‘Earthworm Dilemma’ Has Climate Scientists Racing to Keep Up
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In terms relevant to the greenhouse effect, N2O is 298 times more potent than CO2 in the atmosphere [1]. I wonder about how increasing the entire boreal forest's emissions of N2O by 42% would affect the current projections. Seems...bad.
There's perhaps a silver lining here though: earthworms "unlock" stored nutrients in soils, making them easier for plants to access. This might spur growth, thereby storing atmospheric carbon in the process.
[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1692 [1]: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases
https://academic.oup.com/forestry/article/90/4/541/3064404
See table 4. Note that NO2 efflux is measured in mg and CO2 is measured in g.
Additionally, at the risk of being pedantic and because I'm a stuck-up academic, I want to point out that your reference is studying a temperate forest. This is relevant not only because species composition and climatic regimes present in temperate forests (decidious trees, high species diversity, high nutrient availabilty, moderate climates) differ markedly from those of boreal forests (coniferous trees, low species diversity, low nutrient availability, extreme climatic seasonality). There's good reason to believe that this difference has a corresponding shift in the GHG emission regimes of the respective forestlands, which you can see here [0]. Additionally, boreal forests are the earth's largest terrestrial ecosystem [1], which makes this potential difference quite relevant.
Your point is well taken, though -- it's important to triage effort in facing a complicated global challenge.
[0]: https://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/10.1139/X08-209#.XOLSAF... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiga
Does anyone here have any links or suggestions? I've done a small amount of work on "raising awareness" (https://twitter.com/ipccbot) but it seems like everyone either knows and cares or knows and doesn't care. A lot of the climate news feels like climate news porn – so the earthworms are freaking scientists out, what does that mean for me? Can I help the scientists? Are there places I can donate? Or specific calls to action I can follow to help advocate for saner climate policy? What is that policy?
I really resonate with the "climate change porn" bullshit. Drives me crazy, and just makes people numb to it.
The best thing you can do is the thing you're best at doing, and that you're motivated to do. You'll do it well, and others will follow.
If that's too vague, here are some objective suggestions. Might get in trouble for this, but individual action isn't going to fix this problem. I don't really care if you are a vegetarian or a vegan, or whether you buy carbon credits or offset your airplane tickets or whatever other bullshit Wall Street is pushing to get around this problem.
What you should be doing is encouraging systems-level thinking. Get people to understand how top-level governmental decisions (or lack thereof) can lead to a system where carbon is entirely written off as irrelevant in our current economic and political system. Encourage people to think of ways in which, to the best of our ability, lifestyles for all people can be maintained or improved while severely regulating the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
1000% agreed that individual action is not enough, and that we need to get the corporations and governments of the world to make serious changes. But I have no idea what those changes are, or like you say, how we can make them while maintaining or improving lifestyles for all people.
Also, thank you for answering kindly and collaboratively. For some reason I'm just feeling really fed up with climate news porn today and these are all the frustrations and questions I've always wanted to ask.
There's a middle ground between "I'm buying local produce for myself" and "I'm quitting my job and chaining myself to an oil tanker."
You're right about the leadership issue, it's one that has plagued the climate conversation ever since Al Gore fell off. Yale Climate has a somewhat old article on this [0], where you may find guidance.
Bottom line is you don't have to believe me. If you're looking for a modern scientist-leader, listen to Dr. Katharine Hayhoe's TED talk ("The most important thing you can do to fight climate change: talk about it" [1]).
[0]: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2012/03/whose-is-the-... [1]: https://youtu.be/-BvcToPZCLI
I do phone up product suppliers and ask them why they've overdone the packaging but if it's only me they will ignore me. I've bothered BP over their environmental damage in Africa, and much more. I'll continue to do more but in the end I despair because 90% of people don't care.
Were it not for health problems I'd be out in central london getting arrested with the other 1,000 or so arrests in the past few weeks.
So there's answers. But I've been talking about this, and doing stuff about it, for ~20 years and no-one gave a shit. Now it may be too late. So do as you please.
We won't see everyone tooling around in their autonomous electric cars. the rich will have Tesla's, and everyone else will probably split the massive cost of an ICE car four ways instead of owning one, or walk everywhere.That's assuming we didn't kill half the jobs off in the USA because now a Burger King Value Meal costs $20, due to cigarette-style sin taxes.
You can systems level think all you like, the problem is when it gets expressed into concrete things. I think people would have to admit that it would be a pretty big qol step down for people...it's just that their solutions dovetail neatly with the way they live their lives already.
This is precisely the kind of Carbon-Rules-All thinking that got us here. There is an implicit assumption that the only way we could have ever gotten to the "place we are today," however you choose to define that, is as a result of the burning fossil fuels.
I implore you to sit with some beer/wine/LSD and contemplate an alternative history in which we never drilled a single oil well but had the same desires for successful civilization. See where you get.
The "system level thinking" I'm talking about is the kind that works to explicitly maintain QOL while strongly curtailing emissions. It's possible, and is actually the only way.
- Only take a plane when absolutely necessary.
- Live in a city, sell your car and take public transport
- Reduce meat consumption (at least beef and lamb which are a lot worse than the others). You don't need to eat meat every single day. Also try tofu, tempeh and seitan; you may find you like them.
- Vote with this topic in mind, even if it might hurt you financially.
How about instead, both.
- Beef
- Pork
- Seafood
- Chicken
- Non-meat dietThe information is widely available. I don't think needing more summaries of it is the problem. The problem is people don't care enough to change their behavior. And food is really tied up with identity, while people covet bad identities.
For example, assuming you live in Germany (for the sake of concreteness) and you want to move down the chain from pork to seafood.
1. Are you aware of fish rated as green, yellow or red?
2. Are you aware of other consideration, such as logistics and methods (e.g.: aquaculture vs. wild)?
3. Do you have access to local and sustainable pork (but perhaps not seafood)?
Annoyingly, most of it goes directly against arguments I have seen [1] about how best to reduce animal suffering in the human food chain without everyone going full vegetarian, since one suffering cow can replace an awful lot of suffering chickens even if you percieve individual chickens as "less conscious".
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/23/vegetarianism-for-meat...
Humans aren't immune to mass dieoffs. We're animals too.
They're pushing a carbon tax policy in the house right now https://citizensclimatelobby.org/energy-innovation-and-carbo.... It's a little silly since it seems like there's little appetite for a bill like this with conservatives. I still think it's important to try.
I'd say there's a lot of opportunity to do things on a state or local level. Reducing your state's carbon emissions has a real impact. Push for renewable energy sources. Fight to make the process of rezoning for higher density housing easier in your community and improve public transit.
Earthworms more important than panda if you want to save the earth... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/earthworms-are-mo...
Since the only way to stop this would be to actually reverse damage already done, requiring worldwide effort never seen in history to perform actions that may be scientifically impossible, I think it's safe to say that we're royally fucked.
So why should I even care about this topic, or the planet, if we're all gonna starve to death within our lifetimes or our childrens'?
I'm going to just live my life for pleasure. Can't stop it now anyway. It's THE EXTINCTION. Time to party I guess.
Quite a few things a likely to change though, just as climate change always did; previously fertile lands will likely become deserts, and vice versa. Which means animals and plants all will be on the move, and some will not have time to adapt and perish. Humans are more adaptable, and would not necessarily face an extinction, but the conflicts that follow may be fatal.
Do you really think the most skeptical business owners and politicians in the US are going to keep ignoring it and emitting when it's their business, family, state or home that's impacted?
I don't know what it is, I don't know when it will be, but there will be a Pearl Harbor equivalent moment. After which inaction will be as impossible as action today. The moment the crash is apparent and inevitable.
By then it'll cost a fuck load more, and have far harder impacts on everyone's economy and lifestyle, but unless it turns out to be a bad dream, it seems pretty damn certain. Pretty damn certainly in our lifetimes.
You don't prefer the easier option?
We go extinct no matter what. Where's the easier option? Good luck to the plankton or whatever that succeeds us.
I'd love to hear a credible source that says something on the lines of, "My understanding of the situation is that there is enough damage already done that a significant portion of the population, if not all of it, will be dead in the next half century, regardless of what's done."
There are crackpots on each side of the argument (skeptics versus doom). I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Right now we're still at a stage of getting people to wake the fuck up.
The plastic threat
The self-destruction threat
The AGI threat
Seem like the most important threats to humanity, in order, by my understanding.
IMO it'll likely be a requirement for life beyond the heliopause or even closer to home.
Resonance & rebranding would hardly be needed to alert the public if an asteroid was found to be on a trajectory for earth.
Who knows, someone might find a negative feedback loop for climate change that we could leverage, even in something as improbable as mycology ?
(Likely increasing defence budget is also another way to mitigate climate change if we don't do it in a more civilized way...)
Ironically trumps tariffs are likely to do more to slow climate change than any other policies.
As transportation gets more expensive, after a certain point, solar panels and wind turbines are cheaper to ship around than huge amounts of coal and oil.
However, at a certain point after that, efficient solar panels and wind turbines (not to mention batteries and motors) may become too hard to manufacture due to unavailability of critical materials and components.
If anyone is looking for a big meaty research problem that may influence just how far our technological society might fall, either work on non-rare replacements for rare-earth elements (semiconductor dopants, magnets, etc.) or on ways to shorten the supply lines (eg. economically/sustainably extract them from ordinary dirt or seawater, perhaps with synbio).
[Citation needed]
Do we continue to make the planet an ever more unlivable hell-hole because "the world is a dynamic system."
Or do we look at what's happening, learn from it, and try to prevent things from getting worse.
Wind/Solar necessarily implies doubling-down on natural gas as this is the standard (and only) way to get around the intermittency issue of those renewables. It's no surprise that natural gas companies now lobby for Wind and Solar deployments, and Germany signs multi-decade deals to import Russian gas as they increase their Solar and Wind footprint.
So nuclear, apart from being capable of cutting our CO2 emissions to 0 for power generation, also requires two orders of magnitude less land-use than Solar and Wind deployments. This does nothing for CO2 emissions, but I'm sure wild-life will appreciate less encroachment.
What will it take for environmentalists, and progressives (who push the anti-nuclear Green New Deal) to support nuclear power?
However:
> Wind/Solar necessarily implies doubling-down on natural gas as this is the standard (and only) way to get around the intermittency issue of those renewables.
Can we so lightly dismiss battery storage? It has a ways to go, but its price continues to improve exponentially.
We can because there is no battery storage technology today, nor is one upcoming, that would work on city scale (i.e. store enough energy to power a city and industry outside of ideal wind/solar times). For example, the Tesla-style deployments are only there to even out supply on the order of milliseconds and maybe seconds. That's still something, and does replace natural gas in those specific use-cases, but that's not what we need.
Worse, we don't even know of a battery technology that would be able to store power across seasons or years, as Wind and Solar are very seasonally dependent and may vary in output by an order of magnitude between, say, Summer and Winter. Furthermore, for wind deployments, you usually need to sample multiple years to figure out if the site is good enough because wind output can vary across multiple-years.
That's why wind/solar/natural gas is a package deal today and for the foreseeable future.
Does it matter? If the game is to cut CO2 emissions, and nothing else can cut CO2 emissions - we're out of options.
Tell me honestly: is there anything that would convince you or are you just saying things? I ask because I do wonder what kind of answer you are looking for that we don't already know. It isn't like nuclear technology is brand new. There's a 5 decades of history behind it and it has been studied exhaustively. We know the risks, the costs, the capabilities, the safety record. Everything. What more do you need before you accept it?
Better marketing. Back in the 90s, the GOP hired a PR firm, who came up with the idea of renaming the estate tax to the death tax. In doing so, they managed to get even hardcore liberals on board with "eliminating the death tax", even though those same people were very much for increasing the estate tax.
Nuclear needs a similar PR boost. Call it something else and get the environmentalists and progressives on board.
The new marketing would have to tout both the newer "meltdown free" reactors as well as put a new spin on the Yucca mountain storage facility.
You think so? Because I would think they would see through the attempt if tried. And it would simply lead to conspiracy theories of big-nuclear trying to put lipstick on a pig - in the same way that 'clean coal' branding didn't really get any environmentalists/progressives on board for coal power.
I go back to what I said about the estate tax/death tax thing. At the time, most people were for the estate tax, but once they came up with death tax, most people were against, including a lot of the most vocal proponents of the estate tax. It was literally the same tax with a name change, and most people were fooled.
I think clean coal didn't take off because it was a straight up lie. With nuclear it's a bit different. There really is a new technology and it really is safer than the old stuff everyone is afraid of. It just needs better marketing.
I'm skeptical. I think most would see through the attempt. Regardless, no one is attempting it anyway. I think nuclear power has been effectively killed. There are scant new nuclear projects on the horizon, with more shutting down then coming online. The industry is overregulated. FUD from environmentalist and progressives has traction. At best nuclear may get a passing reference in mainstream press when talking about solutions to global warming.
I think we're toast. If we doubled down on nuclear in the 60s/70s/80s to the same extent that France did, we would have prevented trillions of tons of CO2 from being emitted, and maybe bought ourselves an extra century to figure out alternatives. As it stands, it's looking pretty bleak. The irony is that in hindsight conservative denialism of global warming will take a backseat to anti-nuclear policies when we get judged for our choices by our descendants.
>I go back to what I said about the estate tax/death tax thing.
I'd like to push back on that. I've heard that reasoning before and I don't think it's that simple. I don't believe it was PR that did it either, rather there was a cultural shift in the 80s and 90s that embraced privatization and free market policies (not just in US, but UK, Canada, and many other nations). This was a pendulum swing from the 60s and 70s when protectionism and over-regulation and high taxation was fashionable.
Besides, there are good ideological reasons for conservatives to not support the estate tax, regardless of the label. Conservatives will tend to oppose taxes and push for tax cuts, but the estate tax provides extra incentive because it can be seen as double-dipping for the government.
I still think a better explanation is that the country became more conservative when it came to economic policy because it wasn't just the attitudes around the estate tax that changed but rather the entire approach to economic policy. Things like wage and price controls, high income tax rates, and protectionist policies were a thing in the 70s, but became unpalatable in the 80s and 90s.
Surely there must be an worm-eater somewhere.
I think this article is quite hyperbolic though. It talks about a researchers "horror" at theoretical possibilities, but the latest literature review cited is 6 years old and it did not resolve any definite effect.
>Our results suggest that although earthworms are largely beneficial to soil fertility, they increase net soil greenhouse-gas emissions.
Worm-eater. That's such a typical solution. The cause of this migration should be given a solution, not the effects or result of the migration.