environment

The Meaning of a Whole Ecosystem

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This well-written and devastating feature in The New York Times Magazine, “The Insect Apocalypse is Here,” is worth reading. You might cry, though.

In conversation, sometimes, a student will wish mosquitoes away. I tell them that mosquitoes are an important part of the food chain for a number of species, and that while I, too, would like to be mosquito-free, we must understand that we are one small part of a whole. We may soon manage to become the whole, though, through chipping and choking everything else out. This article is about the decline of all insects and the overall functional extinction of many species - and our often unnoticed acclimation to it all.

A Selection of Readings

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Climate Science in the Public Eye

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I was sick recently, so I had the time to watch the television series Newsroom.  One clip really stuck with me:

Now given that this is from a fictional television series, viewers could be forgiven for thinking it an exaggeration.  But the facts check out, though sadly a few are outdated and have increased negatively in the meantime.

What really interests me apart from the immediate content is that the whole reason it's funny (admittedly in a macabre sense) is because most scientists are a little less depressingly stark about our situation.  Why is that?

It turns out that a recent paper "Duality in Climate Science" published in Nature Geoscience takes scientists and the media to task for underselling our ecological position due to fear of politically and professionally calamitous ramifications.  The paper summary reads:

Delivery of palatable 2 °C mitigation scenarios depends on speculative negative emissions or changing the past. Scientists must make their assumptions transparent and defensible, however politically uncomfortable the conclusions.  

What that's saying is that unless we can time travel backwards or develop technology in the future that we don't know exists yet, we're screwed.  Here's another not-at-all-comforting review of this and other papers saying in part, "The latest installment of depressing news is the delightful prediction that dozens of American cities are at risk of drowning before the century is out, turning places like New Orleans and Miami into the lost kingdom of Atlantis."