Environment

Though activists try to portray farmers as slathering pesticides and fertilizer on land, anyone who has farmed know it is just the opposite; land is their greatest asset and given price competition they need to control costs and inputs as much as possible. No one wants to control fertilizer and pesticides more than farmers. A new simulation says pre-growing season weather and its impact on soil nitrogen may provide a clue. The agroecosystem model known as ecosys was used to understand how temperature and precipitation in the pre-growing season impacted soil inorganic nitrogen content and…

Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, can produce toxins and deplete lakes of oxygen when they die.  It can be dangerous for both pets and people. In August 2014, nearly half a million people in the Toledo area were without tap water for nearly three days due to contaminated drinking water. A type of blue-green algae, Microcystis, had produced particularly high levels of the liver toxin microcystin (MC) in Lake Erie. Since the nutrient phosphorus is an important nutrient for these algae, and environmentalists and the politicians they influence don't understand biological…

Before the invention of modern science and technology, where many diverse foods can be grown in areas once considered inhospitable, the whims of nature determined what you ate, and if you ate at all.  A new paper says that climate had the most influence over diet in the Central Andes between 400 and 7,000 years ago. No shock there. What was more surprising is their contention that population size had little impact on diet variation, even though in other parts of the world larger civilizations fostered trade and increased competition. The only period where diets across the…

Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation built 109 eye-catching and affordable homes in New Orleans for a community where many people were displaced by damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Now this housing development is in disarray. The vast majority of the recently constructed homes are riddled with construction-related problems that have led to mold, termites, rotting wood, flooding and other woes. At least six are boarded up and abandoned. Many residents have filed lawsuits that are still pending. That is, a nonprofit that built houses with input from Frank Gehry and other prominent…

In the 1966 Harry Harrison novel "Make Room! Make Room!" concerns about population control were the driver of the plot and the storytellers were various people in New York City when the world has reached a population of 7 billion. You have probably never heard of the novel, but you likely have heard of the movie version, "Soylent Green", starring the incomparable Charlton Heston. Population was a big concern throughout the 20th century. Until the mid-point, the solution embraced by progressives was eugenics - weeding out those deemed less fit and letting evolution take over from there. A…

According to NASA, there is a consensus on climate change and that humans are causing it through their sustained actions. However, while many people know that climate change is happening, few realize the kind of energy that the scientific community has put into ensuring the science on the topic is right. It's interesting to note that many people who deny that climate change is happening accuse scientists of being "harbingers of doom" with their predictions. However, a paper published in Global Environmental Change accuses scientists of erring on the side of least drama. What's really going…

From time to time we get larger solar storms. One of the last major ones was the one in March 1989 geomagnetic storm which caused a nine hour power cut in Quebec. That happened because they weren’t prepared for it. Modern power supplies are hardened against this, making such events much less likely. There were earlier studies suggesting widespread damage to transformers which could cause months to years to repair, widespread power supply problems that would take a long time to resolve, and trillions of dollars of damage, so a large economic impact. However later studies found the newer…

This is for people who worry that the Democrats in the USA will never come to agreement on their climate policies. It’s tough work for them, because they have to get agreement of 50 senators, even one abstention and they will lose the vote. IMHO this is also a strength- the bill is getting intense scrutiny. Everyone’s concerns need to be listened to. Joe Manchin seems genuine and he represents centrist politicians in the USA - a bill is more likely to work if he is behind it too. But we are getting stories claiming that COP26 will fail if this bill doesn’t include strong climate change action…

How to motivate your self, and others to act on climate change, biodiversity or anything else - tips from psychology This talk may help you if you are thinking about how to motivate both yourself and others, and also governments, to act on climate change, biodiversity loss or indeed anything. The way you might do it instinctively, to focus on all the negatives that need to be fixed, is actually not the best approach. Psychologists call this negative framing. Psychology says, in order to create engagement, we should present, on balance, three positive or supportive framings for each climate…

Though it is common to see environmental videos of birds caught in plastic, less well known is that, like cats, seabirds love to eat it. Paracelsus famously noted that the dose makes the poison but in the 1990s some activist scientists began claiming that any dose is a poison, so even if birds excrete the plastic, chemicals can "bioaccumulate" and cause harm. While that notion remains controversial, a new paper in Environmental Monitoring and Contaminants Research engages in a What If? scenario based on an analysis of 32 species of seabirds sampled from around the globe. They…