Tag: climate

Thawing Diseases

In August 2016, in a remote corner of Siberian tundra called the Yamal Peninsula in the Arctic Circle, a 12-year-old boy died and at least 20 people were hospitalized after being infected by anthrax. The theory is that, over 75 years ago, a reindeer infected with anthrax died and it’s frozen carcass became trapped under a layer of frozen soil, known as permafrost. There it stayed until a heatwave in the summer of 2016, when the permafrost thawed.

Insect extinction

This won’t be good for the food chain

The Krefeld Entomological Society has seen the yearly insect catches fluctuate, as expected. But in 2013 they spotted something alarming. When they returned to one of their earliest trapping sites from 1989, the total mass of their catch had fallen by 80%. Through more direct comparisons, the group—which had preserved 1000s of samples over 3 decades—found dramatic declines across 10 other sites.

2019-02-11: Insects are going extinct 8x faster than other animals

“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind”. The 2.5% rate of annual loss over the last 25-30 years is shocking: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will 25% less, in 50 years 50% left and in 100 years you will have 0.” A rethinking of current agricultural practices, in particular a serious reduction in pesticide usage and its substitution with more sustainable, ecologically-based practices, is urgently needed to slow or reverse current trends, allow the recovery of declining insect populations and safeguard the vital ecosystem services they provide. In addition, effective remediation technologies should be applied to clean polluted waters in both agricultural and urban environments.

RIP Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 ma old.

For most of its life, the reef was the world’s largest living structure, and the only one visible from space. It was 2200km long, with 2900 individual reefs and 1050 islands. In total area, it was larger than the United Kingdom, and it contained more biodiversity than all of Europe combined. It harbored 1625 species of fish, 3000 species of mollusk, 450 species of coral, 220 species of birds, and 30 species of whales and dolphins. Among its many other achievements, the reef was home to one of the world’s largest populations of dugong and the largest breeding ground of green turtles.

2022-08-21: Various coral startups are tackling this problem. I haven’t been able to find a number in centimeters / year for this claim to make it comparable.

Unlike traditional projects, Coral Vita grows their corals on land, and they do this for a few key reasons. Land-based coral farming basically allows us to grow more diverse and resilient corals more affordably and at scale. So corals have a natural ability to adapt to changing conditions, but things are deteriorating in the ocean so quickly— largely due to climate change— that they can’t keep up. So what we’re doing is acclimating the corals. By raising and lowering the temperature of the water, the corals undergo stress. We basically take them to the gym. And in turn harden, which boosts their ability to survive the planet’s warming oceans. Corals also have an ability to make babies, it’s known as coral spawning. So when it comes time for coral spawning, we can then put those already more resilient corals together so that their babies are also gonna be more resilient. This process is called ‘assisted evolution.’ They can also dramatically speed up a coral’s growth rate. The method we rely on to accelerate coral growth rates is known as ‘microfragmenting,’ which is an open-source method that basically allows us to grow corals 50x faster.

2022-10-07: Another huge claim on coral growth. Has anyone combined these techniques?

In nature, coral grows 0.5cm per year through the accretion of minerals dissolved in seawater, which form a thick layer of substrate. But on electrically charged reefs, the electric current takes on some of the heavy lifting needed to deposit essential calcium carbonate on the reef. The coating could thicken at a rate of 5cm per year — 10x faster than coral grows naturally — for as long as a current was flowing through it.

2023-04-07: There’s also Stony coral tissue loss disease to deal with

A bacterial probiotic treatment effectively stopped or slowed SCTLD in 66% of tested infected coral fragments. It also prevented the infection from spreading in all transmission experiments.

Methane Reduction

we can now detect cow farts from space.

For the first time, an instrument onboard an orbiting spacecraft has measured the methane emissions from a single, specific leaking facility on Earth’s surface. The observation — by the Hyperion spectrometer on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) — is an important breakthrough in our ability to eventually measure and monitor emissions of this potent greenhouse gas from space.

2017-06-10: Methane-free cows

Scientists are also tweaking the cows themselves. The Genome Canada project identifies cows that produce fewer greenhouse gases, with the ultimate goal of distributing the responsible genes—conveniently transported in the form of bull semen—to areas that don’t have the resources to develop their own greener cows.

2020-04-02: Rice paddies produce a LOT of methane from the bacteria in the muck. Adding fish to the rice paddies could cut it by 90%
2023-09-08: Methanotrophs

A strain of bacteria called methylotuvimicrobium buryatense 5GB1C can remove methane efficiently even when it is present in lower amounts. If it became widespread, the technology has the potential to help slow global warming.

Typically, this group of bacteria thrive in environments with high levels of methane (5k – 10k ppm). The normal concentrations in our atmosphere have much lower levels of 2 ppm. But certain areas such as landfills, rice fields and oilwells emit higher concentrations of 500 ppm. To implement methane-eating bacteria on a mass scale, 1000s of high-functioning reactors will be needed.

Predicting Drone Strikes

Climate change plus religious confusion plus a shit economy equals drone strikes.

climate change is very tightly woven with war and conflict. In one sense, this relationship isn’t news. Climate change causes resource scarcity — and resource scarcity is, historically, one brutally reliable trigger of war and strife. The US Department of Defense certainly takes it seriously; last year it released a report calling climate change “an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water.” Another nonprofit study recently argued that a massive 2006-2011 drought in Syria, by driving rural populations into the already-stressed cities, helped accelerate the country’s human-rights catastrophe. But that map above suggests an even more intriguing and subtle finding: That climate change tracks conflict with such granularity that it even tracks drone strikes.

90% renewables by 2030

Renewables like solar and wind are plunging in price. But there are impediments to powering a grid entirely, or even primarily, with renewable energy. How far can they go? A new paper suggests that wind and solar could power 60% of the US’s electricity needs, given a national grid, without any energy storage, and without massive overbuild. Another 20% of the grid’s electricity would come from CO2-free hydro and nuclear.