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Watch This Billion-Year Journey of Earth’s Tectonic Plates (Published 2021)

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A new simulation offers a different view of how the continents we live on drifted into their current configuration.

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What you can do for the environment...

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subscribe to Short Wave podcast

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Happy Earth Day, Short Wave listeners. Over the last six months, we've received many questions from you all about how to take action on climate change ⁠- in your households and communities. So, we consulted two folks who have been thinking about this deeply for over a decade: Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, two architects of the 2015 Paris Agreement. They offer their personal action plans for reducing your carbon footprint.

Christiana and Tom have a podcast called " Outrage and Optimism." Check out their new book, "The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis."
This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez, edited by Viet Le, and fact checked by Emily Vaughn. This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez, edited by Viet Le and fact-checked by Emily Vaughn.

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On 50th Anniversary Of Earth Day, What You Can Do For The Environment : Short Wave

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Happy (early) Earth Day, Short Wave listeners. We've received many questions from you about climate change, specifically what can individuals and households do to reduce their carbon footprint. So, we consulted two folks who have been thinking about this deeply and developing strategies for over a decade: Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, two architects of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

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very April, Sweden's main highway comes to a periodic standstill. Hundreds of reindeer overseen by indigenous Sami herders shuffle across the asphalt on the E4 as they begin their journey west to the mountains after a winter gorging on the lichen near the city of Umeå. As Sweden's main arterial road has become busier, the crossings have become increasingly fractious, especially if authorities do not arrive in time to close the road. Sometimes drivers try to overtake the reindeer as they cross - spooking the animals and causing long traffic jams as their Sami owners battle to regain control.

"During difficult climate conditions, these lichen lands can be extra important for the reindeer," says Per Sandström, a landscape ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences who works as an intermediary between the Sami and authorities to improve the crossings.

This week, Swedish authorities announced they would build up to a dozen "renoducts" (reindeer viaducts) to aid the crossings and allow reindeer herds to reach grazing more easily.

Reindeer viaducts in Sweden will keep herds safe from traffic as they roam in search of grazing. Photograph: Pawel Garski./Alamy

It is hoped the crossings will allow herders to find fresh grazing lands and alleviate traffic jams, and also help moose and lynx to move around the landscape. The country's 4,500 Sami herders and 250,000 reindeer have been hit hard by the climate crisis, battling forest fires in the summer and freezing rain in the winter that hides lichen below impenetrable sheets of ice.

"The animals that will really benefit from this system are long-ranging mammals that are really not meant to survive in these small, isolated pockets," says Sandström, who started his career in the US helping to create ecological corridors in Montana for grizzly bears.

The renoducts are part of a growing number of wildlife bridges and underpasses around the world that aim to connect fractured habitats. On the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, underpasses have been used to shield jaguars from traffic. Natural canopy bridges in the Peruvian Amazon have helped porcupines, monkeys and kinkajous pass over natural gas pipelines. On Christmas Island, bridges have been built over roads to allow millions of red crabs to pass from the forest to the beaches on their annual migration.

Red crabs on Christmas Island climb a bridge designed for their protection. Photograph: Chris Bray Photography/Swell Lodge

The wildlife bridges help avert some of the billions of animal deaths that happen on the roads every year around the world and counteract unintended consequences of human infrastructure.

In southern California, there have been signs of inbreeding among lions in the Santa Monica Mountains because busy freeways around Los Angeles have isolated populations with low genetic diversity. To help save the mountain lion population from local extinction, an $87m (£63m) wildlife bridge is planned over the 101 highway north of LA, which would be the largest in the world.

"When habitat is isolated, we can have impact on individual animals where they might not be able to find water or food. We can also have impact on the genetic diversity of populations," says Mark Benson, a member of the human-wildlife coexistence team for Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay at Parks Canada.

The agency has overseen one of the most successful uses of wildlife bridges in the world in Banff national park, Alberta, installing seven overpasses and 41 underpasses on the section bisected by the Trans-Canada Highway. A 2014 study found that fencing off the road and installing wildlife passes had maintained high genetic diversity in black and grizzly bear populations. Benson credits the passes with a big fall in roadkill along the highway, also significantly reducing human mortality from animal collision.

"We can go all the way back to 1983. There was an underpass that was put in place as part of twinning improvements [widening the highway] in the park. The first overpasses were put in place in 1996 and the twinning of the highway was completed in 2016," he says.

"It's very effective in terms of allowing wildlife to move across the landscape."

In the UK, wildlife bridges are likely to form part of the government's nature recovery network which aims to link together biodiverse areas under a 25-year environment plan. A 2015 review by Natural England acknowledged the benefits for nature and cited the example of the Netherlands, which is developing a network of "ecoducts" to help animals move around the country.

Highways England is increasingly building wildlife bridges as part of schemes around the country, with more planned for future infrastructure work. But some conservationists warn not enough is being done in the UK.

"We're woefully behind the rest of the world. In Europe, it's become second nature in some areas," says Martin​ de Retuerto, director of conservation at Hampshire & Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust.

The trust is advocating the creation of a green bridge across the M3 at Twyford Down, one of the most controversial road schemes in English history, built in the 90s. The motorway severed the link between the South Downs national park and St Catherine's Hill, an iron age fort and nature reserve home to rare butterflies and wildflowers.

Twyford Down in Hampshire, where conservationists are calling for a green bridge to help wildlife cross the M3. Photograph: Steve Morgan/Alamy

Major protests against the scheme might have failed to stop construction but De Retuerto says they marked a shift in attitudes to environmental issues in the UK. For that reason alone, he says, a green bridge at Twyford Down should be made to kickstart the nature recovery network.

"It's been heralded as the best bad example of how to do a road scheme. It's symbolic and deserves to be the one where, politically, prioritisation is centred," he said.

"If the Romanians can build them for bison, then we can build them for butterflies."
Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

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How creating wildlife crossings can help reindeer, bears - and even crabs

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very April, Sweden's main highway comes to a periodic standstill. Hundreds of reindeer overseen by indigenous Sami herders shuffle across the asphalt on the E4 as they begin their journey west to the mountains after a winter gorging on the lichen near the city of Umeå.

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Insect decline in the Anthropocene: Death by a thousand cuts

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Nature is under siege. In the last 10,000 y the human population has grown from 1 million to 7.8 billion. Much of Earth's arable lands are already in agriculture (1), millions of acres of tropical forest are cleared each year (2, 3), atmospheric CO2 levels are at their highest concentrations in more than 3 million y (4), and climates are erratically and steadily changing from pole to pole, triggering unprecedented droughts, fires, and floods across continents.

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Viruses that jump from animals to people, like the one responsible for COVID-19, will likely become more common as people continue to transform natural habitats into agricultural land, according to a new Stanford study.

The analysis, published in Landscape Ecology, reveals how the loss of tropical forests in Uganda puts people at greater risk of physical interactions with wild primates and the viruses they carry. The findings have implications for the emergence and spread of infectious animal-to-human diseases in other parts of the world, and suggest potential solutions for curbing the trend.

"At a time when COVID-19 is causing an unprecedented level of economic, social and health devastation, it is essential that we think critically about how human behaviors increase our interactions with disease-infected animals," said study lead author Laura Bloomfield, an MD student in the School of Medicine and a PhD candidate in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources within Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. "The combination of major environmental change, like deforestation, and poverty can spark the fire of a global pandemic."

A changing landscape

People have converted nearly half of the world's land into agriculture. Tropical forests have suffered the most, with some of the highest rates of agricultural conversion over the last few decades. In Africa, this has accounted for about three-quarters of recent forest loss. What remains, outside protected parks and preserves, are small islands of forest in a sea of farmland and areas where farmland intrudes into larger forested areas.

In Uganda, decades of migration and the creation of farmlands outside Kibale National Park have led to a high density of people trying to support their families at the edge of forested habitats. Ordinarily, people avoid wild primates because they are well-known carriers of disease, and many are protected by Uganda's Wildlife Authority. However, continued loss of forested habitat means wild primates and humans are increasingly sharing the same spaces and vying for the same food.

When people venture into forested areas for resources and when animals venture out of their habitats to raid crops, the chances increase for transmission of zoonotic - or animal-to-human - disease. A prime example is HIV, which is caused by a virus that jumped from wild primates to humans via infected bodily fluids.

"We humans go to these animals," study co-author Eric Lambin, the George and Setsuko Ishiyama Provostial Professor in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. "We are forcing the interaction through transformation of the land."

Predicting infection

Unlike previous studies that examined the issue from primarily an ecological standpoint, the Stanford study is the first to integrate landscape-level ecological factors with individual-level behavioral factors and weigh risks to human health.

The researchers began by collecting land use survey data from small-scale farmers living near forest fragments. They combined this information with high-resolution satellite imagery from the same time period to model how landscape patterns and individual behaviors together make certain people more likely to have contact with wild animals.

They found the strongest predictors of human-wild primate contact were the length of the forest boundary around people's homes and the frequency with which people ventured into these forested areas to collect small trees for construction material. Searching for these pole-like trees entails spending more time deep in primate habitats than other forest-based activities.

The researchers were surprised to find some of their assumptions turned upside down. For example, small fragments of residual forest - not larger expanses of habitat - were most likely to be the site of human-wild primate contacts due to their shared borders with agricultural landscapes.

Similarly, the researchers speculate that increasing intrusion of agriculture into forests and resulting human activities in these areas could lead to more spillover of infections from wild primates to humans worldwide.

Keeping disease at bay

The researchers suggest that relatively small buffer zones, such as tree farms or reforestation projects, around biodiversity-rich forests could dramatically lessen the likelihood of human-wild primate interaction. Using external resources, such as national or international aid, to provide fuel and construction material or monetary supplements could also reduce pressure on people to seek out wood in forested areas.

"At the end of the day, land conservation and the reduction of forest fragmentation is our best bet to reduce human-wild animal interactions," said study coauthor Tyler McIntosh, a former graduate student in the Stanford Earth Systems Program now working at the Center for Western Priorities.

To read all stories about Stanford science, subscribe to the biweekly Stanford Science Digest.

Lambin is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the McGee and Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources and the Medical Scientist Training Program.

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Understanding spread of disease from animals to human | Stanford News

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In Uganda, loss of forested habitat increases the likelihood of interactions between disease-carrying wild primates and humans. The findings suggest the emergence and spread of viruses, such as the one that causes COVID-19, will become more common as the conversion of natural habitats into farmland continues worldwide.

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The low-lying shrubs, grasses and other plants growing in the Arctic are getting taller.

The finding comes from scientists who have analysed three decades of measurements.

This data, gathered across Alaska, Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia and Russia, indicates that a warming climate is driving the change.

The team of 180 researchers says the increase in height could ultimately work to push up temperatures further.

The international group reports its work in the journal Nature.

Co-lead author Isla Myers-Smith, from the University of Edinburgh, UK, predicted that, on their current trajectory, the centimetres-tall Arctic flora could double in size by the end of the century.

"That doesn't seem like a very dramatic increase, but if you compare it to the ecosystems around your house like the forest nearby - if you imagined that forest getting twice as tall; that is a pretty dramatic change," she told BBC News.

Plants have to be hardy to flourish in the far north or high up Alpine mountains.

The cold and short growing season precludes trees. Instead, this tundra landscape is populated by small species that hug the ground. But the Arctic is undergoing rapid change.

Recent decades have seen the region experience some of the fastest rates of warming on the planet. It is not simply that existing plants have increased their stature, although that is the case; it is more that taller species are now invading areas they never used to grow in large numbers.

As an example, vernal sweetgrass, which is common in lowland Europe, has now moved into the research plots in Iceland and Sweden where long-term monitoring is undertaken.

Why does height matter?

The re-profiling of plant communities is important because it could alter the way the tundra ecosystem functions.

Taller Arctic plants will trap more snow around them, insulating the ground from very cold air and preventing it from freezing quite so hard. This makes it easier for usually rock-solid soils to thaw out in summer months and release their carbon into the atmosphere. This would add to the warming.

Taller plants could also effect the same outcome because, by sticking their heads above the snow, they would present a darker surface, and that allows the ecosystem to trap more heat from the Sun.

"Although there are still many uncertainties, taller tundra plants could fuel climate change, both in the Arctic and for the planet as a whole," said the study's other co-lead investigator, Anne Bjorkman, from the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, Germany.

How does this study stand out?

It is remarkable because of its scale. It incorporates more than 60,000 data observations from hundreds of sites across the Arctic and in the European Alps and the American Rockies.

The information reaches back through the decades, enabling it to reliably catch real trends.

Scientists will revisit specific locations to take the same measurements over and over again. These measurements cover everything from plant height and leaf area to wood density, seed size, leaf chemistry, and more.

Those researchers who initiated the earliest data collections could never have known precisely how their persistence would eventually pay off. They would just have had the recognition that long observation series are invaluable.

"One of the goals of our project was to make this database publicly available so that future researchers can ask questions that we can't anticipate right now either," said Dr Myers-Smith.

UK funding for this project came from the Natural Environment Research Council. You can read more at the Team Shrub and Arctic Above websites.

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The low-lying shrubs, grasses and other plants growing in the Arctic are getting taller. The finding comes from scientists who have analysed three decades of measurements. This data, gathered across Alaska, Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia and Russia, indicates that a warming climate is driving the change.

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Insect Collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’ The Guardian, Damian Carrington, Environmental Editor, Tuesday, 15 Jan 2019

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Insect Collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’ The Guardian, Damian Carrington, Environmental Editor, Tuesday, 15 Jan 2019

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Insect collapse: 'We are destroying our life support systems'

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Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished

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Kate Raworth: How Can We Create a Thriving Economy for Ourselves and the Planet? Video of TED Talk 7 December 2018 – also see TED Radio Hour “Circular”

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Kate Raworth: How Can We Create a Thriving Economy for Ourselves and the Planet? Video of TED Talk 7 December 2018 – also see TED Radio Hour “Circular”

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subscribe to TED Radio Hour podcast

Part 1 of the TED Radio Hour episode Circular.
About Kate Raworth's TED Talk
We're often told that economic growth is good, but Kate Raworth says our addiction to growth is destroying the planet. To thrive in the 21st century, she says we need a new circular economic system.
About Kate Raworth
Kate Raworth is a self-described "renegade" economist focused on designing a sustainable economy for the future. She's the author of Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist.

She has presented her ideas all over the world, including at the UN General Assembly, and has contributed to a number of publications including The Guardian, The New Statesman, Newsweek.com, and Wired.com.

She is a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, and a Senior Visiting Research Associate and lecturer at Oxford's Environmental Change Institute. Raworth received her Bachelors and Masters degrees from Oxford University.

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Kate Raworth: How Can We Create A Thriving Economy For Ourselves And The Planet?

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subscribe to TED Radio Hour podcast Part 1 of the TED Radio Hour episode Circular. About Kate Raworth's TED Talk We're often told that economic growth is good, but Kate Raworth says our addiction to growth is destroying the planet. To thrive in the 21st century, she says we need a new circular economic system.

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The Insect Apocalypse is Here. What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth? The New Your Time Magazine Feature

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The Insect Apocalypse is Here. What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth? The New Your Time Magazine Feature

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Credit... Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman. Source photographs: Bridgeman Images.

Feature

What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?

Credit... Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman. Source photographs: Bridgeman Images.

S une Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his youngest son, enjoying the sun slanting over the fields and woodlands near their home north of Copenhagen, when it suddenly occurred to him that something about the experience was amiss. Specifically, something was missing.

It was summer. He was out in the country, moving fast. But strangely, he wasn't eating any bugs.

For a moment, Riis was transported to his childhood on the Danish island of Lolland, in the Baltic Sea. Back then, summer bike rides meant closing his mouth to cruise through thick clouds of insects, but inevitably he swallowed some anyway. When his parents took him driving, he remembered, the car's windshield was frequently so smeared with insect carcasses that you almost couldn't see through it. But all that seemed distant now. He couldn't recall the last time he needed to wash bugs from his windshield; he even wondered, vaguely, whether car manufacturers had invented some fancy new coating to keep off insects. But this absence, he now realized with some alarm, seemed to be all around him. Where had all those insects gone? And when? And why hadn't he noticed?

Riis watched his son, flying through the beautiful day, not eating bugs, and was struck by the melancholy thought that his son's childhood would lack this particular bug-eating experience of his own. It was, he granted, an odd thing to feel nostalgic about. But he couldn't shake a feeling of loss. "I guess it's pretty human to think that everything was better when you were a kid," he said. "Maybe I didn't like it when I was on my bike and I ate all the bugs, but looking back on it, I think it's something everybody should experience."

I met Riis, a lanky high school science and math teacher, on a hot day in June. He was anxious about not having yet written his address for the school's graduation ceremony that evening, but first, he had a job to do. From his garage, he retrieved a large insect net, drove to a nearby intersection and stopped to strap the net to the car's roof. Made of white mesh, the net ran the length of his car and was held up by a tent pole at the front, tapering to a small, removable bag in back. Drivers whizzing past twisted their heads to stare. Riis eyed his parking spot nervously as he adjusted the straps of the contraption. "This is not 100 percent legal," he said, "but I guess, for the sake of science."

Riis had not been able to stop thinking about the missing bugs. The more he learned, the more his nostalgia gave way to worry. Insects are the vital pollinators and recyclers of ecosystems and the base of food webs everywhere. Riis was not alone in noticing their decline. In the United States, scientists recently found the population of monarch butterflies fell by 90 percent in the last 20 years, a loss of 900 million individuals; the rusty-patched bumblebee, which once lived in 28 states, dropped by 87 percent over the same period. With other, less-studied insect species, one butterfly researcher told me, "all we can do is wave our arms and say, 'It's not here anymore!' " Still, the most disquieting thing wasn't the disappearance of certain species of insects; it was the deeper worry, shared by Riis and many others, that a whole insect world might be quietly going missing, a loss of abundance that could alter the planet in unknowable ways. "We notice the losses," says David Wagner, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut. "It's the diminishment that we don't see."

Because insects are legion, inconspicuous and hard to meaningfully track, the fear that there might be far fewer than before was more felt than documented. People noticed it by canals or in backyards or under streetlights at night - familiar places that had become unfamiliarly empty. The feeling was so common that entomologists developed a shorthand for it, named for the way many people first began to notice that they weren't seeing as many bugs. They called it the windshield phenomenon.

To test what had been primarily a loose suspicion of wrongness, Riis and 200 other Danes were spending the month of June roaming their country's back roads in their outfitted cars. They were part of a study conducted by the Natural History Museum of Denmark, a joint effort of the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University and North Carolina State University. The nets would stand in for windshields as Riis and the other volunteers drove through various habitats - urban areas, forests, agricultural tracts, uncultivated open land and wetlands - hoping to quantify the disorienting sense that, as one of the study's designers put it, "something from the past is missing from the present."

When the investigators began planning the study in 2016, they weren't sure if anyone would sign up. But by the time the nets were ready, a paper by an obscure German entomological society had brought the problem of insect decline into sharp focus. The German study found that, measured simply by weight, the overall abundance of flying insects in German nature reserves had decreased by 75 percent over just 27 years. If you looked at midsummer population peaks, the drop was 82 percent.

Riis learned about the study from a group of his students in one of their class projects. They must have made some kind of mistake in their citation, he thought. But they hadn't. The study would quickly become, according to the website Altmetric, the sixth-most-discussed scientific paper of 2017. Headlines around the world warned of an "insect Armageddon."

Within days of announcing the insect-collection project, the Natural History Museum of Denmark was turning away eager volunteers by the dozens. It seemed there were people like Riis everywhere, people who had noticed a change but didn't know what to make of it. How could something as fundamental as the bugs in the sky just disappear? And what would become of the world without them?

Anyone who has returned to a childhood haunt to find that everything somehow got smaller knows that humans are not great at remembering the past accurately. This is especially true when it comes to changes to the natural world. It is impossible to maintain a fixed perspective, as Heraclitus observed 2,500 years ago: It is not the same river, but we are also not the same people.

A 1995 study, by Peter H. Kahn and Batya Friedman, of the way some children in Houston experienced pollution summed up our blindness this way: "With each generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation takes that amount as the norm." In decades of photos of fishermen holding up their catch in the Florida Keys, the marine biologist Loren McClenachan found a perfect illustration of this phenomenon, which is often called "shifting baseline syndrome." The fish got smaller and smaller, to the point where the prize catches were dwarfed by fish that in years past were piled up and ignored. But the smiles on the fishermen's faces stayed the same size. The world never feels fallen, because we grow accustomed to the fall.

By one measure, bugs are the wildlife we know best, the nondomesticated animals whose lives intersect most intimately with our own: spiders in the shower, ants at the picnic, ticks buried in the skin. We sometimes feel that we know them rather too well. In another sense, though, they are one of our planet's greatest mysteries, a reminder of how little we know about what's happening in the world around us.

We've named and described a million species of insects, a stupefying array of thrips and firebrats and antlions and caddis flies and froghoppers and other enormous families of bugs that most of us can't even name. (Technically, the word "bug" applies only to the order Hemiptera, also known as true bugs, species that have tubelike mouths for piercing and sucking - and there are as many as 80,000 named varieties of those.) The ones we think we do know well, we don't: There are 12,000 types of ants, nearly 20,000 varieties of bees, almost 400,000 species of beetles, so many that the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane reportedly quipped that God must have an inordinate fondness for them. A bit of healthy soil a foot square and two inches deep might easily be home to 200 unique species of mites, each, presumably, with a subtly different job to do. And yet entomologists estimate that all this amazing, absurd and understudied variety represents perhaps only 20 percent of the actual diversity of insects on our planet - that there are millions and millions of species that are entirely unknown to science.

With so much abundance, it very likely never occurred to most entomologists of the past that their multitudinous subjects might dwindle away. As they poured themselves into studies of the life cycles and taxonomies of the species that fascinated them, few thought to measure or record something as boring as their number. Besides, tracking quantity is slow, tedious and unglamorous work: setting and checking traps, waiting years or decades for your data to be meaningful, grappling with blunt baseline questions instead of more sophisticated ones. And who would pay for it? Most academic funding is short-term, but when what you're interested in is invisible, generational change, says Dave Goulson, an entomologist at the University of Sussex, "a three-year monitoring program is no good to anybody." This is especially true of insect populations, which are naturally variable, with wide, trend-obscuring fluctuations from one year to the next.

When entomologists began noticing and investigating insect declines, they lamented the absence of solid information from the past in which to ground their experiences of the present. "We see a hundred of something, and we think we're fine," Wagner says, "but what if there were 100,000 two generations ago?" Rob Dunn, an ecologist at North Carolina State University who helped design the net experiment in Denmark, recently searched for studies showing the effect of pesticide spraying on the quantity of insects living in nearby forests. He was surprised to find that no such studies existed. "We ignored really basic questions," he said. "It feels like we've dropped the ball in some giant collective way."

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If entomologists lacked data, what they did have were some very worrying clues. Along with the impression that they were seeing fewer bugs in their own jars and nets while out doing experiments - a windshield phenomenon specific to the sorts of people who have bug jars and nets - there were documented downward slides of well-studied bugs, including various kinds of bees, moths, butterflies and beetles. In Britain, as many as 30 to 60 percent of species were found to have diminishing ranges. Larger trends were harder to pin down, though a 2014 review in Science tried to quantify these declines by synthesizing the findings of existing studies and found that a majority of monitored species were declining, on average by 45 percent.

Entomologists also knew that climate change and the overall degradation of global habitat are bad news for biodiversity in general, and that insects are dealing with the particular challenges posed by herbicides and pesticides, along with the effects of losing meadows, forests and even weedy patches to the relentless expansion of human spaces. There were studies of other, better-understood species that suggested that the insects associated with them might be declining, too. People who studied fish found that the fish had fewer mayflies to eat. Ornithologists kept finding that birds that rely on insects for food were in trouble: eight in 10 partridges gone from French farmlands; 50 and 80 percent drops, respectively, for nightingales and turtledoves. Half of all farmland birds in Europe disappeared in just three decades. At first, many scientists assumed the familiar culprit of habitat destruction was at work, but then they began to wonder if the birds might simply be starving. In Denmark, an ornithologist named Anders Tottrup was the one who came up with the idea of turning cars into insect trackers for the windshield-effect study after he noticed that rollers, little owls, Eurasian hobbies and bee-eaters - all birds that subsist on large insects such as beetles and dragonflies - had abruptly disappeared from the landscape.

The signs were certainly alarming, but they were also just signs, not enough to justify grand pronouncements about the health of insects as a whole or about what might be driving a widespread, cross-species decline. "There are no quantitative data on insects, so this is just a hypothesis," Hans de Kroon, an ecologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, explained to me - not the sort of language that sends people to the barricades.

Then came the German study. Scientists are still cautious about what the findings might imply about other regions of the world. But the study brought forth exactly the kind of longitudinal data they had been seeking, and it wasn't specific to just one type of insect. The numbers were stark, indicating a vast impoverishment of an entire insect universe, even in protected areas where insects ought to be under less stress. The speed and scale of the drop were shocking even to entomologists who were already anxious about bees or fireflies or the cleanliness of car windshields.

The results were surprising in another way too. The long-term details about insect abundance, the kind that no one really thought existed, hadn't appeared in a particularly prestigious journal and didn't come from university-affiliated scientists, but from a small society of insect enthusiasts based in the modest German city Krefeld.

Krefeld sits a half-hour drive outside Düsseldorf, near the western bank of the Rhine. It's a city of brick houses and bright flower gardens and a stadtwald - a municipal forest and park - where paddle boats float on a lake, umbrellas shade a beer garden and (I couldn't help noticing) the afternoon light through the trees illuminates small swarms of dancing insects.

Near the center of the old city, a paper sign, not much larger than a business card, identifies the stolid headquarters of the society whose research caused so much commotion. When it was founded, in 1905, the society operated out of another building, one that was destroyed when Britain bombed the city during World War II. (By the time the bombs fell, members had moved their precious records and collections of insects, some of which dated back to the 1860s, to an underground bunker.) Nowadays, the society uses more than 6,000 square feet of an old three-story school as storage space. Ask for a tour of the collections, and you will hear such sentences as "This whole room is Lepidoptera," referring to a former classroom stuffed with what I at first took to be shelves of books but which are in fact innumerable wooden frames containing pinned butterflies and moths; and, in an even larger room, "every bumblebee here was collected before the Second World War, 1880 to 1930"; and, upon opening a drawer full of sweat bees, "It's a new collection, 30 years only."

On the shelves that do hold books, I counted 31 clearly well-loved volumes in the series "Beetles of Middle Europe." A 395-page book that cataloged specimens of spider wasps - where they were collected; where they were stored - of the western Palearctic said "1948-2008" on the cover. I asked my guide, a society member named Martin Sorg, who was one of the lead authors of the paper, whether those dates reflected when the specimens were collected. "No," Sorg replied, "that was the time the author needed for this work."

Sorg, who rolls his own cigarettes and wears John Lennon glasses and whose gray hair grows long past his shoulders, is not a freewheeling type when it comes to his insect work. And his insect work is really all he wants to talk about. "We think details about nature and biodiversity declines are important, not details about life histories of entomologists," Sorg explained after he and Werner Stenmans, a society member whose name appeared alongside Sorg's on the 2017 paper, dismissed my questions about their day jobs. Leery of an article that focused on him as a person, Sorg also didn't want to talk about what drew him to entomology as a child or even what it was about certain types of wasps that had made him want to devote so much of his life to studying them. "We normally give life histories when someone is dead," he said.

There was a reason for the wariness. Society members dislike seeing themselves described, over and over in news stories, as "amateurs." It's a framing that reflects, they believe, a too-narrow understanding of what it means to be an expert or even a scientist - what it means to be a student of the natural world.

Amateurs have long provided much of the patchy knowledge we have about nature. Those bee and butterfly studies? Most depend on mass mobilizations of volunteers willing to walk transects and count insects, every two weeks or every year, year after year. The scary numbers about bird declines were gathered this way, too, though because birds can be hard to spot, volunteers often must learn to identify them by their sounds. Britain, which has a particularly strong tradition of amateur naturalism, has the best-studied bugs in the world. As technologically advanced as we are, the natural world is still a very big and complex place, and the best way to learn what's going on is for a lot of people to spend a lot of time observing it. The Latin root of the word "amateur" is, after all, the word "lover."

Some of these citizen-scientists are true beginners clutching field guides; others, driven by their own passion and following in a long tradition of "amateur" naturalism, are far from novices. Think of Victorians with their butterfly nets and curiosity cabinets; of Vladimir Nabokov, whose theories about the evolution of Polyommatus blue butterflies were ignored until proved correct by DNA testing more than 30 years after his death; of young Charles Darwin, cutting his classes at Cambridge to collect beetles at Wicken Fen and once putting a live beetle in his mouth because his hands were already full of other bugs.

The Krefeld society is volunteer-run, and many members have other jobs in unrelated fields, but they also have an enormous depth of knowledge about insects, accumulated through years of what other people might consider obsessive attention. Some study the ecology or evolutionary taxonomy of their favorite species or map their populations or breed them to study their life histories. All hone their identification skills across species by amassing their own collections of carefully pinned and labeled insects like those that fill the society's storage rooms. Sorg estimated that of the society's 63 members, a third are university-trained in subjects such as biology or earth science. Another third, he said, are "highly specialized and highly qualified but they never visited the university," while the remaining third are actual amateurs who are still in the process of becoming "real" entomologists: "Some of them may also have a degree from the university, but in our view, they are beginners."

The society members' projects often involved setting up what are called malaise traps, nets that look like tents and drive insects flying by into bottles of ethanol. Because of the scientific standards of the society, members followed certain procedures: They always employed identical traps, sewn from a template they first used in 1982. (Sorg showed me the original rolled-up craft paper with great solemnity.) They always put them in the same places. (Before GPS, that meant a painstaking process of triangulating with surveying equipment. "We are not sure about a few centimeters," Sorg granted.) They saved everything they caught, regardless of what the main purpose of the experiment was. (The society bought so much ethanol that it attracted the attention of a narcotics unit.)

Those bottles of insects were gathered into thousands of boxes, which are now crammed into what were once offices in the upper reaches of the school. When the society members, like entomologists elsewhere, began to notice that they were seeing fewer insects, they had something against which to measure their worries.

"We don't throw away anything, we store everything," Sorg explained. "That gives us today the possibility to go back in time."

In 2013, Krefeld entomologists confirmed that the total number of insects caught in one nature reserve was nearly 80 percent lower than the same spot in 1989. They had sampled other sites, analyzed old data sets and found similar declines: Where 30 years earlier, they often needed a liter bottle for a week of trapping, now a half-liter bottle usually sufficed. But it would have taken even highly trained entomologists years of painstaking work to identify all the insects in the bottles. So the society used a standardized method for weighing insects in alcohol, which told a powerful story simply by showing how much the overall mass of insects dropped over time. "A decline of this mixture," Sorg said, "is a very different thing than the decline of only a few species."

The society collaborated with de Kroon and other scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands, who did a trend analysis of the data that Krefeld provided, controlling for things like the effects of nearby plants, weather and forest cover on fluctuations in insect populations. The final study looked at 63 nature preserves, representing almost 17,000 sampling days, and found consistent declines in every kind of habitat they sampled. This suggested, the authors wrote, "that it is not only the vulnerable species but the flying-insect community as a whole that has been decimated over the last few decades."

For some scientists, the study created a moment of reckoning. "Scientists thought this data was too boring," Dunn says. "But these people found it beautiful, and they loved it. They were the ones paying attention to Earth for all the rest of us."

The current worldwide loss of biodiversity is popularly known as the sixth extinction: the sixth time in world history that a large number of species have disappeared in unusually rapid succession, caused this time not by asteroids or ice ages but by humans. When we think about losing biodiversity, we tend to think of the last northern white rhinos protected by armed guards, of polar bears on dwindling ice floes. Extinction is a visceral tragedy, universally understood: There is no coming back from it. The guilt of letting a unique species vanish is eternal.

But extinction is not the only tragedy through which we're living. What about the species that still exist, but as a shadow of what they once were? In "The Once and Future World," the journalist J.B. MacKinnon cites records from recent centuries that hint at what has only just been lost: "In the North Atlantic, a school of cod stalls a tall ship in midocean; off Sydney, Australia, a ship's captain sails from noon until sunset through pods of sperm whales as far as the eye can see. ... Pacific pioneers complain to the authorities that splashing salmon threaten to swamp their canoes." There were reports of lions in the south of France, walruses at the mouth of the Thames, flocks of birds that took three days to fly overhead, as many as 100 blue whales in the Southern Ocean for every one that's there now. "These are not sights from some ancient age of fire and ice," MacKinnon writes. "We are talking about things seen by human eyes, recalled in human memory."

What we're losing is not just the diversity part of biodiversity, but the bio part: life in sheer quantity. While I was writing this article, scientists learned that the world's largest king penguin colony shrank by 88 percent in 35 years, that more than 97 percent of the bluefin tuna that once lived in the ocean are gone. The number of Sophie the Giraffe toys sold in France in a single year is nine times the number of all the giraffes that still live in Africa.

Finding reassurance in the survival of a few symbolic standard-bearers ignores the value of abundance, of a natural world that thrives on richness and complexity and interaction. Tigers still exist, for example, but that doesn't change the fact that 93 percent of the land where they used to live is now tigerless. This matters for more than romantic reasons: Large animals, especially top predators like tigers, connect ecosystems to one another and move energy and resources among them simply by walking and eating and defecating and dying. (In the deep ocean, sunken whale carcasses form the basis of entire ecosystems in nutrient-poor places.) One result of their loss is what's known as trophic cascade, the unraveling of an ecosystem's fabric as prey populations boom and crash and the various levels of the food web no longer keep each other in check. These places are emptier, impoverished in a thousand subtle ways.

Scientists have begun to speak of functional extinction (as opposed to the more familiar kind, numerical extinction). Functionally extinct animals and plants are still present but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works. Some phrase this as the extinction not of a species but of all its former interactions with its environment - an extinction of seed dispersal and predation and pollination and all the other ecological functions an animal once had, which can be devastating even if some individuals still persist. The more interactions are lost, the more disordered the ecosystem becomes. A 2013 paper in Nature, which modeled both natural and computer-generated food webs, suggested that a loss of even 30 percent of a species' abundance can be so destabilizing that other species start going fully, numerically extinct - in fact, 80 percent of the time it was a secondarily affected creature that was the first to disappear. A famous real-world example of this type of cascade concerns sea otters. When they were nearly wiped out in the northern Pacific, their prey, sea urchins, ballooned in number and decimated kelp forests, turning a rich environment into a barren one and also possibly contributing to numerical extinctions, notably of the Steller's sea cow.

Conservationists tend to focus on rare and endangered species, but it is common ones, because of their abundance, that power the living systems of our planet. Most species are not common, but within many animal groups most individuals - some 80 percent of them - belong to common species. Like the slow approach of twilight, their declines can be hard to see. White-rumped vultures were nearly gone from India before there was widespread awareness of their disappearance. Describing this phenomenon in the journal BioScience, Kevin Gaston, a professor of biodiversity and conservation at the University of Exeter, wrote: "Humans seem innately better able to detect the complete loss of an environmental feature than its progressive change."

In addition to extinction (the complete loss of a species) and extirpation (a localized extinction), scientists now speak of defaunation: the loss of individuals, the loss of abundance, the loss of a place's absolute animalness. In a 2014 article in Science, researchers argued that the word should become as familiar, and influential, as the concept of deforestation. In 2017 another paper reported that major population and range losses extended even to species considered to be at low risk for extinction. They predicted "negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization" and the authors offered another term for the widespread loss of the world's wild fauna: "biological annihilation."

It is estimated that, since 1970, Earth's various populations of wild land animals have lost, on average, 60 percent of their members. Zeroing in on the category we most relate to, mammals, scientists believe that for every six wild creatures that once ate and burrowed and raised young, only one remains. What we have instead is ourselves. A study published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that if you look at the world's mammals by weight, 96 percent of that biomass is humans and livestock; just 4 percent is wild animals.

We've begun to talk about living in the Anthropocene, a world shaped by humans. But E.O. Wilson, the naturalist and prophet of environmental degradation, has suggested another name: the Eremocine, the age of loneliness.

Wilson began his career as a taxonomic entomologist, studying ants. Insects - about as far as you can get from charismatic megafauna - are not what we're usually imagining when we talk about biodiversity. Yet they are, in Wilson's words, "the little things that run the natural world." He means it literally. Insects are a case study in the invisible importance of the common.

Scientists have tried to calculate the benefits that insects provide simply by going about their business in large numbers. Trillions of bugs flitting from flower to flower pollinate some three-quarters of our food crops, a service worth as much as $500 billion every year. (This doesn't count the 80 percent of wild flowering plants, the foundation blocks of life everywhere, that rely on insects for pollination.) If monetary calculations like that sound strange, consider the Maoxian Valley in China, where shortages of insect pollinators have led farmers to hire human workers, at a cost of up to $19 per worker per day, to replace bees. Each person covers five to 10 trees a day, pollinating apple blossoms by hand.

By eating and being eaten, insects turn plants into protein and power the growth of all the uncountable species - including freshwater fish and a majority of birds - that rely on them for food, not to mention all the creatures that eat those creatures. We worry about saving the grizzly bear, says the insect ecologist Scott Hoffman Black, but where is the grizzly without the bee that pollinates the berries it eats or the flies that sustain baby salmon? Where, for that matter, are we?

Bugs are vital to the decomposition that keeps nutrients cycling, soil healthy, plants growing and ecosystems running. This role is mostly invisible, until suddenly it's not. After introducing cattle to Australia at the turn of the 19th century, settlers soon found themselves overwhelmed by the problem of their feces: For some reason, cow pies there were taking months or even years to decompose. Cows refused to eat near the stink, requiring more and more land for grazing, and so many flies bred in the piles that the country became famous for the funny hats that stockmen wore to keep them at bay. It wasn't until 1951 that a visiting entomologist realized what was wrong: The local insects, evolved to eat the more fibrous waste of marsupials, couldn't handle cow excrement. For the next 25 years, the importation, quarantine and release of dozens of species of dung beetles became a national priority. And that was just one unfilled niche. (In the United States, dung beetles save ranchers an estimated $380 million a year.) We simply don't know everything that insects do. Only about 2 percent of invertebrate species have been studied enough for us to estimate whether they are in danger of extinction, never mind what dangers that extinction might pose.

When asked to imagine what would happen if insects were to disappear completely, scientists find words like chaos, collapse, Armageddon. Wagner, the University of Connecticut entomologist, describes a flowerless world with silent forests, a world of dung and old leaves and rotting carcasses accumulating in cities and roadsides, a world of "collapse or decay and erosion and loss that would spread through ecosystems" - spiraling from predators to plants. E.O. Wilson has written of an insect-free world, a place where most plants and land animals become extinct; where fungi explodes, for a while, thriving on death and rot; and where "the human species survives, able to fall back on wind-pollinated grains and marine fishing" despite mass starvation and resource wars. "Clinging to survival in a devastated world, and trapped in an ecological dark age," he adds, "the survivors would offer prayers for the return of weeds and bugs."

But the crux of the windshield phenomenon, the reason that the creeping suspicion of change is so creepy, is that insects wouldn't have to disappear altogether for us to find ourselves missing them for reasons far beyond nostalgia. In October, an entomologist sent me an email with the subject line, "Holy [expletive]!" and an attachment: a study just out from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that he labeled, "Krefeld comes to Puerto Rico." The study included data from the 1970s and from the early 2010s, when a tropical ecologist named Brad Lister returned to the rain forest where he had studied lizards - and, crucially, their prey - 40 years earlier. Lister set out sticky traps and swept nets across foliage in the same places he had in the 1970s, but this time he and his co-author, Andres Garcia, caught much, much less: 10 to 60 times less arthropod biomass than before. (It's easy to read that number as 60 percent less, but it's sixtyfold less: Where once he caught 473 milligrams of bugs, Lister was now catching just eight milligrams.) "It was, you know, devastating," Lister told me. But even scarier were the ways the losses were already moving through the ecosystem, with serious declines in the numbers of lizards, birds and frogs. The paper reported "a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web." Lister's inbox quickly filled with messages from other scientists, especially people who study soil invertebrates, telling him they were seeing similarly frightening declines. Even after his dire findings, Lister found the losses shocking: "I didn't even know about the earthworm crisis!"

The strange thing, Lister said, is that, as staggering as they are, all the declines he documented would still be basically invisible to the average person walking through the Luquillo rain forest. On his last visit, the forest still felt "timeless" and "phantasmagorical," with "cascading waterfalls and carpets of flowers." You would have to be an expert to notice what was missing. But he expects the losses to push the forest toward a tipping point, after which "there is a sudden and dramatic loss of the rain-forest system," and the changes will become obvious to anyone. The place he loves will become unrecognizable.

The insects in the forest that Lister studied haven't been contending with pesticides or habitat loss, the two problems to which the Krefeld paper pointed. Instead, Lister chalks up their decline to climate change, which has already increased temperatures in Luquillo by two degrees Celsius since Lister first sampled there. Previous research suggested that tropical bugs will be unusually sensitive to temperature changes; in November, scientists who subjected laboratory beetles to a heat wave reported that the increased temperatures made them significantly less fertile. Other scientists wonder if it might be climate-induced drought or possibly invasive rats or simply "death by a thousand cuts" - a confluence of many kinds of changes to the places where insects once thrived.

Like other species, insects are responding to what Chris Thomas, an insect ecologist at the University of York, has called "the transformation of the world": not just a changing climate but also the widespread conversion, via urbanization, agricultural intensification and so on, of natural spaces into human ones, with fewer and fewer resources "left over" for nonhuman creatures to live on. What resources remain are often contaminated. Hans de Kroon characterizes the life of many modern insects as trying to survive from one dwindling oasis to the next but with "a desert in between, and at worst it's a poisonous desert." Of particular concern are neonicotinoids, neurotoxins that were thought to affect only treated crops but turned out to accumulate in the landscape and to be consumed by all kinds of nontargeted bugs. People talk about the "loss" of bees to colony collapse disorder, and that appears to be the right word: Affected hives aren't full of dead bees, but simply mysteriously empty. A leading theory is that exposure to neurotoxins leaves bees unable to find their way home. Even hives exposed to low levels of neonicotinoids have been shown to collect less pollen and produce fewer eggs and far fewer queens. Some recent studies found bees doing better in cities than in the supposed countryside.

The diversity of insects means that some will manage to make do in new environments, some will thrive (abundance cuts both ways: agricultural monocultures, places where only one kind of plant grows, allow some pests to reach population levels they would never achieve in nature) and some, searching for food and shelter in a world nothing like the one they were meant for, will fail. While we need much more data to better understand the reasons or mechanisms behind the ups and downs, Thomas says, "the average across all species is still a decline."

Since the Krefeld study came out, researchers have begun searching for other forgotten repositories of information that might offer windows into the past. Some of the Radboud researchers have analyzed long-term data, belonging to Dutch entomological societies, about beetles and moths in certain reserves; they found significant drops (72 percent, 54 percent) that mirrored the Krefeld ones. Roel van Klink, a researcher at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, told me that before Krefeld, he, like most entomologists, had never been interested in biomass. Now he is looking for historical data sets - many of which began as studies of agricultural pests, like a decades-long study of grasshoppers in Kansas - that could help create a more thorough picture of what's happening to creatures that are at once abundant and imperiled. So far he has found forgotten data from 140 old data sets for 1,500 locations that could be resampled.

In the United States, one of the few long-term data sets about insect abundance comes from the work of Arthur Shapiro, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis. In 1972, he began walking transects in the Central Valley and the Sierras, counting butterflies. He planned to do a study on how short-term weather variations affected butterfly populations. But the longer he sampled, the more valuable his data became, offering a signal through the noise of seasonal ups and downs. "And so here I am in Year 46," he said, nearly half a century of spending five days a week, from late spring to the end of autumn, observing butterflies. In that time he has watched overall numbers decline and seen some species that used to be everywhere - even species that "everyone regarded as a junk species" only a few decades ago - all but disappear. Shapiro believes that Krefeld-level declines are likely to be happening all over the globe. "But, of course, I don't cover the entire globe," he added. "I cover I-80."

There are also new efforts to set up more of the kind of insect-monitoring schemes researchers wish had existed decades ago, so that our current level of fallenness, at least, is captured. One is a pilot project in Germany similar to the Danish car study. To analyze what is caught, the researchers turned to volunteer naturalists, hobbyists similar to the ones in Krefeld, with the necessary breadth of knowledge to know what they're looking at. "These are not easy species to identify," says Aletta Bonn, of the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, who is overseeing the project. (The skills required for such work "are really extreme," Dunn says. "These people train for decades with other amateurs to be able to identify beetles based on their genitalia.") Bond would like to pay the volunteers for their expertise, she says, but funding hasn't caught up to the crisis. That didn't stop the "amateurs" from being willing to help: "They said, 'We're just curious what's in there, we would like to have samples.' "

Goulson says that Europe's tradition of amateur naturalism may account for why so many of the clues to the falloff in insect biodiversity originate there. (Tottrup's design for the car net in Denmark, for example, was itself adapted from the invention of a dedicated beetle-collecting hobbyist.) As little as we know about the status of European bugs, we know significantly less about other parts of the world. "We wouldn't know anything if it weren't for them," the so-called amateurs, Goulson told me. "We'd be entirely relying on the fact that there's no bugs on the windshield."

Thomas believes that this naturalist tradition is also why Europe is acting much faster than other places - for example, the United States - to address the decline of insects: Interest leads to tracking, which leads to awareness, which leads to concern, which leads to action. Since the Krefeld data emerged, there have been hearings about protecting insect biodiversity in the German Bundestag and the European Parliament. European Union member states voted to extend a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides and have begun to put money toward further studies of how abundance is changing, what is causing those changes and what can be done. When I knocked on the door of de Kroon's office, at Radboud University in the Dutch city Nijmegen, he was looking at some photos from another meeting he had that day: Willem-Alexander, the king of the Netherlands, had taken a tour of the city's efforts to make its riverside a friendlier habitat for bugs.

Stemming insect declines will require much more than this, however. The European Union already had some measures in place to help pollinators - including more strictly regulating pesticides than the United States does and paying farmers to create insect habitats by leaving fields fallow and allowing for wild edges alongside cultivation - but insect populations dropped anyway. New reports call for national governments to collaborate; for more creative approaches such as integrating insect habitats into the design of roads, power lines, railroads and other infrastructure; and, as always, for more studies. The necessary changes, like the causes, may be profound. "It's just another indication that we're destroying the life-support system of the planet," Lister says of the Puerto Rico study. "Nature's resilient, but we're pushing her to such extremes that eventually it will cause a collapse of the system."

Scientists hope that insects will have a chance to embody that resilience. While tigers tend to give birth to three or four cubs at a time, a ghost moth in Australia was once recorded laying 29,100 eggs, and she still had 15,000 in her ovaries. The fecund abundance that is insects' singular trait should enable them to recover, but only if they are given the space and the opportunity to do so.

"It's a debate we need to have urgently," Goulson says. "If we lose insects, life on earth will. ..." He trailed off, pausing for what felt like a long time.

In Denmark, Sune Boye Riis's transect with his car net took him past a bit of woods, some suburban lawns, some hedges, a Christmas-tree farm. The closest thing to a meadow that we passed was a large military property, on which the grass had been allowed to grow tall and golden. Riis had received instructions not to drive too fast, so traffic backed up behind us, and some people began to honk. "Well," Riis said, "so much for science." After three miles, he turned around and drove back toward the start. His windshield stayed mockingly clean.

Riis had four friends who were also participating in the study. They had a bet going among them: Who would net the biggest bug? "I'm way behind," Riis said. "A bumblebee is in the lead." His biggest catch? "A fly. Not even a big one."

At the end of the transect, Riis stopped at another parlous roadside spot, unfastened the net and removed the small bag at its tip. Some volunteers, captivated by what the study revealed about the world around them, asked the organizers for extra specimen bags, so they could do more sampling on their own. Some even asked if they could buy the entire car-net apparatus. Riis, though, was content to peer through the mesh, inside of which he could make out a number of black specks of varying tininess.

There was also a single butterfly, white-winged and delicate. Riis thought of the bet with his friends, for which the meaning of bigness had not been defined. He wondered how it might be reckoned. What gave a creature value?

"Is it weight?" he asked, staring down at the butterfly. In the big bag, it looked small and sad and alone. "Or is it grace?"

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The Insect Apocalypse Is Here (Published 2018)

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Feature What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth? Credit... Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman. Source photographs: Bridgeman Images. S une Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his youngest son, enjoying the sun slanting over the fields and woodlands near their home north of Copenhagen, when it suddenly occurred to him that something about the experience was amiss.

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How One Company Pulls Carbon From the Air, Aiming to Avert a Climate Catastrophe 10 Dec 2018 NPR Special Series 

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How One Company Pulls Carbon From the Air, Aiming to Avert a Climate Catastrophe 10 Dec 2018 NPR Special Series 

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At a major climate meeting in Poland, nearly 200 countries are trying to reach a deal on dramatically reducing carbon emissions. But a recent U.N. report found that may not be enough to avoid dangerous impacts from the warming climate. In fact, the world is falling so far short of what's needed, it said, that it might be necessary to pull massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air.

The problem is that there's no feasible - let alone economical - way to do that yet. But there are a number of efforts underway to find one, including in the small, picturesque town of Squamish, British Columbia, an hour's drive north of Vancouver.

Carbon Engineering has been working for nearly a decade on the technology behind a "direct air capture" pilot plant, which sits just outside its office.

The process of capturing CO2 starts with an "air contactor," which looks like an oversized semitrailer with a huge fan on top. In front there's a black grill with a solution containing potassium hydroxide flowing down it, so it sounds like a waterfall. Once the solution meets the air, it captures and retains carbon dioxide.

That may sound simple, but it's not. Even though scientists say there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere now, it's at a very small concentration - only about 0.04 percent.

"So you have to pull in a huge volume of air to get that CO2, and that's really the trick to direct air capture," says Jenny McCahill, a chemist and engineer who works for Carbon Engineering.

Next, more chemicals are added and the solution is heated to create white pellets that look like the filling in bean bag chairs. These contain about 50 percent CO2.

Then the pellets are heated to 900 degrees Celsius (1,652 degrees Fahrenheit) to further concentrate the CO2 into a gas.

At this point the company could inject that underground. That's one way to address climate change. But there's no business model for that right now, and Carbon Engineering is looking for profits to help its technology expand.

To that end, it combines the CO2 gas with hydrogen extracted from water and makes a clear, synthetic fuel that McCahill says is similar to crude oil.

"It's a lot purer, so we don't have impurities like sulfur and nitrogen components that end up with that soot when you combust," she says.

Once this fuel is put through a refinery, McCahill says it can be turned into products such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.

But burning those emits carbon dioxide, so essentially carbon would just be moved around instead of reduced in the atmosphere. Still, the company argues there's an environmental benefit.

"We capture it again the next day and we make more fuel out of it," says company CEO Steve Oldham. "So the CO2 becomes recycled, and consequently there's no additional emissions from using fuel."

That's because Carbon Engineering's fuel would replace carbon-intensive fossil fuels. But that cleaner fuel comes with a cost.

"If we were to sell our fuel directly at the pump today, we're about 20 percent more expensive than regular gasoline," Oldham says.

Right now you can't buy this fuel, though, because the company's pilot plant removes just one ton of CO2 from the air each day and produces only about two barrels of synthetic fuel. But Oldham says his company is ready to start building larger plants.

With investors that include Bill Gates, Carbon Engineering has spent $30 million perfecting this process. The company says it can extract carbon dioxide from the air for less than $100 a ton, a claim two other companies, Climeworks and Global Thermostat, also make.

But some experts are skeptical this can be done that cheaply. It takes a lot of energy to move that much air and heat to concentrate the CO2. And energy costs money.

"The reality is, it's a lot cheaper to keep CO2 out of the air than to capture it once we get it into the air," says Howard Herzog, senior research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative. He thinks reducing emissions makes more economic sense than direct air capture technologies.

But many scientists argue it's too late to rely only on reducing emissions, with mounting projections of dire consequences from climate change.

"Certainly, in light of the recent climate reports, we don't have the option of simply avoiding carbon emissions any more. We now are at a point where we need to start removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere," says Jennifer Wilcox, chemical engineering professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Wilcox says this technology shouldn't be seen as the one solution to climate change. But combined with many other efforts, she thinks it could make a valuable contribution.

Still, Wilcox and others say the technology needs more research and development.

"I see this industry similar to the renewable energy industry, maybe 20 or 30 years ago," says Carbon180 Executive Director Noah Deich. His group in Oakland, Calif., advocates for an economy that removes more carbon than it emits.

Deich says direct air capture needs the kind of private and government investment that helped wind and solar grow. Earlier this year Congress did expand tax credits for extracting carbon.

"I think an even bigger opportunity on the policy front is in California," Deich says. The state's Low Carbon Fuel Standard includes a carbon trading program for transportation fuels such as gasoline. That could be a big boost for Carbon Engineering's fuel.

Carbon Engineering's Oldham also wants more governments to put a price, or tax, on carbon dioxide emissions. "It will force companies that have a carbon footprint today to find ways to mitigate that carbon footprint, and we're a very good way of doing so," he says.

Oldham says his company plans to soon build its first full-size plant, one that will remove much more carbon dioxide from the air and run on renewable energy. (The pilot plant uses natural gas.)

If all goes well, he hopes it will become a model for many more such plants in the near future.

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How One Company Pulls Carbon From The Air, Aiming To Avert A Climate Catastrophe

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At a major climate meeting in Poland, nearly 200 countries are trying to reach a deal on dramatically reducing carbon emissions. But a recent U.N. report found that may not be enough to avoid dangerous impacts from the warming climate.

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Greenland’s Melting Ice Nears a ‘Tipping Point,’ Scientists Say; The New York Times Climate Forward newsletter 21 Jan 2019, John Schwartz

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Greenland’s Melting Ice Nears a ‘Tipping Point,’ Scientists Say; The New York Times Climate Forward newsletter 21 Jan 2019, John Schwartz

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Greenland's ice is melting so fast that it could become a major factor in sea-level rise around the world within two decades, scientists said in a new study. Credit Credit... Lucas Jackson/Reuters

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Greenland's enormous ice sheet is melting at such an accelerated rate that it may have reached a "tipping point" and could become a major factor in sea-level rise around the world within two decades, scientists said in a study published on Monday.

The Arctic is warming at twice the average rate of the rest of the planet, and the new research adds to the evidence that the ice loss in Greenland, which lies mainly above the Arctic Circle, is speeding up as the warming increases. The authors found that ice loss in 2012, more than 400 billion tons per year, was nearly four times the rate in 2003. After a lull in 2013-14, losses have resumed.

The study is the latest in a series of papers published this month suggesting that scientific estimates of the effects of a warming planet have been, if anything, too conservative. Just a week ago, a separate study of ice loss in Antarctica found that the continent is contributing more to rising sea levels than previously thought.

Another new analysis suggested that the oceans are warming far faster than earlier estimates. Warming oceans are currently the leading cause of sea-level rise, since water expands as it warms.

Researchers said these findings underscored the need for action to curb emissions of planet-warming gases and avoid the worst effects of climate change.
[A record number of Americans are concerned about global warming, a new poll found.]
Rising sea levels are one of the clearest consequences of global warming; they are caused both by thermal expansion of the oceans and by the melting of ice sheets on land. Current projections say that if the planet warms by two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial times, average sea levels will rise by more than two feet, and 32 million to 80 million people will be exposed to coastal flooding.

Much of the previous research on Greenland's ice has dealt with the southeast and northeast parts of the island, where large chunks of glacial ice calve into the sea. The new paper focuses on the ice-covered stretches of southwest Greenland, which has few large glaciers and was not generally considered as important a source of ice loss.

But as the earth warms, the paper concludes, the vast plains of southwestern ice will increasingly melt, with the meltwater flowing to the ocean. Within two decades, it says, the region "will become a major contributor to sea level rise."

The study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used satellite data and ground-based instruments to measure Greenland's ice loss in the 21st century. It looked closely at what seemed to be a pause in the ice loss for about a year, beginning in 2013, that followed a stretch of greatly accelerated melting.

The researchers tied the pause in melting to a reversal of the cyclical weather phenomenon known as the North Atlantic Oscillation. Before the pause, the oscillation was in what is known as its negative phase, which is associated with warmer air hitting west Greenland, along with less snowfall and more sunlight, all of which contribute to ice loss. When the cycle shifted into a positive phase in 2013, an "abrupt slowdown" of melting occurred.

Yet, the slowdown was anything but good news, said Michael Bevis, the lead author of the paper and a professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University.

The North Atlantic Oscillation has occurred throughout the historical record, he noted. But before 2000, overall average temperatures were cool enough that the N.A.O.'s positive and negative cycles did not have much of an effect on rates of melting in Greenland.

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A scientist repaired a GPS device last summer near Greenland's Helheim Glacier. Credit... Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Now, the strong effect that the cooler cycle had on the rate of melting - even if it was helpful in stopping ice loss - is a reason for concern, Dr. Bevis said. If the warm cycles of the N.A.O. are associated with huge losses of ice, and the cool cycles only pause the melting, it suggests a threshold has been reached: As average temperatures rise further, melting will be more sustained, and the cooling cycles will have less of an effect in slowing the ice loss.

"If a relatively minor cycle can cause massive melting," he said, "it means you've reached a point of amazing sensitivity" to warmer temperatures, which could represent "the tipping point."

And so, he said, "One degree of warming in the future will have way more impact than one degree of warming in the last century."

The new research dovetails with other recent papers on the accelerating melting. Last month a team of researchers published a paper in Nature that used satellite observations, analysis of ice cores and models to show that losses from the Greenland ice sheet have reached their fastest rate in at least 350 years.

At the other end of the earth, the speed of Antarctica's ice loss is also becoming clearer. A study published last week, also in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, surveyed four decades of data and found faster losses in some regions than scientists had previously estimated.

The continent has presented a mixed story in recent years, with researchers measuring substantial losses in some regions but stability and even gains in others. But the new paper found considerable losses of glacial ice in East Antarctica, previously considered to be relatively stable. As a whole, Antarctica lost about 40 billion tons of ice per year in the 1980s, but it has been losing roughly 250 billion tons per year in the past decade.

That new paper adds to a body of recent research showing that Antarctica's ice loss is accelerating, including a study in June that found that the rate of ice loss had tripled since 2007. Scientists estimate the Antarctic melting will contribute six inches to sea-level rise by 2100.

Luke D. Trusel, a glaciologist at Rowan University and an author of last month's Nature paper on Greenland, said the new research by Dr. Bevis and his colleagues "provides clear and further illustration of how sensitive Greenland now is" to global warming.

"What's happening today is well beyond the range of what could be expected naturally," he said. "The human fingerprint on Greenland melting today is unequivocal."

Still, he said, most estimates of a tipping point for Greenland ice loss cite higher average temperatures than are currently occurring, more along the lines of 1.5 or two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Global average temperatures have already increased by about one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

A co-author of the Nature paper, Sarah B. Das, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, agreed that Dr. Bevis's study reinforced her own team's conclusions and showed "how quickly Greenland is disappearing." The common finding, she said, is that climate change has brought Greenland to a state in which "a little bit of a nudge is going to have an outsized impact," causing enormous melting.

But, she said, "I take issue with using 'tipping point' to describe the accelerating mass loss Greenland is experiencing," because "it makes it appear as if we have passed, or soon will pass, the point of no return." She said she saw reasons for hope.

Dr. Trusel agreed that talk of tipping points could discount humans' ability to mitigate global warming. "We may be able to control how rapidly the ice sheet changes in the future," he said.

"By limiting greenhouse gas emissions we limit warming, and thus also limit how rapidly and intensely Greenland affects our livelihoods through sea-level rise," he added. "That, it seems, is our call to make."

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

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Greenland's Melting Ice Nears a 'Tipping Point,' Scientists Say (Published 2019)

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Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. Greenland's enormous ice sheet is melting at such an accelerated rate that it may have reached a "tipping point" and could become a major factor in sea-level rise around the world within two decades, scientists said in a study published on Monday.

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Brace for the Polar Vortex; It May Be Visiting More Often 18 January 2019, Kendra Pierre-Louis

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Brace for the Polar Vortex; It May Be Visiting More Often 18 January 2019, Kendra Pierre-Louis

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Updated Jan. 28, 2019

Find your long johns, break out the thick socks and raid the supermarket. After a month of relatively mild winter weather, the Midwest and the East Coast are experiencing what has become a seasonal rite of passage: the polar vortex.

The phrase has become synonymous with frigid temperatures that make snowstorms more likely. And if it seems as if these polar freezes are happening more often, you're right. "They are definitely becoming more common," said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. "There have been a couple of studies that have documented that."

Colder temperatures have been arriving later in winter over the past few years, according to Judah Cohen, a climatologist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, a weather risk assessment firm. But because of changes to the polar vortex, when wintry weather does arrive, it's often more intense - witness the four back-to-back nor'easters last year.

"I've been making that argument that winter is shortening, but you're getting these more intensive periods in that shorter winter," Dr. Cohen said.
[If it's so cold outside, what happened to global warming? Read our explainer.

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A satellite image of low pressure from the polar vortex swooping across North America in January 2014. Credit... NOAA, via Getty Images

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Scientists are still trying to figure out why these intense arctic chills are flooding southward more frequently. To understand their thinking, it helps to understand the nature of the polar vortex. While the expression became broadly popular during an unusually cold winter in 2014, the vortex was known to meteorologists long before that.

The term refers to circular bands of winds near the poles that are strongest in wintertime and well above the jet stream in the stratosphere. The stratosphere is an atmospheric layer that extends roughly seven to 31 miles above the earth.

Usually, those circular bands act as walls that keep the teeth-chattering cold air locked at the poles. But, every so often, the winds break down and allow the cold air to escape. That's what happened at the beginning of January, when the polar vortex split into three separate bands.

It's this escaping polar air that is dropping temperatures in the Midwest and the East - there's a lag time between the atmospheric event and when we experience the effects. The broken vortex is also sending icy temperatures to much of Europe in what some call the "Beast From the East."

Some researchers, including Dr. Francis and Dr. Cohen, say they suspect that the more frequent polar vortex breakdowns can be tied to climate change.

While climate change is warming the earth, not all parts of the earth are warming at the same rate; the Arctic is warming at a rate twice as fast as the world average. That warming has led to historically low levels of sea ice in the region. The melting sea ice, particularly in an area near the Barents and Kara Seas off Siberia, may be linked to the changes in the polar vortex.

"When we lose a lot of ice in that particular area in the summer, it absorbs a lot of extra heat from the sun," Dr. Francis said. This is because the darker open ocean absorbs more heat than reflective ice. "And so we see a very persistent, hot spot there in terms of temperature differences from what they should be."

Research suggests that the hot spot, along with changes in the jet stream driven by climate change, cause the polar vortex to break down in mid- to late winter.

"As the Arctic gets warmer and warmer, the severe weather picks up," Dr. Cohen said.

In October, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted a milder than average winter, but that is not necessarily at odds with the January chill.

"There's a difference between some seasonal outlooks such as NOAA's that look at the whole three-month period and others that may be breaking it down month by month," said Bob Henson, a meteorologist with the forecasting service Weather Underground. "It's quite possible the winter will average warm for December through February. But that may well manifest as the extreme warmth we've seen over the last month followed by some much colder and colder than average conditions into February."

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

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Brace for the Polar Vortex; It May Be Visiting More Often (Published 2019)

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Updated Jan. 28, 2019 Find your long johns, break out the thick socks and raid the supermarket. After a month of relatively mild winter weather, the Midwest and the East Coast are experiencing what has become a seasonal rite of passage: the polar vortex.

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Climate Change in the American Mind: December 2018; Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Report Summary 22 January 2019

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Climate Change in the American Mind: December 2018; Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Report Summary 22 January 2019

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Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

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Our latest national survey finds that a large majority of Americans think global warming is happening, outnumbering those who don't by more than 5 to 1. Americans are also growing more certain that global warming is happening and more aware that it is caused by human activities. Certainty has increased 14 percentage points since March 2015, with 51% of the public now "extremely" or "very sure" that global warming is happening. Sixty-two percent of the public now understands that global warming is caused mostly by human activities, an increase of 10 points over that same time period.

This report is based on findings from a nationally representative survey - Climate Change in the American Mind - conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (climatecommunication.yale.edu) and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication (climatechangecommunication.org), Interview dates: November 28 - December 11, 2018. Interviews: 1,114 Adults (18+). Average margin of error +/- 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

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Climate Change in the American Mind: December 2018

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Our latest national survey finds that a large majority of Americans think global warming is happening, outnumbering those who don't by more than 5 to 1. Americans are also growing more certain that global warming is happening and more aware that it is caused by human activities.

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Capturing carbon to fight climate change is dividing environmentalists 

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Capturing carbon to fight climate change is dividing environmentalists 

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Green Technology Magazine, 1 Feb 2019

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Georgetown University and Holly Jean Buck, University of California, Los Angeles

Environmental activists are teaming up with fresh faces in Congress to advocate for a Green New Deal, a bundle of policies that would fight climate change while creating new jobs and reducing inequality. Not all of the activists agree on what those policies ought to be.

Some 626 environmental groups, including Greenpeace, the Center for Biological Diversity and 350, recently laid out their vision in a letter they sent to U.S. lawmakers. They warned that they "vigorously oppose" several strategies, including the use of carbon capture and storage - a process that can trap excess carbon pollution that's already warming the Earth, and lock it away.

In our view, as a political philosopher who studies global justice and an environmental social scientist, this blanket opposition is an unfortunate mistake. Based on the need to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and the risks in relying on land sinks like forests and soils alone to take up the excess carbon, we believe that carbon capture and storage could be a powerful tool for making the climate safer and even rectifying historical climate injustices.

Global inequality

We think the U.S. and other rich countries should accelerate negative emissions research for two reasons.

First, they can afford it. Second, they have a historical responsibility as they burned a disproportionate amount of the carbon causing climate change today. Global warming is poised to hit the least-developed countries, including dozens that were colonized by these wealthier nations, the hardest.

Consider this: The entire African continent emits less carbon than the U.S., Russia or Japan.

Yet Africa is likely to experience climate change impacts sooner and more intensely than any other region. Some African regions are already experiencing warming increases at more than twice the global rate. Coastal and island nations like Bangladesh, Madagascar and the Marshall Islands face near or total destruction.

But the world's richest nations have been slow to endorse and support the necessary research, development and governance for negative emissions technologies.

Bad track record with coal

What explains the objections from climate justice advocates?

The U.S. has heavily funded experiments with carbon capture and storage to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from new coal-fired power plants since George W. Bush's presidency.

Those efforts have not paid off, partly because of economics. Natural gas and renewable energy have become cheaper and more popular than coal for generating electricity.

Only a handful of coal-fired power plants are under construction in the U.S., where closures are routine. The industry is in trouble everywhere, with few exceptions.

In addition, carbon capture with coal has a bad track record. The biggest U.S. experiment is the US$7.5 billion Kemper power plant in Mississippi. It ended in failure in 2017 when state power authorities ordered the plant operator to give up on this technology and rely on natural gas instead.

Other uses

Carbon capture and storage, however, isn't just for fossil-fuel-burning power plants. It can work with industrial carbon dioxide sources, such as steel, cement and chemical plants and incinerators.

Then, one of two things can happen. The carbon can be turned into new products, such as fuels, cement, soft drinks or even shoes.

Carbon can also be stored permanently if it is injected underground, where geologists believe it can stay put for centuries.

Until now, a common use for captured carbon is extracting oil out of old wells. Burning that petroleum, however, can make climate change worse.

Going carbon negative

This technology may potentially also remove more carbon than gets emitted - as long as it's designed right.

One example is what's called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, where farm residues or crops like trees or grasses are grown to be burned to generate electricity. Carbon is separated out and stored at the power plants where this happens.

If the supply chain is sustainable, with cultivation, harvesting and transport done in low-carbon or carbon-neutral ways, this process can produce what scientists call negative emissions, with more carbon removed than released. Another possibility involves directly capturing carbon from the air.

Scientists point out that bioenergy with carbon capture and storage could require vast amounts of land for growing biofuels to burn. And climate advocates are concerned that both approaches could pave the way for oil, gas and coal companies and big industries to simply continue with business as usual instead of phasing out fossil fuels.

Natural solutions

Every pathway to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in the most recent U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report projected the use of carbon removal approaches.

Planting more trees, composting and farming in ways that store carbon in soils and protecting wetlands can also reduce atmospheric carbon. We believe the natural solutions many environmentalists might prefer are crucial. But soaking up excess carbon through afforestation on a massive scale could encroach on farmland.

To be sure, not all environmentalists are writing off carbon capture and storage.

The Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council, along with many other big green organizations, did not sign the letter, which objected not just to carbon capture and storage but also to nuclear power, emissions trading and converting trash into energy through incineration.

Rather than leave carbon removal technologies out of the Green New Deal, we suggest that more environmentalists consider their potential for removing carbon that has already been emitted. We believe these approaches could potentially create jobs, foster economic development and reduce inequality on a global scale - as long as they are meaningfully accountable to people in the world's poorest nations.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University and Holly Jean Buck, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of California, Los Angeles

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Capturing carbon to fight climate change is dividing environmentalists - Green Technology

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Georgetown University and Holly Jean Buck, University of California, Los Angeles Environmental activists are teaming up with fresh faces in Congress to advocate for a Green New Deal, a bundle of policies that would fight climate change while creating new jobs and reducing inequality.

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Coastal DEMS make 3-d maps of coasts that help understand and predict changes in Earth’s environment. 

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Coastal DEMS make 3-d maps of coasts that help understand and predict changes in Earth’s environment. 

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The CIRES coastal digital elevation model (DEM) team is located in NOAA's David Skaggs Research Center in Boulder, Colorado and is funded primarily by NOAA Line Offices through a Cooperative Agreement with NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). A companion website at NCEI has more details on the role of our group within NOAA.

To meet our team visit our About Us page.

We develop high-resolution, three-dimensional computer models of coastal regions throughout the United States and select international territories. Our DEMs are available here. Our DEMs integrate land and seafloor topography to depict Earth's solid surface and are made from public land and seafloor elevation data collected by federal, state and local governments, universities and private companies. Our models help plan, prepare for and better understand ocean processes and have a wide range of scientific and technical uses such as tsunami and storm-surge forecasting and warning, hazard mitigation and community preparedness, ecosystem management and habitat research, coastal change and terrain analysis.

Projects

National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program (NTHMP)
Read More

Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL)
Read More

Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013
Read More

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The CIRES coastal digital elevation model (DEM) team is located in NOAA's David Skaggs Research Center in Boulder, Colorado and is funded primarily by NOAA Line Offices through a Cooperative Agreement with NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). A companion website at NCEI has more details on the role of our group within NOAA.

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An independently operated and funded research organization focusing on climate science and strategic analysis.

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Globally, October 2020 was the fifth warmest October since record-keeping began in 1850. La Niña conditions strengthened in October, significantly reducing the likelihood that 2020 sets a new record for warmest year.

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Globally, October 2020 was the fifth warmest October since record-keeping began in 1850. La Niña conditions strengthened in October, significantly reducing the likelihood that 2020 sets a new record for warmest year.

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Becoming Greta: Invisible (school) Girl to Global Climate Activist…” Somini Segupta 18 Feb 2019

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Becoming Greta: Invisible (school) Girl to Global Climate Activist…” Somini Segupta 18 Feb 2019

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Greta Thunberg, center, skips school on Fridays to demonstrate for climate action at the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm. Credit... Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times

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STOCKHOLM - It's complicated being Greta.

Small, shy, survivor of crippling depression, Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish girl skipping school to shame the world into addressing climate change, drew a parade of fans one Friday in February on a frozen square in Stockholm.

Six Swiss students had traveled 26 hours by train to seek her support for their petition for a tougher Swiss carbon emissions law. An Italian scientist told her she reminded him of his younger, activist self. A television news crew hovered around her. Women from an antismoking group came to give her a T-shirt.

Greta nodded, whispered, "Thanks," posed for pictures. Made exactly zero small talk.

All this attention, she said out of earshot of the others, is great. It means "people are listening." But then, a knife-blade flash of rage revealed itself.

"It's sometimes annoying when people say, 'Oh you children, you young people are the hope. You will save the world'" she said, after several grown-ups had told her just that. "I think it would be helpful if you could help us just a little bit."

This is signature Greta. Wry. Blunt. Sometimes sarcastic. The opposite of sweet.

It surfaced again on Friday, when Prime Minister Theresa May's office dismissed school walkouts in Britain as a distraction that "wastes lesson time." Greta swiftly struck back on Twitter: "But then again, political leaders have wasted 30 yrs of inaction. And that is slightly worse."

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Margot Wallstrom, the deputy prime minister of Sweden, left, met with Greta on a recent Friday. Credit... Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times

Like a modern-day Cassandra for the age of climate change, her solitary act of civil disobedience - this was the 25th time that she skipped school to protest at Parliament - has turned her into something of a global commodity. It has inspired huge children's demonstrations elsewhere, prompted a debate about whether children should skip classes for climate action, and invited trolls, haters and skeptics who wonder who profits from Greta.

The last six months have been, as she said, "a weird contrast." They have compelled her to talk, talk a lot, which is something she is not accustomed to.

"All my life I've been invisible, the invisible girl in the back who doesn't say anything," she said. "From one day to another, people listen to me. That's a weird contrast. It's hard."

"It's sometimes annoying when people say, 'Oh you children, you young people are the hope. You will save the world,'" Greta said. "I think it would be helpful if you could help us just a little bit." Credit... Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times

At midday, as the sky turned gray, her father, Svante, brought lunch. Chickpeas and rice, which she ate, standing, alone in the crowd, in minute forkfuls, like a bird, before receiving a gaggle of third-graders in snowsuits. By the end of the afternoon, a full 7 hours standing outside in the cold, she was very tired. All she wanted to do, she said, was to go home and lie on the couch with her dogs.

Greta Thunberg is an unlikely, though not entirely accidental, activist.

The eldest of two girls, she grew up in Stockholm. She studied piano and ballet and theater. She did well in school. Like many children, she watched educational films about the melting Arctic and the fate of the polar bears and the marine mammals bloated with plastic. But unlike other children, she couldn't let them go. "I became very affected. I began thinking about it all the time and I became very sad," she said. "Those pictures were stuck in my head."

Adolescence brought social pressures. She wasn't into the things that many other kids were into. Mobile phones. Clothes. None of it interested her, her father recalled. "I think she was very isolated and very lonely," Mr. Thunberg said.

By age 11, Greta had fallen into a deep funk. She stopped going to school. She stopped eating. She stopped growing. She spoke only to family, and, at school, only to one teacher, Anita von Berens.

"Before, my own world was very big," she recalled. "I was all alone."

Is the alone-world still there?

"Yes," she readily replied. "But it's getting smaller and the real world is getting bigger."

"I'm happier now," she added. "I have meaning. I have something I have to do."

Greta with Roxy, her Labrador retriever. Credit... Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times

It was a cold, silver Saturday morning, the day after her weekly school strike. Mr. Thunberg had brought her to see the horse her family keeps and shares with other children in a stable outside the city. Greta brushed the animal, an Icelandic horse named Freyja. "Like a massage," she said. She cleaned the gunk from its hooves. "Mostly poop," she said. She tried to keep her black Lab, Roxy, from gobbling the stuff off the snow. "Hopeless," she grumbled.

Freyja, she said, is very stubborn, and it took her some time to get the bit into the horse's mouth before taking her for a slow ride in the woods. Being with her horse calms her, Greta said. The trees should be covered in snow by this time. It has snowed less than normal this year, she said.

She remains tiny for her age, a consequence of barely eating during her struggle with depression. She doesn't laugh much, or make small talk.

Or, as she puts it, "I only say what's necessary."

She prefers the company of adults and animals to children of her own age. Bullying and depression have taken a toll.

Getting through the rough patch took months. Greta said what made her feel better was to be heard, first by her parents. She goaded them to stop eating meat. Then she goaded them to become vegan, which they also did, except that, according to Greta, her mother, Malena Ernman, continues to sneak in cheese. "At night, so I won't see it," Greta said.

Her most important victory came when, in 2016, she persuaded her mother to stop flying, which was a big deal because Ms. Ernman is an opera singer well-known in Sweden whose career depends on traveling widely. Soon came a flurry of attention to the no-fly decision and, eventually, a book that Ms. Ernman and Mr. Thunberg wrote about how their child had changed them.

"It felt very good to be listened to," Greta said.

"One of the pros of having a famous mother," Greta said, is that "I'm quite familiar with the media and how it works." Credit... Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times

On Monday, Aug. 20, around the time her parents' book came out, she sat in front of the Swedish Parliament. Word quickly spread. Soon came an invitation to the United Nations climate conference and another to the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, where she told a roomful of business leaders that their financial success had "come with an unthinkable price tag" for the planet.

Greta, for her part, has told her mother not to join her at the protests. She said she does not want anyone to think her mother put her up to it. (Through her husband, Ms. Ernman declined to be interviewed.)

Being Ms. Ernman's daughter prepared Greta for this role. "That's one of the pros of having a famous mother," she said. "I'm quite familiar with the media and how it works."

Only once, when she confronted journalists lined up to interview her at Davos, did she freeze. Like before, the words didn't come.

These days, she said, she thinks carefully about everything she does - what she wears, what she says, whom she connects with on Facebook. She curates her social media carefully, posting a picture of herself riding back from Davos by train, which drew attention to the conference participants who had chartered private jets.

Sometimes, her public role brings unwelcome attention. A plastic-wrapped sandwich in one of the pictures on the train brought criticism. A German politician, Paul Ziemiak, challenged her on Twitter recently by posting an unflattering emoji of a monkey covering its eyes. He was roundly criticized for picking on a child.

And an investigation by the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet asserted that Greta's name and photograph had been used to raise money for a start-up. (Mr. Thunberg said the family had not been informed; the start-up founder, Ingmar Rentzhog, confirmed that Greta's name and photo had appeared in a financial prospectus for the start-up without the family's prior knowledge but he denied that her name had been used to raise capital.)

It prompted Greta to write a long Facebook post, declaring that she is acting independently and that neither she nor her family are accepting any money.

Her former teacher, Ms. von Berens, marveled at her transformation. She also wondered what would happen next, when the attention fades. "I don't think this will be forever," she said.

As for Greta, this is her last semester of 9th grade. She is weighing whether to take a year off to pursue her activism full time.

Asked if she would go to New York in September for the United Nations climate summit if invited, Greta said she would not fly. But, she could sail there on a ship. And she's learned that going on a container ship would have the smallest carbon footprint.

Credit... Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times

Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin and Christina Anderson from Stockholm.

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

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Becoming Greta: 'Invisible Girl' to Global Climate Activist, With Bumps Along the Way (Published 2019)

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Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. STOCKHOLM - It's complicated being Greta. Small, shy, survivor of crippling depression, Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish girl skipping school to shame the world into addressing climate change, drew a parade of fans one Friday in February on a frozen square in Stockholm.

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(Mapping of coastlines as sea levels rise)

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The 2020 Super Bowl stadium could experience
occasional flooding from sea level rise by 2070...

With Florida's coastal areas already facing increased flood risk from high tide flooding and extreme rainfall events, Climate Central looked into how sea level rise may affect Miami's Hard Rock Stadium, this year's Super Bowl host.

Our analysis found most of the stadium property faces exposure to annual flood risk by 2070, if emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to grow unchecked⁠⁠.

...Read More

The Facts About Sea Level Rise

Global warming has raised global sea level about 8 inches since 1880, and the rate of rise is accelerating. Rising seas dramatically increase the odds of damaging floods from storm surges. A Climate Central analysis finds the odds of "century" or worse floods occurring by 2030 are on track to double or more, over widespread areas of the U.S. These increases threaten an enormous amount of damage. Across the country, nearly 5 million people live in 2.6 million homes at less than 4 feet above high tide - a level lower than the century flood line for most locations analyzed. And compounding this risk, scientists expect roughly 2 to 7 more feet of sea level rise this century - a lot depending upon how much more heat-trapping pollution humanity puts into the sky.

Explore

Search or navigate our interactive tools above to see maps of areas below different amounts of sea level rise and flooding, down to neighborhood scale, matched with area timelines of risk. The tool also provides statistics of population, homes and land affected by city, county and state, plus links to factsheets, data downloads, action plans, embeddable widgets, and more.

Interested in supporting the Program on Sea Level Rise or Climate Central generally? Make a gift online or contact Barbara Charbonnet at 201-321-8301 or by email at barbcharb@climatecentral.org.

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Surging Seas Sea level rise analysis by Climate Central

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With Florida's coastal areas already facing increased flood risk from high tide flooding and extreme rainfall events, Climate Central looked into how sea level rise may affect Miami's Hard Rock Stadium, this year's Super Bowl host. Our analysis found most of the stadium property faces exposure to annual flood risk by 2070, if emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to grow unchecked⁠⁠.

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Truthdig, Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth, Chris Hedges

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Truthdig, Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth, Chris Hedges

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Truthdig: Expert Reporting, Current News, Provocative Columnists

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Editor's note: The U.S. Senate on Thursday confirmed a former oil and mining industry lobbyist as secretary of the interior. President Donald Trump's nomination of David Bernhardt, a government official during the George W. Bush administration, easily survived challenges by environmentally minded senators and others. It came amid rapidly mounting scientific evidence that global warming is an existential threat to huge numbers of species, including Homo sapiens. In the reposted column below, first published on Truthdig on Aug. 19, 2018, Chris Hedges writes about climate change and interviews a scientist who is among the many warning about what they call the monumental damage that human-made emissions are causing to the atmosphere and the planet. Hedges will return with a new column next Monday.
The spectacular rise of human civilization-its agrarian societies, cities, states, empires and industrial and technological advances ranging from irrigation and the use of metals to nuclear fusion-took place during the last 10,000 years, after the last ice age. Much of North America was buried, before the ice retreated, under sheets eight times the height of the Empire State Building. This tiny span of time on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old is known as the Holocene Age. It now appears to be coming to an end with the refusal of our species to significantly curb the carbon emissions and pollutants that might cause human extinction. The human-induced change to the ecosystem, at least for many thousands of years, will probably make the biosphere inhospitable to most forms of life.

The planet is transitioning under our onslaught to a new era called the Anthropocene. This era is the product of violent conquest, warfare, slavery, genocide and the Industrial Revolution, which began about 200 years ago and saw humans start to burn a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum. The numbers of humans climbed to over 7 billion. Air, water, ice and rock, which are interdependent, changed. Temperatures climbed. The Anthropocene, for humans and most other species, will most likely conclude with extinction or a massive die-off, as well as climate conditions that will preclude most known life forms. We engineered our march toward collective suicide although global warming was first identified in 1896 by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius.

The failure to act to ameliorate global warming exposes the myth of human progress and the illusion that we are rational creatures. We ignore the wisdom of the past and the stark scientific facts before us. We are entranced by electronic hallucinations and burlesque acts, including those emanating from the centers of power, and this ensures our doom. Speak this unpleasant truth and you are condemned by much of society. The mania for hope and magical thinking is as seductive in the Industrial Age as it was in pre-modern societies.

Ate and Nemesis were minor deities who were evoked in ancient Greek drama. Those infected with hubris, the Greeks warned, lost touch with the sacred, believed they could defy fate, or fortuna, and abandoned humility and virtue. They thought of themselves as gods. Their hubris blinded them to human limits and led them to carry out acts of suicidal folly, embodied in the god Ate. This provoked the wrath of the other gods. Divine retribution, in the form of Nemesis, led to tragedy and death and then restored balance and order, once those poisoned with hubris were eradicated. "Too late, too late you see the path of wisdom," the Chorus in the play "Antigone" tells Creon, ruler of Thebes, whose family has died because of his hubris.

"We're probably not the first time there's been a civilization in the universe," Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and the author of " Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth," told me when we met in New York.

"The idea that we're destroying the planet gives us way too much credit," he went on. "Certainly, we're pushing the earth into a new era. If we look at the history of the biosphere, the history of life on earth, in the long run, the earth is just going to pick that up and do what is interesting for it. It will run new evolutionary experiments. We, on the other hand, may not be a part of that experiment."

Civilizations probably have risen elsewhere in the universe, developed complex societies and then died because of their own technological advances. Every star in the night sky is believed to be circled by planets, some 10 billion trillion of which astronomers such as Frank Drake estimate are hospitable to life.

"If you develop an industrial civilization like ours, the route is going to be the same," Adam Frank said. "You're going to have a hard time not triggering climate change."

Astronomers call the inevitable death of advanced civilizations across the universe "the great filter." Robin Hanson in the essay "The Great Filter-Are We Almost Past It?" argues that advanced civilizations hit a wall or a barrier that makes continued existence impossible. The more that human societies evolve, according to Hanson, the more they become "energy intensive" and ensure their own obliteration. This is why, many astronomers theorize, we have not encountered other advanced civilizations in the universe. They destroyed themselves.

"For a civilization to destroy itself through nuclear war, it has to have certain emotional characteristics," Frank said. "You can imagine certain civilizations saying, 'I'm not building those [nuclear weapons]. Those are crazy.' But climate change, you can't get away from. If you build a civilization, you're using huge amounts of energy. The energy feeds back on the planet, and you're going to push yourself into a kind of Anthropocene. It's probably universal."

Frank said that our inability to project ourselves into a future beyond our own life spans makes it hard for us to grasp the reality and consequences of severe climate change. Scenarios for dramatic climate change often center around the year 2100, when most adults living now will be dead. Although this projection may turn out to be overly optimistic given the accelerating rate of climate change, it allows societies to ignore-because it is outside the life span of most living adults-the slow-motion tsunami that is occurring.

"We think we're not a part of the biosphere-that we're above it-that we're special," Frank said. "We're not special."

"We're the experiment that the biosphere is running now," he said. "A hundred million years ago, it was grassland. Grasslands were a new evolutionary innovation. They changed the planet, changed how the planet worked. Then the planet went on and did things with it. Industrial civilization is the latest experiment. We will keep being a part of that experiment or, with the way that we're pushing the biosphere, it will just move on without us."

"We have been sending probes to every other planet in the solar system for the last 60 years," he said. "We have rovers running around on Mars. We've learned generically how planets work. From Venus, we've learned about the runaway greenhouse effect. On Venus the temperature is 800 degrees. You can melt lead [there]. Mars is a totally dry, barren world now. But it used to have an ocean. It used to be a blue world. We have models that can predict the climate. I can predict the weather on Mars tomorrow via these climate models. People who think the only way we can understand climate is by studying the earth now, that's completely untrue. These other worlds-Mars, Venus, Titan. Titan is a moon of Saturn that has an amazingly rich atmosphere. They all teach us how to think like a planet. They have taught us generically how planets behave."

Frank points out that much of the configurations of the ecosystem on which we depend have not always been part of the planet's biosphere. This includes the Gulf Stream, which carries warm water and warm air up from Florida to Boston and out across the Atlantic.

"Hundreds of millions of people in some of Earth's most technologically advanced cities rely on the mild climate delivered by the Gulf Stream," Frank writes in "Light of the Stars." "But the Gulf Stream is nothing more than a particular circulation pattern formed during a particular climate state the Earth settled into after the last ice age ended. It is not a permanent fixture of the planet."

"Everything we think about the earth just happens to be this one moment we found it in," he told me. "We're pushing it [the planet] and we're pushing it hard. We don't have much time to make these transitions. What people have to understand is that climate change is our cosmic adolescence. We should have expected this. The question is not 'did we change the climate?' It's 'of course we changed the climate. What else did you expect to have happened?' We're like a teenager who has been given this power over ourselves. Just like how you give a teenager the keys to the car, there's this moment where you're like, 'Oh my God I hope you make it.' And that's what we are."

"Climate change is not a problem we have to make go away, in a sense that you don't make adolescence go away," Frank said. "It is a dangerous transition that you have to navigate. ... The question is are we smart enough to deal with the effects of our own power? Climate change is not a pollution problem. It's not like any environmental problem we've faced before. In some sense, it's not an environmental problem but a planetary transition. We've already pushed the earth into it. We're going to have to evolve a new way of being a civilization, fundamentally."

"We will either evolve those group behaviors quickly or the earth will take what we've given it, in terms of new climate states, and move on and create new species," he said.

Frank said the mathematical models for the future of the planet have three trajectories. One is a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human population and then an uneasy stabilization. The second is complete collapse and extinction. The third is a dramatic reconfiguration of human society to protect the biosphere and make it more diverse and productive not for human beings but for the health of the planet. This would include halting our consumption of fossil fuels, converting to a plant-based diet and dismantling the animal agriculture industry as well as greening deserts and restoring rainforests.

There is, Frank warned, a tipping point when the biosphere becomes so degraded no human activity will halt runaway climate change. He cites Venus again.

"The water on Venus got lost slowly," he said. "The CO 2 built up. There was no way to take it out of the atmosphere. It gets hotter. The fact that it gets hotter makes it even hotter. Which makes it even hotter. That's what would happen in the collapse model. Planets have minds of their own. They are super-complex systems. Once you get the ball rolling down the hill. ... This is the greatest fear. This is why we don't want to go past 2 degrees [Celsius] of climate change. We're scared that once you get past 2 degrees, the planet's own internal mechanisms kick in. The population comes down like a stone. A complete collapse. You lose the civilization entirely."

Chris Hedges writes a weekly opinion column for Truthdig. He has written 12 books, including the New York Times best-seller "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt" (2012), which he co-authored with the...

Mr. Fish, also known as Dwayne Booth, is a cartoonist who primarily creates for Truthdig.com and Harpers.com. Mr. Fish's work has also appeared nationally in The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Vanity...

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Editor's note: The U.S. Senate on Thursday confirmed a former oil and mining industry lobbyist as secretary of the interior. President Donald Trump's nomination of David Bernhardt, a government official during the George W. Bush administration, easily survived challenges by environmentally minded senators and others.

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Green Technology Magazine, “is an ‘Insect Apocalypse’ Happening? How Would We Know?” by Brian Lovett, University of Maryland. 

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Green Technology Magazine, “is an ‘Insect Apocalypse’ Happening? How Would We Know?” by Brian Lovett, University of Maryland. 

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Brian Lovett, University of Maryland

Insects scuttle, chew and fly through the world around us. Humans rely on them to pollinate plants, prey on insects that we don't get along with, and to be movers and shakers for Earth's ecosystems. It's hard to imagine a world without insects.

That's why news reports in recent months warning of an " insect apocalypse" sparked widespread alarm. These articles, which were based on long-term insect collections and a review of past studies, suggested that people alive today will witness the indiscriminate extinction of insect-kind.

I study fungi that can be used to control harmful insects, such as pests that damage crops and mosquitoes that transmit malaria. In my world, reports of mass insect die-offs are big news. But while there clearly is reason to be concerned about certain insects, such as the endangered rusty patched bumble bee or the American burying beetle, in my view it isn't yet possible to predict a looming insect apocalypse.

More than 1 million insects have been discovered and named, but many millions have yet to be described. It's undeniable that Earth is becoming increasingly inhospitable to some insects - but nightmarish conditions for one may be heaven to another.

Put another way, there is no perfect environment for all insects. And human impacts on the environment, like climate change and land development, very well may hurt beneficial insects and help harmful ones.

Insect declines

Around the world, entomologists are looking wistfully into empty nets, and car owners are increasingly unsettled by their pristine windshields. It does not take decades of data collection and a degree to notice that in a human lifetime, our teeming world teems less.

The first study to set off alarms was published in 2017 by entomologists in Germany, who reported that over 27 years the biomass of flying insects in their traps had declined by 75%.
Another study from the Luquillo Long Term Ecological Research program site in the Puerto Rican rainforest reproduced an insect survey from the 1970s. It found that the biomass of arthropods - a large group of organisms that includes insects - had declined 10- to 60-fold in that time, and that lizards, frogs and birds that ate arthropods had also declined.

Underscoring this theme, in April 2019 two scholars published a review that synthesized over 70 reports of insect decline from around the world, and predicted mass insect extinctions within a human lifetime. They took a alarmist tone, and have been widely criticized for exaggerating their conclusions and selecting studies to review with the word "decline."

Nonetheless, these researchers had no trouble finding studies to include in their review. Many scientists are currently analyzing the roles that climate change, land use, chemical pesticides and other factors have played in reported declines in many insect species.

The end is not near

These discussions are important, but they don't mean an insect apocalypse is under way. Predicting insect decline is hard to do without a lot of effort and data.

To predict an apocalypse, entomologists worldwide will need to conduct careful large-scale studies that involve collecting, identifying and counting many different insects. There are very few insects for which scientists have enough data now to reliably predict how many individuals there will be from year to year, let alone confidently chart a decline in each species. Most of the insects for which this information exists are species that are important for agricultural or human health, such as managed honey bees or mosquitoes.

And human actions are shifting balances between insect species. As an example, the mosquitoes that are best at spreading pathogens that cause disease have evolved to thrive near us. Entomologists call them anthropophilic, which means they love people.

That love extends to human impacts on the land. Insects that flutter from flower to flower won't be happy when developers bulldoze a meadow and scatter tires around, but human-biting mosquitoes will be buzzing with excitement.

What else is out there?

Entomologists are uniformly concerned about the fate of insects in today's changing world. But I believe the responsible approach is to push back on fire-and-brimstone rhetoric until detailed, large-scale studies are completed. Until then, these same gaps in our knowledge also make it hard to rule out that significant declines in diverse insects are happening. These gaps must be filled to illuminate challenges that insects face, from the inconvenient to the apocalyptic.

When the majority of insects remain to be described, it's hard to value them. But here's one example: Insecticide use in pear groves in China's Sichuan Province has caused such a decline in native pollinators that beekeepers will not lend their bees to these orchards. These farmers are forced to pollinate their trees by hand - an expensive and time-consuming process if you aren't an insect.

Similarly, native natural enemies played invisible roles in slowing the spread of the invasive brown marmorated stink bug when it was introduced into Pennsylvania in the 1990s. They included wasps that lay their eggs inside of stink bug eggs, and predatory insects and spiders that eat stink bugs eggs for breakfast.

Pollination and predation are just the start. Some insects could be sources of new drugs or traditional dyes, while others inspire artists or just provide little moments of inimitable beauty.

With so many unanswered questions, it's clear that there is a need for more funding for biodiversity research. It is no coincidence that recent studies reporting massive insect declines came from a Long-Term Ecological Research center that is publicly funded through the National Science Foundation and from a carefully curated collection made and maintained by entomologists.

This kind of work requires money, bold foresight and dedication to science over long periods of time. But it can produce insights into how our world is changing - and that knowledge will help us prepare for the future.

Brian Lovett, PhD Candidate, University of Maryland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Is an 'insect apocalypse' happening? How would we know? - Green Technology

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Brian Lovett, University of Maryland Insects scuttle, chew and fly through the world around us. Humans rely on them to pollinate plants, prey on insects that we don't get along with, and to be movers and shakers for Earth's ecosystems. It's hard to imagine a world without insects.

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How to Make Biodegradable ‘Plastic’ from Cactus Juice, BBC News (Film by Tom Heyden for People Fixing the World), 4 June 2019.

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How to Make Biodegradable ‘Plastic’ from Cactus Juice, BBC News (Film by Tom Heyden for People Fixing the World), 4 June 2019.

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How to make biodegradable ‘plastic’ from cactus juice

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This Mexican researcher hopes her invention can help replace single-use plastics.

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International restrictions on plastic waste expanding – Wealthy nations seek solutions at home, by Kate O’Neill for The Conversation. ND (June 2019)

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International restrictions on plastic waste expanding – Wealthy nations seek solutions at home, by Kate O’Neill for The Conversation. ND (June 2019)

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Less than two years after China banned most imports of scrap material from abroad, many of its neighbors are following suit. On May 28, 2019, Malaysia's environment minister announced that the country was sending 3,000 metric tons of contaminated plastic wastes back to their countries of origin, including the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Along with the Philippines, which is sending 2,400 tons of illegally exported trash back to Canada, Malaysia's stance highlights how controversial the global trade in plastic scrap has become.

Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are all halting flows of plastics that once went to China but were diverted elsewhere after China started refusing it. They are finding support from many nations that are concerned about waste dumping and marine plastic pollution. At a meeting in Geneva in May 2019, 186 countries agreed to dramatically restrict international trade in scrap plastics to prevent plastics dumping.

As I show in my forthcoming book, " Waste," scrap material of all kinds is both a resource and a threat. The new plastics restriction allows less-wealthy countries to exercise their sovereign right not to accept materials they are ill-equipped to handle. This narrows options for wealthy countries that used to send much of their plastic and paper scrap abroad, and is a small but symbolic step toward curbing plastic waste.

A trade with few rules

The Basel Convention, which governs the international waste trade, was adopted in 1989 in response to egregious cases of hazardous waste dumping on communities in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia. Many of its goals remain unfulfilled, including a ban on shipments of hazardous waste from wealthy to less-wealthy nations for final disposal, and a liability protocol that would assign financial responsibility in the event of an incident. And the agreement has largely failed to encompass newer wastes, particularly discarded electronics.

The new provision, proposed by Norway with broad international support, takes a more aggressive approach. It moves plastic scrap from one category - wastes that can be traded unless directly contaminated - to another group of materials that are not deemed hazardous per se, but are subject to the same trade controls as those classified as hazardous. Now these plastics can be shipped overseas for disposal or recycling only with the express consent of the importing country.

The United States signed the treaty in 1989, but never ratified it and is not bound by the treaty's terms. However, Basel Convention member countries cannot accept any restricted waste imports from the United States unless they have reached a bilateral or regional agreement that meets Basel's environmental provisions. The U.S. already has such an agreement with fellow OECD member countries.

Operation National Sword, China's policy restricting imports of post-consumer scrap, was a major driver for updating the treaty. Before the ban China imported nearly half of the world's scrap plastic and paper. Now scrap exporters in wealthy nations are struggling to find alternate markets overseas and boost domestic recycling.

Crisis and opportunity for US recyclers

Trends in the United States illustrate these wrenching shifts. Plastic scrap exports to China plummeted from around 250,000 tons in the spring of 2017 to near zero in the spring of 2019. Overall, U.S. exports of plastic waste to all countries fell from 750,000 tons to 375,000 tons over the same period.

Most U.S. waste and recycling policies are made at the local level, and the past year has been a transformative period. Without ready markets abroad for scrap, recyclers are raising prices, which in turn is leading some municipalities to reduce or eliminate curbside recycling programs. Many plastic products in groups 3-7, the least recyclable types, are being sent to landfills.

More positively, recycling authorities have launched public education campaigns, and investment in recycling infrastructure is on the rise. There is palpable energy at trade meetings around improving options for plastics recycling. Chinese companies are investing in U.S. pulp and paper recycling plants, and may extend into plastics.

Green-leaning states and cities across the nation have passed strict controls on single-use consumer plastics. However, businesses are pushing back, and have persuaded some U.S. states to adopt preemptive measures barring plastic bag bans.

The greatest immediate pressure is on international scrap dealers, who are most immediately affected by the Norway Amendment and vocally opposed it. They are also under stress from the U.S.-China tariff wars, which could make it difficult for them to send even clean, commercially valuable scrap to China.

Waste or scrap?

Under the Norway Amendment, nations can still export plastic scrap if it is clean, uncontaminated and of high quality. The measure effectively distinguishes between waste - which has no value and is potentially harmful - and scrap, or discarded materials that still have value.

This bifurcation matters for the U.S. and other countries that formerly outsourced their recycling to China and are having trouble creating domestic demand for recovered plastics, because it makes a legitimate trade in plastic and other marginal scrap possible. However, there is still no guarantee that this scrap can be reprocessed without harm to workers or the environment once it has reached the importing country.

Nor will the Norway Amendment do much to reduce marine plastic pollution directly. Only a tiny fraction of ocean plastics originate from shipped plastic scrap from rich countries. Most come from items that are used and discarded on land and never enter a recycling system.

Curbing plastic pollution will require broader action, with a focus on coordinating scattered global initiatives and building up relevant international law. Implementing extended producer responsibility for plastics, which could require manufacturers to take plastic products back at their end of life and dispose of them in approved ways, would be a useful step. However, it should not supplant ongoing efforts to reduce production and use of plastics, which contribute to climate change as well as waste.

Solutions may come from the top down in European nations or the bottom up in the United States. But as one Asian country after another shuts the door on scrap exports, it is becoming increasingly clear that business as usual will not solve the plastic pollution challenge.

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As more developing countries reject plastic waste exports, wealthy nations seek solutions at home

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Less than two years after China banned most imports of scrap material from abroad, many of its neighbors are following suit. On May 28, 2019, Malaysia's environment minister announced that the country was sending 3,000 metric tons of contaminated plastic wastes back to their countries of origin, including the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.

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Hashem Al-Ghaili, “The 6th Mass Extinction has begun…” 5 Dec 2018 Video posted to Facebook Page

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Hashem Al-Ghaili, “The 6th Mass Extinction has begun…” 5 Dec 2018 Video posted to Facebook Page

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Saving the Island (Kit) Fox, NPR Morning Addition, 5 Dec 2018: 

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Saving the Island (Kit) Fox, NPR Morning Addition, 5 Dec 2018: 

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NPR broadcast script: Special Series: Getting to Zero Carbon: The Climate Challenge. “How to Push for Renewable Energy is Changing Southwest Georgia. Aired 25 June 2019 Host Mary Louise Kelly. 

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NPR broadcast script: Special Series: Getting to Zero Carbon: The Climate Challenge. “How to Push for Renewable Energy is Changing Southwest Georgia. Aired 25 June 2019 Host Mary Louise Kelly. 

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ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

We're going to head out next on a road trip with our colleague Mary Louise Kelly. She's been driving her home state of Georgia top to bottom, reporting on how clean energy is taking hold in a red state. This summer, we're looking at clean energy, climate change and what it's going to take for the U.S. to cut carbon emissions. In Georgia, Mary Louise has found solar energy taking off and changing communities in the process. Today her road trip takes her to Early County in the southwest corner of Georgia.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, BYLINE: Among the first things you notice when you cross into this part of Georgia - plenty of good, flat land, plenty of sun - sometimes, too much.

MIKE NEWBERRY: Golly, we got lucky, y'all. The sun kind of disappeared.

KELLY: The sun has disappeared, hooray.

NEWBERRY: And the wind started blowing. How nice could that be?

KELLY: Mike Newberry, fourth generation here at Hillside farms - the directions he gave us involved no street names. There's a big curve, he told us. And if you hit the Baker County line, you've gone too far. We find him eventually, and Newberry walks me out to one of his fields.

NEWBERRY: This is very typical for Southwest Georgia - a lot of peanuts, a lot of cotton and a lot of corn. But we're looking at a peanut field that's about a month old.

KELLY: The work is hard. This spring was too dry - no rain. This time of year, Newberry gets up at 5 a.m., works till 9 at night. Newberry tells me he loves farming. But at his age, 62, he's thinking of doing something different, maybe even selling some of his land.

NEWBERRY: The right piece of land in the right place - yes.

KELLY: It's been on his mind since developers began showing up a few years ago, interested in land to build solar farms. Now, again, for generations, land around here has supported peanuts, cotton, pine trees - not solar farms. But Newberry, who's also chairman of the county's economic development authority, shoos away a swarm of gnats and tells me he's got one kid - a daughter, who has a job and a life off the farm.

NEWBERRY: And this generation has no tie with the land, so that little heart thing holding it may not be gone. But it's a matter of economics now. And that's true all around us. That's true all around us.

KELLY: A matter of economics - I ask Mike Newberry if his neighbors know much about solar, whether they care where their electricity comes from.

I mean, just to make it personal, do you care where your electricity comes from?

NEWBERRY: I could care less. I want it the cheapest (laughter). I want to pay the cheapest as I can.

KELLY: Drive west for 15 minutes, turning off hot, black, asphalt roads onto dirt, and a solar farm is going up fast.

(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINERY RUNNING)

KELLY: Row after row of steel posts sprout from red Georgia clay. They will be fitted with frames to support the solar panels.

NICK DE VRIES: These are articulated single-axis trackers.

KELLY: Nick de Vries, showing me how the panels will swivel as the day unfolds. De Vries is vice president of technology for silicon ranch. It's a developer out of Nashville that is building solar power plants all over the country. This one is on track to be up and running by the end of the year - 355,000 solar panels blanketing this land as far as you can see.

DE VRIES: This is one of the beauties of solar power plants. We know our production rates. We know what it takes to build. You can build a large power plant construction within a year.

KELLY: De Vries says as the solar industry's matured and costs have fallen, renewable energy can actually be cheaper than traditional.

DE VRIES: We are now able to deliver energy at very competitive prices.

KELLY: So here's how it's all coming together. Right now here in Georgia, the solar panels we see going up here were assembled and shipped from a brand-new Korean-owned factory in Dalton, Ga., up north - opposite corner of the state. And the power that those panels generate will supply a new data center east of Atlanta for Facebook. That is also under construction and committed to 100% renewable energy.

So much change so fast - mixed feelings about it?

STEVE SINGLETARY: Yeah, big time. I hate to see it go, but things change. It was a golden opportunity, so we took advantage of it.

KELLY: This is Steve Singletary. It was his family's land that Silicon Ranch bought for the solar farm - land they'd owned for nearly nine decades. Singletary tells me he cares about the environment, but the decision to sell to a solar company - it wasn't about the environment. It was about money.

Would you have sold that land to a nuclear facility?

SINGLETARY: Probably.

KELLY: Coal?

SINGLETARY: Probably.

KELLY: Singletary's sitting, by the way, with me and his friend June Merritt. She runs this county. She is chair of the Early County Commission, which has been agreeable to all the solar projects, especially this one.

JUNE MERRITT: There's no downside. I don't know how it could be. We don't have pollution. We don't have smell. There's just nothing. They're just there.

KELLY: We've met up in an old theater, where the county commission now meets in Blakely, the county seat.

What's it bringing to you? I mean, why is this good for Early County?

MERRITT: It's good for Early County for money. I would say over the next 25 years, there will be about $8 million that will come into Early County in the form of taxes. And that will be a tremendous relief.

KELLY: Merritt says 5 million of that will go to county schools. And there's another way Silicon Ranch is engaging with the community here, which brings us to the last stop on our road trip. It involves cows.

All right, Will Harris, tell us where you're taking us this morning. Why are we driving?

WILL HARRIS: So we're just leaving our general store, heading for one of the paddocks, where our big herd is grazing.

KELLY: I'll let you picture him - cowboy hat, gray beard, suspenders holding up his jeans. He's driving. His gun is in a holster dangling from the back of the passenger seat - my seat - as we bounce along.

HARRIS: (Unintelligible) a disservice.

KELLY: Will Harris is fourth generation here at White Oak Pastures. His family's been on this land since 1866. When he found out what Silicon Ranch was doing next door, he came up with a big idea, which is maybe you can have it both ways. Maybe you can have a solar farm and keep the land for agriculture. I'll explain, but hang on. The cows are coming.

HARRIS: If you're going to record, you need to get out.

KELLY: OK. Just watching a couple thousand head of cattle move through a big, green, metal gate. They're moving from one paddock to another - watching a cowboy drive them through.

(SOUNDBITE OF COW MOOING)

KELLY: What Will Harris is doing on his farm is called regenerative land management. Put simply, he's trying to restore cycles of nature broken by humans and chemicals and over-farming. Harris rotates different animals through his pastures. First, the cattle - let them eat and poop. There's rich nutrients in there. Then move them on. Bring in sheep or other animals to eat what the cows didn't eat. Let the land recover, and repeat. Now, imagine this same scenario - a couple thousand cows chewing on knee-high grass on a solar farm. That is what Will Harris and Silicon Ranch are working out how to do here in Southwest Georgia.

HARRIS: What you don't want to do is let this brand-new grass bud out and bite it off, bud out and bite it off.

DE VRIES: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

HARRIS: We call it eat it to death...

DE VRIES: Yeah.

HARRIS: ...Literally.

(SOUNDBITE OF COWS MOOING)

KELLY: Harris explains to Nick de Vries that this kind of grazing will help prevent erosion under the solar panels. And long term, as the soil revitalizes, he thinks it could draw carbon out of the atmosphere, as he's proven on his own land. Outside experts have studied Harris' farm and found his soil could be capturing as much carbon as his cows are emitting.

(SOUNDBITE OF COWS MOOING)

KELLY: So that is one thread of the solar story being written today in Georgia, a red state, where people are trying to figure out, in a state with a lot of land and a lot of sun, just how far solar can go.

HARRIS: All right. Thank you all for going with me.

KELLY: Thank you for driving.

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How The Push For Renewable Energy Is Changing Southwest Georgia

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ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: We're going to head out next on a road trip with our colleague Mary Louise Kelly. She's been driving her home state of Georgia top to bottom, reporting on how clean energy is taking hold in a red state.

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About the author

Publisher, Editor and Author

Kathy worked with the Bureau of Land Management for 12 years before founding Livestock for Landscapes in 2004. Her twelve years at the agency allowed her to pursue her goal of helping communities find ways to live profitably AND sustainably in their environment. She has been researching and working with livestock as a land management tool for over a decade. When she's not helping farmers, ranchers and land managers on-site, she writes articles, and books, and edits videos to help others turn their livestock into landscape managers.
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Birdwell and Clark Ranch - Moving 5,000 Head of Cattle Multiple Times a Day

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New research suggests climate change could enable mosquitoes to evolve more rapidly

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New research suggests climate change could enable mosquitoes to evolve more rapidly

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Think of the world's deadliest animal, and what comes foremost to mind? (For purposes of discussion and fear of losing readers, let's exclude humans.)

Saltwater crocodiles get a lot of votes, and deservedly. So too do black mamba snakes - slithering at speeds of up to 12.5 miles per hour, but perhaps not so well-known to many. Pufferfish and golden poison dart frogs also garner their share of votes.

But closer to home (at least for most of us), it's actually mosquitoes that earn the "We're No. 1" ranking. Adding to the fear factor, mosquitoes also find alluring our human body temperatures and the carbon dioxide we exhale.

The World Health Organization reports more than 700,000 people around the world die from vector-borne diseases each year, and 438,000 global malaria deaths in 2015 alone. It's for sure that not all mosquitoes carry the makings of Chikungunya, West Nile virus, Zika virus, and yellow fever that contribute to that yearly bounty, and some diseases are carried by vectors other than mosquitoes.

But while not every mosquito carries disease, some do, and that has scientists concerned that climate change may boost the number of mosquito-borne illnesses worldwide. Their concern only increases given that the buzzing bloodsuckers live on most of the Earth's large landmasses other than, you guessed it, Antarctica and Iceland.

Researchers from the University of Bath, University of York, and China Agricultural University recently published a study in Communications Biology explaining how climate change could bring mosquito-borne diseases to areas where these diseases had previously been eradicated and also to entirely new areas.

The scientists modeled mosquito speciation rates over the past 195 million years and found a strong correlation between the rate of speciation and levels of atmospheric CO2 and temperature, with faster rates of mosquito evolution when temperatures were higher, and more CO2 was present.

What does this mean? "The evolution of mosquitoes certainly would raise the possibility of many bad things, such as triggering the return of some regional-eradicated diseases," says Chufei Tang, PhD candidate at China Agricultural University, and one of the co-authors of the study. "A faster evolution of mosquitoes would definitely mean challenges to human beings."

Tang notes the problems linked to mosquitoes and climate change aren't limited to speciation - density is also a huge concern. "If the warming and the high atmospheric CO2 keeps going on, there would be more species, so the population would be more diversified," Tang says. "There would be also more places with longer time that mosquitoes could breed. Thus the mosquitoes would have population growth, bringing higher density."

Factors that could increase rates of mosquito speciation, including CO2 levels and temperature, may also affect other species - including the animals female mosquitoes feed upon for their blood meals. These species - and their interactions with mosquitoes - could evolve in unknown ways. "Our finding that mammal speciation is linked to mosquito speciation is unsurprising given that mammals are a predominant source of food for many species of mosquitoes," according to the authors of the Communications Biology study.

As mosquitoes evolve, no one knows precisely what may happen, but experts like Tang are concerned. "We know that by the greenhouse trend, there would be more species and their group size would be growing," Tang says. "This would bring higher possibility of transmitting diseases. The possibility might not be very high, but there might be new species transmitting diseases that the previous mosquitoes could not spread, so new disease would be epidemic. There might be new species people couldn't control in a short time [that are] transmitting diseases, so some eradicated diseases come back. There would be more burden on the public health system whether the diseases could be easily cured or not."

Dengue fever - 'climate-sensitive'

While some researchers are examining mosquito speciation and evolution on a wide scale, others hone-in on a single deadly mosquito-borne disease: dengue. More than 40 percent of the global population live in areas where they could become infected with dengue, and the World Health Organization estimates 50-100 million people contract the virus each year, with 20,000 people dying of it. Dengue is considered a "climate-sensitive" disease since rates of the virus are linked to mosquito density, which is affected by temperature and precipitation.

Nils Stenseth, professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Oslo, and a number of researchers from other institutions, published their findings on dengue outbreaks in PNAS in February. Their goal: see if they could use climate data to predict outbreaks in a region of southern China. This area recently had suffered from "unprecedentedly severe dengue outbreaks," the researchers wrote, adding that China's Guangdong Province had 45,230 cases of the disease in 2014 alone.

In many parts of the world, old city centers where people live are located near ponds, parks, and other areas that mosquitoes find much to their liking. Stenseth says proximity between human habitation and mosquito habitat is particularly concerning given that warm, wet conditions lead people to leave their windows open, providing more opportunities for bites ... and infections.

The team examined a decade's worth of data, looking at mosquito abundance, temperature, and precipitation. They noted mosquito incubation is related to temperature, and found more mosquitoes between July and October, with a peak in August, though those peaks clearly vary by specific location. They reported a one-month lag between weather conditions and the abundance of adult mosquitoes. Using data from 2005 to 2014 to train their models, the researchers were able to accurately predict 2015 mosquito population figures. They concluded climate was the key factor driving the numbers.

However, Stenseth also pointed out that a number of other factors, such as El Niño and human movements, could affect the number and severity of dengue outbreaks. Another factor to consider is that not everyone who becomes infected with dengue shows symptoms, and many people are unaware they have contracted the disease. The PNAS paper noted, "The human risk is also likely underestimated, because asymptomatic infections are not included in our analysis."

It may be tempting to leap to wide-ranging conclusions based on this study, Stenseth said, but he cautions people to avoid extrapolating the findings to other regions and diseases because a variety of other factors may also contribute to infection rates. "We should be very careful about taking a model that is fitted to data in one particular place and generalize that to be applicable all over," Stenseth says, adding that the approach itself is applicable more broadly. He says he plans to continue researching how climate change affects mosquitoes and other vector-borne diseases.

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That could worsen the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, dengue, and Zika.

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