Environmental News

Ongoing losses of global biodiversity are hard to estimate. For most species, who, where and how many remain unknown. Most challenging for rare species, and of course they are most at risk of extinction.

Even so, it has been claimed that climate changes are causing much biodiversity loss. More correctly and stated here by @austingreen (among others I think) that human-caused land-use changes have been more important.

So, see this new study:

Climate change to overtake land use as major threat to global biodiversity -- ScienceDaily

Comparing those two. Predicts that climate change will overtake by 2070. I'd add that if climate-change rates are currently overestimated, that transition would be delayed. OTOH those change rates could be underestimated.

All these things are very difficult to predict, but that is no reason to disregard attempts being made.

 

A better (sorry, higher) estimate of US fugitive methane emissions:

US oil & gas methane emissions 60 percent higher than estimated: High emissions findings undercut the case that gas offers substantial climate advantage over coal -- ScienceDaily

 

Lemurs are photogenic while still, and even better in motion. Other lemur 'movements' more tree seeds around:

Loss of lemurs might endanger many of Madagascar's largest tree species -- ScienceDaily

With broader implications because many forests have been defaunated and secondary effects of those losses remain mostly unknown.

 

Golden age of sail also put rats on many remote islands. Some have been made rat free by mass poisoning ( or you choose). On one such, trees are sprouting aplenty:

5,000 percent increase in native trees on rat-free palmyra atoll: New research demonstrates strong positive benefit to native trees following invasive species removal -- ScienceDaily

 

Modern genomics can be used to develop new medicines. Or herbicides as described here:

Natural product that could lead to new class of commercial herbicide: Bioinformatics approach used to uncover the weed killer could also be used to find new drugs for medications -- ScienceDaily

Assuming unintended consequences are well controlled such would be all to the good. That has never been a trivial concern and Humans, Inc. have famously dropped the ball several times. I would like to be optimistic in this area.

 

In case readers don't know that chocolate is fermented along its production stream, it is. Now it has been learned that fungal fermenter is not genetically distinguishable from Candida that causes human disease:

Yeast species used in food industry can cause disease in humans, study finds -- ScienceDaily

No evidence is presented that eating chocolate could bring you a fungal disease.

 

A collection of review articles on Tropics in this week's Nature

https://www.nature.com/collections/nftscfnydg

 

A compilation of climate and related datasets:

Real-Time Data | Climate Signals

I saw no compilation of sunspot numbers, and of global T, only GISS. Others might notice other gaps. But as a big bucket it seems quite extensive.

 

Some nuclear power reactors in France will have hot-weather shutdowns:

Hot weather forces 4 French nuclear reactors to shut down - ABC News

It is not (as I first imagined) that intake water is too warm for cooling purpose. Rather, that outlet water would raise downstream river temperature above specified level.

Science parts: Solubility of oxygen (and other gases) decreases with temperature. Fish essentially suffocate*. Pretty much any turbulent river can maintain fish-friendly levels of oxygen even when warmed, but flat water cannot. If you can hear a river standing nearby, it'll be OK.

When such water-heaters are approved for construction, they agree to not discharge if an agreed-upon temperature would be exceeded. That's what's happening now along Rhine and Rhone Rivers. When France cools off, they can crank up again. No immediate evidence of power-supply problems.

I had thought of surface water availability as a potentially scarce resource where large users (thermal power and agriculture) collide. This broadens the topic to include water coolness as a potentially scarce resource.

Speculation: One could create 'rapids' by putting rocks or other structure into river to cause turbulence (and increase O2). But if river is also used for navigation, maybe not. Multi-faceted resources are tricky things.

*Actually more complex. Fish metabolic rates increase in warmer water; not something they can control. So their oxygen requirement increases as its availability goes down.

 

French electricity is 76% nuclear. I suspect, for the moment, that other plants will get dialed up.

Which in a sense might imply that they built too many reactors. But as current situation illustrates, not every plant can be operated at high output at all times.

 

Water use in electrical power generation. Have hit that topic several times. A quartz link

The hidden water footprint of fossil fuel and nuclear power plants — Quartz

does so again, but also helpfully connects you to a 2012 open-access review article. There you might find Figure 2 to be useful. Note that its y axis is edited.

 

Nature interview with Microsoft's environmental scientist. Or, leading environmental scientist. It may be that he would enjoy communication with PriusChat folks, many of whom combine interest in environmental issues with substantial knowledge of technology.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05897-1

 

Warmer and reduced-pH oceans put stress on coral reefs. This study

Reef corals have endured since 'age of dinosaurs' and may survive global warming

Uses DNA 'hindcasting' to suggest that previous hot times were not entirely damaging to reefs. This optimistic note is concordant with some experimental and observational work on current reefs. Others are less optimistic.

So, as usual, it's complicated. But important if you are an ocean fish, or eat them.

==
Actual study in Current Biology is free access, but written for those comfortable with concepts and language of modern genomics.

 

Perhaps we can set aside political and similar aspects of US/Mexico border wall here and focus on environmental. See a very recent summary:


Nature Divided, Scientists United: US–Mexico Border Wall Threatens Biodiversity and Binational Conservation | BioScience | Oxford Academic

 

Consideration of walls naturally leads to windows. At least this is how my mind handles metaphors.

Earth BioGenome project is window on global biodiversity. Aggressive and not inexpensive plan to sequence all eukaryotic species:

Earth BioGenome Project

Earth BioGenome Project: Sequencing life for the future of life | PNAS

This would have been impossible before modern, rapid sequencers were developed. Getting the money remains a major challenge. As in all explorations of biodiversity, appeal is made to discovering additional natural molecules with implications for human benefits. Hard to fault that because much narrower genomic projects have already yielded many such benefits.

As a reminder, eukaryotic means organisms with complicated cells, and many species have more than one cell and different types of cells. Excludes bacteria and viruses.

==
I see two substantial challenges to success here. One is that marine or other aquatic critters seem not to be treated as the big black hole that they are. Other is fungi. Those critters are certainly hyperdiverse and do not conform to classical definition of species. They also exchange DNA in ways other than animals do, by way of, well, sex. Even sex is novel (from human perspective) as some fungi have thousands of sexes. Far cry from our surprise that humans have anything more than two.

Anyway, there it is, and one might imagine worse ways to spend about 4 trillion dollars.

 

In a much narrower sense, yours truly is involved with a project involving biodiversity of soil animals. This project heats soil with buried (resistive) wires to simulate future warmer soils. Its design precludes taking large soil samples to lab and compelling animals to walk* out on their own. That is traditional soil research. There are about 18 large taxonomic groups of soil animals.

With much smaller (feasible) soil samples, these animal groups can be known from their environmental DNA. That is what they leave laying around by either passing (leakily) through or by dying. For this one needs to know unique DNA for each group, and to do other things I'll not describe here. Existing library of unique DNA for those 18 is incomplete. Earth BioGenome, among many other things, would fill those gaps.

*They don't all walk, but there are ways to separate them from soils for direct examination.

 

Boring you with DNA stories continues.

Wheat, right up there among food crops, has now been DNA sequenced

Previously grainy wheat genome comes into focus -- ScienceDaily

"Why so slow?" I imagine hearing you ask. This genome is large, and (not uncommon among plants) polyploid. Meaning two, four or even six copies of everything. Also as link states, there are a lot of repeating sequences. DNA sequencing involves breaking bigs into many littles, sequencing the littles, and then reassembling (a computational task). Like a puzzle; a long one-dimensional puzzle. But with repeats, the puzzle pieces are not unique.

Wheat 'draft' genome, an earlier step, was published about 6 years ago. These days, 6 yrs from draft to final is a huge time. Testifying to its puzzleliferiousness.

As with any crop or 'useful' species, having genomes makes genetic tinkering much easier. That will be Act II, later. Act III is figuring out if any of such tinkerings have unintended consequences. Such 3-Act plays are becoming very common.

That's enough DNA learning for today. back to your lives...