of the problem. Decreasing small farmland and increasing population.