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Category: Environment

The capitalist transformations of the countryside

The capitalist transformations of the countryside

Sven Beckert and Ulbe Bosma write: Sometimes, what is most common is most remarkable. For those of us living in a city or suburb, a typical day starts with rising from (cotton) sheets, hopping under the shower for a quick wash with (palm oil-based) soaps, dressing in (cotton) shirts and pants, drinking a hot beverage (coffee or tea) and then eating a (sugary) cereal or jam, perhaps followed by a (soy-fed) processed meat sandwich, wrapped in (fossil-fuel-based) plastic. What describes…

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Are we in the midst of a silent mass extinction?

Are we in the midst of a silent mass extinction?

Andy Carstens writes: Nearly one fifth of the genetic diversity of the planet’s most vulnerable species may already be lost, an analysis published today (September 22) in Science finds. If accurate, it would mean that many species are already below a conservation threshold proposed last year by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) a part of the United Nations Environment Programme. Moisés Expósito-Alonso was in his back yard in Menlo Park, California, last year reading a monograph on the unified…

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Climate change threatens up to 100% of trees in Australian cities, and most urban species worldwide

Climate change threatens up to 100% of trees in Australian cities, and most urban species worldwide

Photo: Jaana Dielenberg, Author provided By Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, Western Sydney University; Jaana Dielenberg, Charles Darwin University; Jonathan Lenoir, Université de Picardie Jules Verne (UPJV); Mark G Tjoelker, Western Sydney University, and Rachael Gallagher, Western Sydney University To anyone who has stepped off a hot pavement into a shady park, it will come as little surprise that trees (and shrubs) have a big cooling effect on cities. Our study published today in Nature Climate Change found climate change will put 90-100%…

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On Earth, ants outnumber humans by about 2.5 million to one

On Earth, ants outnumber humans by about 2.5 million to one

The Washington Post reports: It’s the ants’ world, and we’re just visiting. A new estimate for the total number of ants burrowing and buzzing on Earth comes to a whopping total of nearly 20 quadrillion individuals. That staggering sum — 20,000,000,000,000,000, or 20,000 trillion — reveals ants’ astonishing ubiquity even as scientists grow concerned a possible mass die off of insects could upend ecosystems. In a paper released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group…

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How migrating birds use quantum effects to navigate across vast distances

How migrating birds use quantum effects to navigate across vast distances

Peter J. Hore writes: Imagine you are a young Bar-tailed Godwit, a large, leggy shorebird with a long, probing bill hatched on the tundra of Alaska. As the days become shorter and the icy winter looms, you feel the urge to embark on one of the most impressive migrations on Earth: a nonstop transequatorial flight lasting at least seven days and nights across the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand 12,000 kilometers away. It’s do or die. Every year tens of…

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Pakistan’s devastating floodwaters could take six months to recede

Pakistan’s devastating floodwaters could take six months to recede

HuffPost reports: Catastrophic floods in Pakistan have submerged large swaths of farmland, swallowed whole villages and turned some communities into islands ― and the water likely won’t be gone anytime soon. Floodwaters will take an estimated three to six months to fully recede, Sindh province’s chief minister Syed Murad Ali Shah said in a statement, according to CNN. As of late August, the southern province had already gotten almost six times as much rainfall as its 30-year annual average. Those…

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As king, will Charles continue speaking out on the environment and climate change?

As king, will Charles continue speaking out on the environment and climate change?

The Associated Press reports: The laws and traditions that govern Britain’s constitutional monarchy dictate that the sovereign must stay out of partisan politics, but Charles has spent much of his adult life speaking out on issues that are important to him, particularly the environment. His words have caused friction with politicians and business leaders who accused the then-Prince of Wales of meddling in issues on which he should have remained silent. The question is whether Charles will follow his mother’s…

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Burning forests for energy isn’t ‘renewable’ — now the EU must admit it

Burning forests for energy isn’t ‘renewable’ — now the EU must admit it

Greta Thunberg et al write: Next week the future of many of the world’s forests will be decided when members of the European parliament vote on a revised EU renewable energy directive. If the parliament fails to change the EU’s discredited and harmful renewables policy, European citizens’ tax money will continue to pay for forests around the globe to literally go up in smoke every day. Europe’s directly elected representatives now have to choose: they can either save the EU’s…

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The most damaging farm products? Organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb

The most damaging farm products? Organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb

George Monbiot writes: Perhaps the most important of all environmental issues is land use. Every hectare of land we use for extractive industries is a hectare that can’t support wild forests, savannahs, wetlands, natural grasslands and other crucial ecosystems. And farming swallows far more land than any other human activity. What are the world’s most damaging farm products? You might be amazed by the answer: organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb. I realise this is a shocking claim. Of all the…

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Major sea-level rise caused by melting of Greenland ice cap is ‘now inevitable’

Major sea-level rise caused by melting of Greenland ice cap is ‘now inevitable’

The Guardian reports: Major sea-level rise from the melting of the Greenland ice cap is now inevitable, scientists have found, even if the fossil fuel burning that is driving the climate crisis were to end overnight. The research shows the global heating to date will cause an absolute minimum sea-level rise of 27cm (10.6in) from Greenland alone as 110tn tonnes of ice melt. With continued carbon emissions, the melting of other ice caps and thermal expansion of the ocean, a…

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The environmental cost of the war in Ukraine

The environmental cost of the war in Ukraine

Fred Pearce writes: What happens to the environment when a large, industrialized country is consumed by war? Ukraine is finding out. While concern about human lives remains paramount, Russia’s war on that country’s environment matters. The fate of Ukraine after the conflict is over is likely to depend on the survival of its natural resources as well as on its human-made infrastructure – on its forests, rivers, and wildlife, as well as its roads, power plants, and cities. Some 30…

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The legacy of James Lovelock

The legacy of James Lovelock

John Gribbin writes: Jim Lovelock (never ‘James’) is remembered as the father of the Gaia hypothesis: the idea that Earth is a self-regulating living organism. Few accepted his argument that this should be elevated to the status of a theory, even though it generated predictions about environmental changes that were borne out by subsequent observations. As a heuristic model, however, Gaia profoundly influenced thinking about the environment and how we interact with it, giving rise to the field of Earth-system…

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Desertification in an Iraqi bread basket

Desertification in an Iraqi bread basket

Tessa Fox reports: Palm branches whip back as Hussein Ibrahim walks through his densely planted land in Al Fao, the very last village in Iraq’s south as it reaches the Persian Gulf. Affectionately known as Abu Yusuf in reference to his eldest son, Ibrahim explains that farming is his culture. “I’ve inherited this land from my grandfather and even the father of my grandfather had it. We were all farmers; we were born to be farmers,” says the father of…

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Scientists warn of dire effects as Mediterranean heats up

Scientists warn of dire effects as Mediterranean heats up

The Associated Press reports: While vacationers might enjoy the Mediterranean Sea’s summer warmth, climate scientists are warning of dire consequences for its marine life as it burns up in a series of severe heat waves. From Barcelona to Tel Aviv, scientists say they are witnessing exceptional temperature hikes ranging from 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) to 5 degrees Celsius (9 Fahrenheit) above the norm for this time of year. Water temperatures have regularly exceeded 30 C (86 F) on some…

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Meet the teenager who helped push Florida toward cleaner energy

Meet the teenager who helped push Florida toward cleaner energy

NPR reports: For most of his 15 years, Levi Draheim led a beachy life on a barrier island on Florida’s east coast, swimming, surfing and sailing in the nearshore waves. He dreamed of someday becoming a marine biologist. But Levi’s world is changing. Warming temperatures led to widespread Sargassum seaweed and harmful algae blooms in the Atlantic Ocean and 156-mile Indian River Lagoon, which together encircle the island. The seaweed and algae blooms have left beaches stinking with rotting seaweed…

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Undersea internet cables can detect earthquakes — and may soon warn of tsunamis

Undersea internet cables can detect earthquakes — and may soon warn of tsunamis

Jeffrey Marlow writes: Somewhere beneath the Adriatic Sea, a rogue block of the African tectonic plate is burrowing under southern Europe, stretching Italy eastward by a few millimetres each year. On October 26, 2016, the stress triggered an earthquake in the Apennine Mountains, one in a series of quakes which toppled buildings in Italian towns. On the day of the tremor, Giuseppe Marra, a principal research scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England, was running an experiment that…

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