Ceres: Risks to Banks from Climate Change→

Ceres:

“The report analyzes $2.2 trillion of exposure for syndicated loans. It finds that the annual value-at-risk from physical climate impacts on just the syndicated loan portfolios of major U.S. banks could approach 10 percent, and that two-thirds of banks’ physical risk comes from the indirect economic impacts of climate change, such as supply chain disruptions and lower productivity, with coastal flooding (driven by sea level rise and stronger storms) representing the largest source of direct risk.”

Ceres’s recommendations to banks can be found here.

Lauren Summer: Fossil Fuels Should Stay in the Ground to Reduce Disaster→

NPR:

Scott Heins

“With tens of thousands of people displaced by floods, wildfires and hurricanes this summer, researchers warn that the majority of untapped fossil fuels must remain in the ground to avoid even more extreme weather.

Fossil fuel producers should avoid extracting at least 90% of coal reserves and 60% of oil and gas reserves by 2050, according to a study published in Nature, to limit global temperature rise to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Even then, that gives the planet only a 50% chance of avoiding a climate hotter than that.

Global temperatures have already warmed about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s, due in large part to the burning of fossil fuels, which releases gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. As a result of the warming, droughts, storms and heat waves are becoming more extreme, causing a cascade of disasters.

The study finds that global coal and oil use would need to peak almost immediately and begin declining 3% annually until 2050. Even that rate is likely an underestimate of what’s needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, the study’s authors say.”

James Temple: How the World Already Addressed Climate Change→

MIT Technology Review

“In 1987, dozens of nations adopted the Montreal Protocol, agreeing to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons and other chemicals used in refrigerants, solvents, and other industrial products that were breaking down Earth’s protective ozone layer.

It was a landmark achievement, the most successful example of nations pulling together in the face of a complex, collective threat to the environment. Three decades later, the atmospheric ozone layer is slowly recovering, preventing additional levels of ultraviolet radiation that cause cancer, eye damage, and other health problems.

But the virtues of the agreement, ultimately ratified by every country, are more widespread than its impact on the ozone hole. Many of those chemicals are also powerful greenhouse gases. So as a major side benefit, their reduction over the last three decades has already eased warming and could cut as much as 1 ˚C off worldwide average temperatures by 2050.”

John Timmer: Reduce CO2 Pollution by targeting the worst power plants→

Ars Technica:

“Some good news in that regard came via the recent release of a paper that looks at how much each power plant contributes to global emissions. The study finds that many countries have many power plants that emit carbon dioxide at rates well above either the national or global average. Shutting down the worst 5 percent of this list would immediately wipe out about 75 percent of the carbon emissions produced by electricity generation.”

Grant et al. 2021 pdf available

Shannon Prather: Bird Deaths from Lead Tackle→

Star Tribune:

Brian Peterson

“Two Maplewood DFLers, Sen. Charles Wiger and Rep. Peter Fischer, introduced bills in January to ban the sale and use of lead fishing jigs and sinkers. Wiger said he’s feeling hopeful after Minnesota became the first state in the nation last year to prohibit most industrial uses of trichloroethylene (TCE), which can increase the risk of cancer and other serious health issues.

An overwhelming majority of lawmakers supported that ban after White Bear Township-based Water Gremlin agreed to pay $7 million in fines and fees after the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) determined the plant had released an excess amount of TCE into the air.

Wiger said his constituents are now pushing for more environmental justice measures. “My district is very concerned about the environmental impact of toxic chemicals,” said Wiger, whose neighboring district was impacted by nearby Water Gremlin. “We need to listen to the next generation.”

Others, including the nonprofit Friends of Minnesota Scientific and Natural Areas, are also aiming to ban lead in hunting ammunition. Board Chairman Tom Casey said people would be shocked to know the amount of lead left in wilderness areas that belong to the public. While legislators push for policy changes, the MPCA has launched a “Get The Lead Out” campaign that asks Minnesotans to voluntarily give up lead fishing tackle.”

Latest statistics from necropsy of Minnesota loons showed a lead poisoning rate of 14%, and based on these and other data, it is estimated that 100 to 200 loons die per year from lead fishing tackle in Minnesota. A needless loss.

York University: Northern lakes at risk of losing ice cover→

Phys.org:

Alessandro Filazzola

“Close to 5,700 lakes in the Northern Hemisphere may permanently lose ice cover this century, 179 of them in the next decade, at current greenhouse gas emissions, despite a possible polar vortex this year, researchers at York University have found.

Those lakes include large bays in some of the deepest of the Great Lakes, such as Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, which could permanently become ice free by 2055 if nothing is done to curb greenhouse gas emissions or by 2085 with moderate changes.”

Catrin Einhorn: 6PPD-quinone Kills Salmon→

New York Times:

Ted S. Warren/Associated Press

“The salmon were dying and nobody knew why. About 20 years ago, ambitious restoration projects had brought coho salmon back to urban creeks in the Seattle area. But after it rained, the fish would display strange behaviors: listing to one side, rolling over, swimming in circles. Within hours they would die — before spawning, taking the next generation with them. In some streams, up to 90 percent of coho salmon were lost.

“To be running into these sick fish was fairly astonishing,” said Jenifer McIntyre, now a toxicologist and professor at Washington State University who is part of a team that, years later, has finally solved the mystery of the dying salmon around Puget Sound. “In those early years, we debated intensely, what could be the cause of this?”

The team’s findings were published Thursday in the journal Science.”

Cara Giaimo: Shifting Baseline Syndrome→

Anthropocene:

“Imagine a world where flocks of birds block out the sun, millions of bison roam the Great Plains, and groupers are the size of those who catch them. For many contemporary people, such scenes seem impossible, as though they should be preceded by “once upon a time.” But they did happen, mere centuries or even decades ago. As generations of humans empty the world, their descendants are unable to see—and so find it hard to understand—how full it once was.

In 1995, fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly used the term “shifting baseline syndrome” to describe this phenomenon: each generation of fisheries scientists, he wrote, “accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers,” leading to “a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance” of species. Shifting baseline syndrome and its implications are now frequently invoked by people concerned about conservation, management, and environmental education.

But although it’s an intuitive concept, it’s difficult to study. For a recent paper in People and Nature, a group of researchers surveyed hundreds of UK residents about the populations of ten local bird species, and compared their knowledge with historic data. They also, for the first time, connected the survey-takers’ knowledge of past and present bird abundance with their opinions about conserving those birds. And while they found evidence that younger people are generally less adept at recognizing biological change than their elders are, they also found that knowledge of and personal experience with nature can help overcome that age gap. ”

Jenny Morber: What is invasive?→

ENSIA:

“In the past 100 years, the planet has warmed in the range of 10 times faster than it did on average over the past 5,000. In response, thousands of species are traveling poleward, climbing to higher elevations, and diving deeper into the seas, seeking their preferred environmental conditions. This great migration is challenging traditional ideas about native species, the role of conservation biology and what kind of environment is desirable for the future...

Indigenous frameworks offer another way to look at species searching for a new home in the face of climate change. According to a study published in Sustainability Science in 2018 by Dartmouth Native American studies and environmental studies associate professor Nicholas Reo, a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and Dartmouth anthropology associate professor Laura Ogden, some Anishnaabe people view plants as persons and the arrival of new plants as a natural form of migration, which is not inherently good or bad. They may seek to discover the purpose of new species, at times with animals as their teachers. In their paper Reo and Ogden quote Anishnaabe tribal chairman Aaron Payment as saying, “We are an extension of our natural environment; we’re not separate from it.”

At the heart of these questions are values. “All of these perceptions around what’s good and what’s bad, all [are based on] some kind of value system,” Pecl says. “As a whole society, we haven’t talked about what we value and who gets to say what’s of value and what isn’t.””

Annie Roth: Sturddlefish→

New York Times:

Flórián Tóth

“At first glance, American paddlefish and Russian sturgeon seem about as different as two fish can be. The Russian sturgeon, whose eggs are used to make top-shelf caviar, is a carnivore that hoovers crustaceans and smaller fish off the floor of rivers, lakes and coastal areas the world over. The American paddlefish, found in only 22 of the United States, is a filter feeder that strains zooplankton from the water. It has a comically long snout covered with tens of thousands of sensory receptors.

Yet somehow, when sperm from an American paddlefish and eggs from a Russian sturgeon were combined in a lab, life found a way and a hybrid of the two species was born. “I did a double-take when I saw it,” said Solomon David, an aquatic ecologist at Nicholls State University in Louisiana. “I just didn’t believe it. I thought, hybridization between sturgeon and paddlefish? There’s no way.””

Sometimes nature finds a way.

Stephanie E. Hampton: Winter Limnology→

Eos:

Credit: Sergey Pesterev

“Historically, research on inland waters has focused on the warmer months of the year. Limnologists have mostly avoided studying lakes in winter, especially lakes that experience seasonal ice cover, as if dynamics beneath the ice were unimportant.

But multiple lines of evidence now present a compelling case that winter is indeed a fascinating and important time for lakes. Under dark conditions, when snow and ice obscure light penetration, degradation of organic material already in lakes still occurs, and when clear ice allows some light through, this light can fuel primary production to levels even higher than those in summer.

Recent high-profile data syntheses of lake water temperatures, ice cover, and ecology under lake ice [Hampton et al., 2017] are galvanizing the scientific community to focus on winter studies, and new data streams are being amassed by in situ sensors deployed during seasonal ice cover. Furthermore, recognition of the magnitude and rapidity of ice loss trends combined with recent work highlighting substantial socioeconomic impacts for people whose livelihoods are associated with winter lake ice cover suggests that winter presents an important research frontier within limnology, from the biology and biogeochemistry of lakes to the dynamic physics of cold water and the sociological and cultural ramifications of change.”

Matt Simon: Plastic Rain is the New Acid Rain→

Ars Technica

Janice Brahney | Utah State University

“ Microplastics are blowing all over the world, landing in supposedly pure habitats, like the Arctic and the remote French Pyrenees. They’re flowing into the oceans via wastewater and tainting deep-sea ecosystems, and they’re even ejecting out of the water and blowing onto land in sea breezes. And now in the American West, and presumably across the rest of the world given that these are fundamental atmospheric processes, they are falling in the form of plastic rain—the new acid rain.

Plastic rain could prove to be a more insidious problem than acid rain, which is a consequence of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. By deploying scrubbers in power plants to control the former, and catalytic converters in cars to control the latter, the US and other countries have over the last several decades cut down on the acidification problem. But microplastic has already corrupted even the most remote environments, and there’s no way to scrub water or land or air of the particles—the stuff is absolutely everywhere, and it’s not like there’s a plastic magnet we can drag through the oceans. What makes plastic so useful—its hardiness—is what also makes it an alarming pollutant: Plastic never really goes away, instead breaking into ever smaller bits that infiltrate ever smaller corners of the planet.”

Dr. Stan Temple: Leopold and Earth Day→

Sand County Foundation:

“Seventy-two years ago, on April 14, 1948, Aldo Leopold received a letter from Oxford University Press informing him that they would publish the book manuscript he had been working on during the war years. After it had been rejected by several publishers, Leopold must have been pleased that his masterpiece would finally be published, but his delight was to be short-lived. On April 21 he died of a heart attack while helping a neighbor fight a grass fire near his beloved shack, which was the setting for the essays in the first half of the manuscript.”

Emily Levang: Can We Protect Nature by Giving it Legal Rights?→

Ensia:

Jacob Boomsma, iStockphoto.com

“In August 2019, a group of citizens met in Duluth to learn about an unconventional strategy that could protect this place and potentially change its story going forward. Rights of Nature is a growing international movement that recognizes species and ecosystems not simply as resources for humans to use, but as living entities with rights of their own. Twenty people from different backgrounds attended the gathering: activists and organizers, grandmothers, a Catholic priest and an Indigenous elder, each with their own concerns about the ecosystem. Now community members are working on a ballot initiative for 2020 to recognize rights of the estuary. This way of seeing the natural world is fundamental to many Indigenous worldviews. If Rights of Nature finds a place in Western law, it could transform our ability to protect nature.”

Curt Meine & Bryan Norton: The Pragmatist's View→

Center for Humans & Nature:

“As large systems change slowly, they become sort of the background for what we do. Smaller systems—like our yard, for example—change much more rapidly. I noticed that Leopold had this very sophisticated conception of time and space, even though he introduced it metaphorically. And then I read “Thinking Like a Mountain,” in which Leopold described how he had destroyed the wolf populations [in the American Southwest] and how he later came to regret that after the deer population he was trying to increase started to actually decrease from overpopulation and over-browsing of the mountainside. Leopold wrote about the famous incident where, having killed an old wolf, he watched the green fire die in her eyes. What he learned there, I think, was that wolves function in a larger and slower system than humans do.

Consequently, we can come to hate something like the wolf, even though, once you start to see the wolf’s role in longer-term developments, the wolf becomes almost like a savior, right? Having destroyed the wolves and changed the ecological system, he then regretted it. He fell back on that hierarchical framework to say, “I was thinking only like a human. I was only thinking in terms of increasing the deer herd for hunters. But then I realized that my activities on that level spilled over to affect the usually slower-scale changes.” In fact, he saw the impacts on the ecological scale, the scale at which deer and wolves interact. The deer populations growing out of control were a result of his removing the wolves. So his human thinking destroyed a very complex system.

So what’s interesting about that is that Leopold starts to see the world on three different levels: the human, the ecological, and the evolutionary. And he felt that we can see positive values on each of those three levels. The positive level for humans is generally economic and developmental. The level of interactions among species (wolves and deer, in particular) would be the ecological scale. And what he realized was that, however important our economics are, if we destroy the ecological system, it’s going to come back and bite us even at the human level. So his explanation of why he went wrong was very much based in a scientific model, which he showed through the metaphor of “thinking like a mountain.””

Interesting perspective that we need to broaden our timelines to create pragmatic environmental solutions.

Boris Kondratieff: Mayflies and Stoneflies→

The Conversation:

Andrew/flickr, CC BY-NC

“Mayflies and stoneflies thrive in unpolluted water – a fact my colleagues and I have witnessed firsthand on our numerous expeditions. Not only do we see greater overall abundance of these insects in clean streams, but more diversity of species, as well. In polluted areas, we observe the exact opposite. Without a doubt, the presence or absence of mayflies and stoneflies in a stream is a reliable indicator of the quality of its water.

The role of mayflies and stoneflies in the food chain is fundamental, as well. Immature mayflies and stoneflies consume algae, living plants, dead leaves, wood and each other. In this nymph phase, when they have gills and live exclusively underwater, they are an important food source for many animals further up the food chain, including fish and wading birds. When the mayflies and stoneflies emerge from the water as adults, they are essential food for spiders, other insects such as dragonflies and damselflies, and many kinds of birds and bats.”

Sonia Shah: Native or Invasive -- Or Why these Classifications?→

Yale360:

NK SANFORD / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

“Author Emma Marris and Macalester College biologist Mark Davis, among others, have pointed out that only a small subset of “alien” species wreak damage on already resident species, and that the categorization of wild creatures as either “native” or “alien” obscures as much as it elucidates... Now, a growing number of scientists say that conservation policies based on the native-alien dichotomy could actually threaten biodiversity. Today’s climate-driven range shifts are “one of the only solutions for species to adapt to climate change,” says ecologist Nathalie Pettorelli, who studies the impact of global environmental changes on biodiversity at the Institute of Zoology in London. Ensuring that wild species can make life-saving movements and establish self-sustaining populations in new habitats, while also protecting already-resident species, will require new ways of evaluating species — not just on their origins and historical value to society but on their ecological functions and how they can contribute to the novel ecosystems of the future.

For some long-time critics of the native-alien paradigm in conservation, it’s the fundamental principle of evaluating species based on their origins that needs to go. “Whether because of climate or because people move them, species need to be evaluated on their own effects,” says Macalester College’s Davis, “and not on whether they are natives or new natives or non-natives or non-natives moved by humans.” Critics such as Davis essentially call for the dissolution of invasion biology and restoration biology as they’ve been traditionally defined. “I don’t see the value of keeping those distinctions,” he says.”

Invasive biologists’ value judgments cannot be supported by science (i.e., values are not in the realm of science). Labeling species as native/nonnative, invasive/noninvasive, good/bad often limits pragmatic management. Categorization leads to prejudice, prejudice leads to contempt, contempt leads to hate, and hate leads to the dark side. We need to be pragmatic and binary thinking is destructive.

North American Lake Management Society: Best Paper Award Nominated Papers Available

NALMS:

“The papers nominated for the Jim LaBounty Best Paper Award in 2019 will be available for free from January 11, 2020 through the end of February. Normally papers published in the last 3 years are only available by subscription, but as a tribute to the quality of research and importance to the lake management community, these papers are being made freely available for a limited time. The 2019 award went to Radomski and Carlson, but all these these papers are worth a read.”

It is a great honor to receive this award. It was exciting to be nominated, and we are delighted to have been chosen for the best paper award! The Lake and Reservoir Management journal is a high quality outlet for lake management science, and we’ve come to appreciate your hard work and the dedication of the Editorial Board.

The award-winning article summarized our research on predicting lake water quality and an economic analysis of a set of actions to improve and protect lake water quality. Our results were not intuitive. For Minnesota lakes, we concluded that to best meet the Clean Water Act’s goals of restoring degraded waters and protecting waters (i.e., the anti-degradation clause) that Minnesota should invest a greater share of funds for lake protection, less on those already impaired. The primary focus on impaired lakes results in considerable forgone benefit (~80%) and substantially higher costs. We predicted a 6X greater return on investment by protecting high quality lakes than focusing on impaired lakes. Currently, only about 20% of the Minnesota’s Clean Water Fund competitive grants go toward protecting unimpaired high quality lakes at risk. We suggest that policy makers reevaluate the distribution of those funds and that they consider investing a greater percentage to protect lakes at risk before they become impaired.

Jim Egenrieder: Underwater, Early and Often

Center for Humans & Nature:

“One of my favorite experiences is lying on the bottom of moving water and watching a smallmouth bass or sunfish use the micro-eddies created by my body to rest from swimming in the current. Less fun is when smaller fish nibble the air bubbles that form on your body hair, which they mistake for tiny eggs of other animals.

Those early exposures have formed the core of who I’ve become, and inform much of what I do. They influence not only my hobbies but the research projects and grants I pursue, the friends I spend time with, how I operate our riverfront farm, the trees I plant, and especially why I work with teachers and others to provide similar experiences for young people.”

Yes, experiences and places make people. Go out and explore nature every day.

Brandon Keim: All Life Counts in Conservation→

Anthropocene:

Wallach et al.

““Currently, conservation data is filtered through a value system that considers ‘native’ life the only appropriate subject of conservation concern,” write researchers in the journal Conservation Biology. “We examined how trends in species richness, distribution, and threats change when all wildlife count.”

The researchers were led by ecologists Arian Wallach and Daniel Ramp, both of the University of Technology Sydney and so-called “compassionate conservationists”—a movement of scientists, conservationists, and ethicists who argue that the moral value of each individual animal’s life deserves more attention in discussions traditionally framed in species- and population-level terms.

One implication of that perspective is open-mindedness towards critiques of nativity as intrinsically good and non-nativity as likely bad, with the latter having little ecological value and frequently being killed to promote desired native species. “Nativism even filters the most fundamental empirical information available to conservation: species counts,” write Wallach’s team. “It is important to ask, independent of these judgements, what might be revealed if biodiversity datasets were fully inclusive?””

Invasive biologists’ value judgments cannot be supported by science (i.e., values are not in the realm of science). Labeling species as native/nonnative, invasive/noninvasive, good/bad appears to limit pragmatic management. Categorization leads to prejudice, prejudice leads to contempt, contempt leads to hate, and hate leads to the dark side. Some of the difficult AIS issues can be solved with a more moderate approach to new arrivals and a change in attitude. Invasion biology mentality often emphasizes control and eradication programs against various non-native species even in the absence of nuisance conditions. Poor AIS efforts deplete financial and personnel resources that could have been devoted to more enduring and meaningful efforts (e.g., dealing with lake water quality issues that are of more serious nature, prevention of human-assisted migration, etc.).