Climate Optimism Part 1

/ Organikos / Leave a comment

Illustration by João Fazenda

Bill McKibben acknowledges in his most recent newsletter that in spite of all his efforts over the decades, he and we all are failing on climate change mitigation. But he has not given up hope:

Big Heat and Big Oil

A rapid end to burning fossil fuel would arrest the heating that has caused extreme damage in recent weeks; and that rapid end is possible.

In the list of ill-timed corporate announcements, historians may someday give pride of place to one made by Wael Sawan, the new C.E.O. of Shell, the largest energy company in Europe. In 2021, Shell said that it would reduce oil and gas production by one to two per cent a year up to 2030—a modest gesture in the direction of an energy transition. Continue reading →

Why Are We Not More Afraid Of The Heat?

/ Organikos / Leave a comment

Jeff Goodell shares his opinion in the newspaper of record in the USA. It will serve as a preview of his book to the right, reviewed here. He has also spoken about this topic. There is no pleasure to be had here. Only awareness, and the question why we are not doing more:

In Texas, Dead Fish and Red-Faced Desperation Are Signs of Things to Come

In 2019, I happened to be visiting Phoenix on a 115-degree day. I had a meeting one afternoon about 10 blocks from the hotel where I was staying downtown. I gamely thought I’d brave the heat and walk to it. How bad could the heat really be? I grew up in California, not the Arctic. I thought I knew heat. I was wrong. After walking three blocks, I felt dizzy. After seven blocks, my heart was pounding. After 10 blocks, I thought I was a goner. Continue reading →

Reviving Plants Lost To Time

/ Organikos / Leave a comment

A branch of Blutaparon rigidum, collected on a 1905-1906 expedition to the Galapagos Islands, contains hundreds of potentially viable seeds. NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN

We have touched on the topic of reviving extinct species only a few times previously, and as obvious as it seems we must mention that reviving plant species sounds like a more sound ambition. So, thanks to Janet Marinelli and Yale e360 for this story:

Back from the Dead: New Hope for Resurrecting Extinct Plants

Armed with new technology, botanists are proposing what was once thought impractical: reviving long-lost plant species by using seeds from dried specimens in collections. The challenges remain daunting, but researchers are now searching for the best de-extinction candidates.

In January 1769, botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander found a daisy in Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. Continue reading →

Paint It Very White

/ Organikos / Leave a comment
In one green-gloved hand, a man wearing goggles holds a paint brush dripping with bright white paint. His other hand holds a plastic container of the white paint under the brush to catch the drops.

Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, has created the whitest paint on record with his students. John Underwood/Purdue University

We once again have Cara Buckley to thank:

Scientists at Purdue have created a white paint that, when applied, can reduce the surface temperature on a roof and cool the building beneath it.

Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, didn’t set out to make it into the Guinness World Records when he began trying to make a new type of paint. He had a loftier goal: to cool down buildings without torching the Earth. Continue reading →

Stop Digging

/ Crist Inman / Leave a comment

A man cools off by a fountain during a heat wave in Seville, Spain, on July 10th. Photograph by Cristina Quicler / AFP / Getty

It is difficult to imagine, from where I sit in cool weather in the mountains of Costa Rica’s central valley, what that heat would feel like. But it is not difficult to imagine all the possibilities for doing something about it. When you are in a hole that you do not want to be in, stop digging:

Is It Hot Enough Yet for Politicians to Take Real Action?

The latest record temperatures are driving, again precisely as scientists have predicted, a cascading series of disasters around the world.

We’ve crushed so many temperature records recently—the hottest day ever measured by average global temperature, the hottest week, the hottest June, the highest ocean temperatures, the lowest sea-ice levels—that it would be easy to overlook a couple of additional data points from this past weekend. But they’re important, because they help illuminate not just the size of our predicament but the political weaknesses that make it so hard to confront. Continue reading →

Anthropocene Representative Location

/ Organikos / Leave a comment

A wide view of a lake with trees surrounding it and blue sky with clouds in distance. We now have a place to match to the name for our epoch:

The Human Age Has a New Symbol. It’s a Record of Bomb Tests and Fossil Fuels.

A scientific panel has picked Crawford Lake, Ontario, to represent the Anthropocene, a proposed, and hotly contested, new chapter in geologic time.

For almost 15 years, a panel of scholars has been chewing over a big question: Has our species transformed the planet so much that we have plunged it into a new interval of geologic time? Continue reading →

The Scale Of Conservation Needed To Mitigate The USA’s Carbon Footprint

/ Organikos / Leave a comment
Protected areas, outlined in yellow, in a swath of the Brazilian Amazon are richer in trees than are other areas.

Protected areas, outlined in yellow, in a swath of the Brazilian Amazon are richer in trees than are other areas. NASA

Thanks to Yale e360, a very simple way to put scale on the value of protected areas, and at the same time consider the carbon footprint of the country that emits the most:

World’s Protected Lands Are Safeguarding More Carbon Than the U.S. Emits in a Year

If left unguarded, many of the world’s protected lands would have likely been burned, logged, or otherwise degraded, unleashing huge sums of heat-trapping gas. Continue reading →

Lula’s Commitments Continue Progress

/ Organikos / Leave a comment

Cattle graze on land recently burned and deforested by cattle farmers near Novo Progresso, in Para state. Photograph: André Penner/AP

A short note following up on the progress reported earlier from our big and very important neighbor to the south:

Brazil: Amazon deforestation drops 34% in first six months under Lula

Government data shows marked reduction against same period last year, reversing trend of destruction during Bolsonaro reign

After four years of rising destruction in Brazil’s Amazon, deforestation dropped by 33.6% during the first six months of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s term, according to new government satellite data. Continue reading →

What An Owl Knows, Reviewed

/ Organikos / Leave a comment

The Economist reviews this new book by Jennifer Ackerman, and if you do not subscribe to that magazine you can see other reviews here or here:

A raptor’s mystique inspires “What an Owl Knows”

They know rather a lot, reveals the book’s author, Jennifer Ackerman

With a face as round as the first letter of its name and a stance as upright as the last—along with human-like features and a haunting cry—the owl has a mystical, mythical perch in the imagination. Difficult to spot because of their mostly nocturnal habits, and sporting cryptic plumage that helps them melt into landscapes, owls, writes Jennifer Ackerman, are the most enigmatic of birds…

George Musser Talks With Michael Levin For Nautilus

/ Organikos / Leave a comment

Nautilus is not one of our go-to sources for inspiration, but with conversations like this it is obvious we should be paying more attention to their work. Thanks to George Musser for this article:

The Biologist Blowing Our Minds

Michael Levin is uncovering the incredible, latent abilities of living things.

Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University, has a knack for taking an unassuming organism and showing it’s capable of the darnedest things. He and his team once extracted skin cells from a frog embryo and cultivated them on their own. With no other cell types around, they were not “bullied,” as he put it, into forming skin tissue. Instead, they reassembled into a new organism of sorts, a “xenobot,” a coinage based on the Latin name of the frog species, Xenopus laevis. It zipped around like a paramecium in pond water. Continue reading →