Earlier this summer, I was invited to write an essay on humanity’s troubled relationship with the changing atmosphere for a special issue of Audubon Magazine centered on the Audubon Society’s comprehensive new report on birds in a changing climate.
In part, my article, “How We Ran Out of Airtime,” considers the current human-generated carbon dioxide buildup in relation to a tumultuous period of atmospheric disruption triggered by another life form some 2.4 billion years ago. Here’s the opening section:
It should be no surprise, first of all, that humanity is taking its time absorbing and confronting what’s going on. Our interactions with climate, for far more than 99 percent of history, ran in one direction: Precipitation or temperatures changed, ice sheets or coastlines or deserts advanced or retreated, and communities thrived, suffered, or adjusted how or where they lived. Only a couple of decades have passed since people outside of a tiny community of scientists began to grasp that the human-climate relationship, in measurable but still subtle ways, now runs in two directions….
We are different from other life-forms that have become planet-scale powerhouses. Take blue-green cyanobacteria, organisms that began flooding the atmosphere with oxygen some 2.4 billion years ago. Some earth scientists call that atmospheric jolt the great Oxygen Catastrophe, because the buildup of oxygen was toxic to most other species at the time. And yes, you could step back and say there’s not much of a difference between our carbon binge and that oxygen outburst. Except those mats of photosynthesizing slime weren’t looking up at the sky, measuring and marveling at what they’d done. Through science, we are. With awareness comes responsibility, at least in theory. I’m pretty sure cyanobacteria are not self-aware. Read more…
A burial team in Monrovia, Liberia, on Sept. 6 collected the body of a man believed to have died from Ebola. Their workload has grown quickly in recent weeks.Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
The Ebola epidemic continues to rage in West Africa, and while it is very unlikely to reach pandemic scale (see The Economist), the outbreak provides a reminder of the linkages between disrupted ecosystems and human illness.
A portion of an illustration showing the links between wildlife and human health. Click for the full graphic and background.Credit EcoHealth Alliance
Now, a very helpful overview of the “one world, one health” concept has been written for the Future Earth blog by by Catherine Machalaba, program coordinator for health and policy at EcoHealth Alliance. The illustration above is part of an info-graphic created by Machalaba and a colleague. Here’s an excerpt: Read more…
A drawing of David Roberts, a prolific environmental blogger at Grist.org.Credit Grist
You may be among those, like me, who confronted a great digital emptiness over the last 12 months as Grist’s prolific environmental and political blogger and Twitter presence David Roberts went into a self-imposed offline exile. He’s back, having learned a thing or two, and he charts his 12 months of analog living in the October issue of Outside Magazine. It’s this week’s essential reading for students in my Blogging a Better Planet course at Pace University.
[Insert, Sept. 10, 10:25 p.m. | My blogging students and I chatted with Roberts via a Google Hangout.]
David Roberts of Grist Reviews His Offline Year and Online Plans
I hope you’ll read his article, too. Here are some fun tidbits, starting with Outside’s summary: Read more…
A good post on InsideClimate News last week explored a new study of organic compounds and other constituents in the briny water that emerges from gas or oil wells created using the high-pressure process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. (This “produced water” is a mix of fracturing fluid and water from the rock layers being drilled.)
California blue whales – the cow is 76 feet long and the calf is 47 feet – swim near the California Channel Islands (higher resolution).Credit J. Gilpatrick/M. Lynn/NOAA
The blue whale, the biggest animal on the planet, was hunted with abandon in the Pacific Ocean until the early 1970s. The species has been rebounding ever since, but a slowdown in the growth of the population frequenting waters off the California coast was a concern. Now it turns out to be a promising sign of recovery.
Scientists at the University of Washington (Cole C. Monnahan, Trevor A. Branch and André E. Punt) have just published research finding that the West Coast blue whale population of around 2,200 individuals appears to be approaching its pre-slaughter size, with the slowing growth a function of the carrying capacity of the marine ecosystem. Collisions with ships remain a problem, the scientists write, but should not affect the whales’ prospects.
A family in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, copes with the ash falling from the nearby volcano. This is one of many photographs taken in the threatened town by the French photographer Eric Lafforgue.Credit
A caldera is the cauldron-like depression formed when a volcanic eruption empties a shallow chamber of magma and the cone collapses. If the volcano is at sea level, the result, after the passage of time, can be a fine harbor.
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Astronauts on a space shuttle mission in 1994 photographed a deadly eruption of a volcano near Rabaul, Papua New Guinea.Credit
A fine harbor, and fertile soil from all that ash, attracts people. At the east end of New Britain Island in Papua New Guinea, the result was the port and one-time district capital, Rabaul. The capital shifted after two of the three smaller cones around the caldera, Tavurvur and Vulcan, explosively erupted in 1994. But plenty of people still live in Rabaul, and they live in harm’s way.
Jesse Smith, the skipper of the circumnavigating sailboat Obelisk, made for safer waters on August 29 as the Tavurvur Volcano erupted near Rabaul, Papua New Guinea. Aboard was the underwater photographer Christopher Hamilton, who took this photograph.Credit Christopher Hamilton
One result, which you can read below, is a remarkable firsthand account from the underwater photographer Christopher Hamilton and his partner, Leah Sindel, who were aboard the boat when the harbor began rumbling. They were sailing in the region photographing World War II shipwrecks and a cave full of skulls. The boat’s owner and skipper, pictured above in one of Hamilton’s photos (and the Facebook shot), is Jesse Smith.
But first I want to draw your attention to two other views of Rabaul and the eruption. Read more…
Drought in the West as of Aug. 26, as mapped on the Drought Monitor website. Dark brown is "exceptional" drought.Credit U.S. Drought Monitor
Doyle Rice has an invaluable piece in USA Today placing California’s persistent and exceptional* drought in the broader context of a very dry West — and the even broader context of the last 1,000 years or so.
Here’s the core point in Rice’s story:
The dryness in California is only part of a longer-term, 15-year drought across most of the Western USA, one that bioclimatologist Park Williams said is notable because “more area in the West has persistently been in drought during the past 15 years than in any other 15-year period since the 1150s and 1160s” — that’s more than 850 years ago.
“When considering the West as a whole, we are currently in the midst of a historically relevant megadrought,” said Williams, a professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York.
Megadroughts are what Cornell University scientist Toby Ault calls the “great white sharks of climate: powerful, dangerous and hard to detect before it’s too late. They have happened in the past, and they are still out there, lurking in what is possible for the future, even without climate change.”
Please read the rest and pass to folks out west. Read more…
Sadly, there’s plenty of conventional trash along the popular paths of Hudson Highlands State Park near our new old home in the village of Nelsonville, N.Y. But there’s a new look to the litter, as well, as I discovered yesterday on a morning dog hike when I spotted this tossed e-cigarette pack:
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There's a new look to litter these days - e-cigarette packages. This one was photographed in Hudson Highlands State Park in Cold Spring. N.Y.Credit Andrew C. Revkin
I’m not picking on smokers, or e-cigarette puffers (are they “smokers”?), but on the habit of not carrying out what you carry in when visiting shared treasures like our state parks. Just two days earlier, some earthy hiker tossed an empty half gallon jug of organic lemonade on the ground.
Updated, 8:15 p.m. | As you may have noted, this is the centennial of the extinction, on Sept. 1, 1914, of the passenger pigeon, which once darkened skies in flocks of a billion or more birds. First, here’s a look back at one of the odder ramifications in 1937 — a market in rare passenger pigeon eggs:
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By 1937, the eggs of the passenger pigeon, which went extinct on Sept. 1, 1914, were pricey collectors' items. Click for more from the Library of Congress.Credit Library of Congress
The Library of Congress:
Passenger pigeon eggs at $300 a piece. Washington, D.C., Dec. 1. Since the last passenger pigeon in existence died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, the eggs from the now extinct birds have become so scarce that G. Ellis Miller, of this city, is asking $300 a piece for the three perfect ones in his possession–with no takers. The eggs were left to Miller by his grandfather from a collection made 75 years ago — when the birds flew in flocks that darkened the sun and broke branches off trees when they roosted en masse. Marjorie Beall, biology student at George Washington University, is shown studying the eggs, which are kept in a display with carved birds and other eggs. 12/1/37
But I want to focus attention on a point made in a fascinating Carl Zimmer essay in National Geographic — on the role of 19th century social networks (the telegraph) and railroads in facilitating mass slaughter: Read more…
Randy Olson, who shifted long ago from an academic career in marine biology to a focus on filmmaking, science communication and effective storytelling, offered this “Your Dot” contribution on Ocean Champions. This group has the simple – if daunting — goal of electing or re-electing lawmakers who fight for the oceans. Congressional politics is a rough-and-tumble arena and the group, as Olson describes in the context of a Florida race, is not afraid to play hard. Here’s his piece:
Ocean Champions: Leading the Attack on Congressman Steve Southerland, “Ocean Enemy #1”
Long before Bill Maher introduced his “Flip a District” concept on his HBO show, the folks at Ocean Champions perfected the idea. Supporters of the group choose an “Ocean Enemy #1” — the member of Congress who does the most to harm the oceans — then the organization goes after the politician who receives the dubious title.
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David Wilmot, a marine biologist, is the president of the organization Ocean Champions.Credit Ocean Champions
The organization, led by the marine biologist David Wilmot, is different than many other conservation groups in that it is a 501(c)(4) organization with a connected political action committee called Ocean Champions PAC. It does three main things — get good people elected, help develop sound ocean policy, and, what I think is the most fun (but that’s just me), they go after “Ocean Enemies.”
In 2006 they put the label on California congressman Richard Pombo and not only helped get him defeated, but kept him in their crosshairs — helping make sure he lost again in 2010 when he attempted another run.
