Environmental News

BTW the main wheat paper has so many authors that it would take an actual effort to count them. This puzzle-solving exercise involved many hands.

 

This introduction to gene editing with CRISPR CAS9 is not short but it mostly avoids deep technical terms:

How Crispr Could Transform Our Food Supply

Transparently sponsored by a dairy-products company. I have no trouble with that. With other sponsorship it might put more emphasis on perceived risks.

Substantially lacking here is description of potential for small groups to craft new diseases, or to make existing diseases worse. Also that CRISPR can make errors. Such discussions can be found elsewhere.

 

How to achieve prosperity, sustainability, inclusivity, and good things like that. There may be ways, and some of them may be described in this report:

NCE 2018

About 200 pages and about 1200 references to material from peer-reviewed journals and gray matter.

Whether or not it catalyzes large changes, one ought to be aware that it exists

 

I wonder if any of you home-scale solar panel people (I know you're out there) could make use of this:

Physics model acts as an 'EKG' for solar panel health -- ScienceDaily

To see how systems are 'aging'.

 

Marine aquaculture and the need to protect global food security:

Marine aquaculture and the need to protect global food security -- ScienceDaily

Probably some truth to this even though it is based on "Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5". Humans are way too smart to poke at climate dragon that hard.

 

Some google-map cars now measure air quality:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b00891

Makes sense in every way except getting too local in time and space. In unlikely event that those folks asked me what to do, I'd suggest drones flying with sniffers. Cars are at risk of following a pre-emission-control antique.

 

It's not clear to me that CO2 and methane data from orbital platforms is at risk of being crimped. There are now such platforms not under US flag. But if California decides to launch its own:

California Gov. Jerry Brown to launch satellite to track greenhouse gas emissions

Well, why not? Half a billion might cover it.

 

There are lots of ways to think about how well humans (growing in number and wealth) handle environmental issues. One is UN' Millennium Development Goals. Which might be viewed as our best overall effort, or tongue-wagging, or a vast globalist conspiracy. Your choice there.

Related, Bill Gates who made off with so much of your (our) money had pangs of conscience and sent lot$ of that back into Gates Foundation. They really do things. There is a website of course, and pages within that for those in need of occasional uplift. For example:

https://www.gatesfoundation.org.cn/goalkeepers

Actually I doubt you'd be sent directly to the .cn page. They know my URL though, and offer what I am expected to want.

 

Based on climate model projections, country-level harms have been calculated:

Research forecasts US among top nations to suffer economic damage from climate change: Novel UC San Diego study indicates global warming is costing US economy about $250 billion per year -- ScienceDaily

 

If pushing that rock up that hill ever seems tiring, consider a retreat into fiction. No, I mean real fiction, speculative ecology, such as that reviewed here:

Wild Speculation: Evolution After Humans | by Lucy Jakub | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

Reviewing a book published 36 years ago. I've not read it but this review was enjoyable.

 

Hard to get fired up about one near-extinct species, unless one is into such things. But this story reveals some ecological themes worthy of attention.

Rare Tree Kangaroo Reappears After Vanishing for 90 Years

1. Legendary evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr saw an animal unknown to him. At that time it was normal procedure to shoot the novelty and send its pelt to museum. This he did.

2. Lack of subsequent sightings suggested that he had 'collected' the last living example. Oops.

3. Now it has been observed again (same area) and 'shot' only photographically. DNA (from poop) will be compared to Mayr's. This is normal procedure now.

4. That DNA should also reveal details of diet and seed dispersal, yielding more information than previous procedure.

5. Critter apparently persists in a remote location where (meat) hunters don't go because bamboo is absurdly impenetrable.

==

Marsupials are mammals but unusual in several ways. Without the unique (long) history of this region, we'd not see any of them. Except from fossils, maybe, which would be humorously difficult to interpret.

Persistence of rare species can involve rare confluences of geography, botany, and sometimes even diseases* that keep human populations (and meat demands) low. Last two not numbered as they are but my humble spin on such stories.

*If one were trying for a malaria infection this would be a good place to go.

 

Opossums of the Americas get discussed 'in class' mostly for being bifurcated in genital areas.