Category: climate change

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 14, 2024 • 8:15 am

Send in your good photos, please, as every day the tank gets lower.

But today we have a text-plus-photo essay by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior on one of his favorite subjects: plant pollination. Athayde’s comments are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair: hover through the fog and filthy air (The Weird Sisters)

Most angiosperms (flowering plants) need an agent to move pollen from one flower to another. This service could be provided by the wind, water, bats, birds, or, for the overwhelming majority of cases, insects. But a plant must advertise itself to attract visitors to its flowers. Visual traits such as colour, shape and size are effective lures, but for short distances only because most pollinating insects see as well as Mr Magoo: their visual acuity ranges from centimetres to a few metres, at best. A red flower must have a diameter of at least 26 cm to be recognised by a honey bee (Apis mellifera) 1 m away (Chittka & Raine, 2006). Insects’ vision is mediocre during daytime and goes down to irrelevant at night, except for a few specialised nocturnal species. Other sensory signals such as temperature, texture and even electrical fields are involved in flower recognition. But to attract insects from afar, plants rely on scent.

The majority of flowering plants produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs), a group of organic chemicals (that is, they all contain carbon) that quickly evaporate and disperse in the air. VOCs can act as herbivore deterrents, but a huge variety of them attract pollinators. These volatiles, released by petals or other plant tissues, persist long enough to reach insects and guide them to the flowers, but not for too long so that they don’t accumulate in the air and overwhelm insects’ sensorial capacity. Most of the attractant VOCs are ‘flowery’ scents such as benzyl acetone, which is one of the most abundant aromatic lures in flowers. You are likely to have smelled it from raspberries, cocoa butter, soaps and perfumes.

Ladies making potpourri, a source of benzyl acetone © Edwin Austin Abbey (1852-1911), Wikimedia Commons:

Pollinators are experts in detecting particular compounds from odour blends. And crucially for the pollination angle, they learn to associate specific fragrances with food, so they return repeatedly to its flowery source.

Tracking VOCs seems like a convenient and efficient way to get to pollen and nectar, but there are complexities involved. Scents released by a flower do not travel in a straight line the way light and sounds do. Air turbulence disperses, dilutes and mixes compounds, so that an odour plume is not a well-defined strand of airborne chemicals. And yet, pollinators manage to sort out the chaotic environs and make a run for the smell’s origin. Watch fruit flies navigating confidently through a turbulent atmosphere.

Top: a section of an odour plume, where the shaded area is the projection of an average conical plume. Crosswind transport and odour concentration decrease rapidly outside the cone. Bottom: a two-dimensional section of two blending plumes © Celani et al., 2014:

We don’t have a complete understanding of the ways pollinators track scents to find flowers, but we do know that the presence of certain compounds, their ratios in volatile blends, and the magnitude of the olfactory signal are important. The processes involved are complex, specific, and vulnerable to disturbances. Such as those created by a diesel-guzzling SUV driven to the farmers’ market for the purchase of locally grown organic carrots.

The engine invented by Rudolf Diesel (1858-1913) is the most fuel-efficient internal combustion engine because it converts more heat to mechanical work than any of its alternatives. It is also reliable and sturdy, so it was quickly adopted by industry, agriculture and transport to become the main source of power that keeps the world going. The diesel engine largely did away with coal and revolutionised the world’s economy by generating power efficiently and inexpensively. But its allure suffered a serious blow in the 2010s, when the first studies about its collateral effects came to light.

The combustion (burning) of diesel fuel results in a complex mixture of water, gases and aerosols. Study after study have shown that some of these by-products such as particulate matter (soot), nitric oxide (NO), carbon monoxide (CO) and oxides of nitrogen (NOx), are serious health hazards. They cause all sorts of ailments, from lung inflammation to exacerbation of emphysema and asthma. The World Health Organisation considers diesel exhausts carcinogenic agents as dangerous as asbestos. As if this evil cocktail wasn’t bad enough, it also promotes the formation of other harmful compounds such as ozone (O3). In the upper atmosphere, this gas is essential for life on Earth because it blocks most of the ultraviolet radiation from the sun. At ground level, ozone is a pollutant resulting from chemical reactions between NOx and VOCs in the presence of sunlight. These ground level VOCs have nothing to do with plants; rather, they come from solvents, biomass burning, industrial processes and, most importantly, incomplete fuel combustion.

Formation of ground level ozone © DANMUSISI, Wikimedia Commons:

Ozone is bad for us and bad for insects. It degrades plant-emitted VOCs and changes the ratios of compounds in a scent blend. As a result, pollinators detect VOCs at shorter distances, become confused, or worse: they may no longer recognise flowers’ chemical signals (Farré-Armengol et al., 2015). In a laboratory setting, adding ozone at concentrations commonly found in rural areas to the scent produced by the jasmine tobacco (Nicotiana alata) disrupted the attraction of one of its main flower visitors, the tobacco hawkmoth (Manduca sexta) (Cook et al., 2020).

Effect of ozone pollution © Langford et al., 2023:

The pale evening primrose (Oenothera pallida) grows in sandy and rocky habitats in the arid regions of northern Mexico and western USA. Its flowers release a scent loaded with monoterpenes, a class of chemicals found in various herbs, spices, conifers and fruits. Monoterpenes attract several visitors including the tobacco hawkmoth and the white-lined sphinx (Hyles lineata), which are two of the plant’s main pollinators. These moths have a keen sense of smell and can track pale evening primrose flowers from several kilometres away. But this plant-moth interaction can be severely disrupted by the nitrate radical NO3, a gas resulting from the reaction of ozone with NO2, the latter spewed by wildfires, power plants and diesel engines. Monoterpenes break down quickly in the presence of NO3, drastically reducing the reach of olfactory cues that moths rely on to locate flowers. In wind tunnel experiments, nocturnal levels of NO3 typically found in urban settings caused a 70% drop in number of flower visitations, resulting in a 28% reduction in fruit set (Chan et al., 2024). Sunlight degrades NO3, so this chemical is primarily a nighttime pollutant – bad news for moths and other nocturnal pollinators.

A white-lined sphinx visiting a pale evening primrose flower © Ron Wolf, US National Science Foundation:

Image of hawkmoth (Hyles lineata) pollinating Oenothera flower. Researchers at the University of Washington found that nitrate radicals (NO3) in the air degrade the scent chemicals released by a common wildflower, drastically reducing the scent-based cues that nighttime pollinators rely on to locate the flower.

With the industrial revolution, urban spaces became choked with foul air. People in charge slowly woke up to the problem, and today many countries drastically reduced atmospheric pollution thanks to ever improving filtration technologies and strict regulations. Despite these advances, diesel exhaust and other emissions remain major environmental problems, particularly in countries undergoing rapid economic growth such as China and India.

Global emissions of NOx, particulate matter with a diameter of 10 μm or less (PM10), ammonia (NH3) and global exposure to tropospheric O3. Tg: teragrams, ppb: parts per billion © Duque & Steffan-Dewenter, 2024:

The progressive deterioration of worldwide air quality is a serious threat to human health and certainly doesn’t bode well for plant reproduction, although the magnitude of this effect can only be guessed at. We already knew that clean air is vital for our eyes and lungs: more and more evidence tell us that it is also important to pollination services.

Haze over London caused by air pollution. Bad for us and for pollinators © shirokazan, Wikimedia Commons:

Can mātauranga Māori help us understand climate change?

May 30, 2023 • 9:30 am

Judging from this video lecture and Q&A session below by a Māori climate scientist, the answer to the title question is “no”.

A New Zealand biologist and teacher sent me the 46-minute video, angered at its intellectual vacuity, as you can detect from his/her email. (By the way, the scientists I quote are different people, not just one disaffected person.  Plenty of Kiwi scientists are fed up with the nation’s drive to indigenize science, as well as its handing over tons of grant money to Māori researchers for dubious projects. But they dare not reveal their names for fear of losing their jobs and reputations. This is a country where academia is deeply involved in self-censoring). Anyway, the email:

“Yesterday I came across a teachers’ newsletter referencing a webinar titled “What te aro Maori can teach us about climate change?” It’s 45 minutes long long and fellow bio teacher [NAME REDACTED] and I could only stomach the first 17 mins, with references to the “sky god”. Readers might be able to get further, but I can’t take this garbage.”

I had trouble getting through it, too, as it’s pretty much anodyne gobbledygook with the ultimate message “we need to talk to each other”. But I managed to listen to the whole thing, though it took me two sessions.

Although I had trouble deciphering some of the Māori language (the use of which is imperative to establish your credibility), I believe the words “te aro Māori” in the title simply mean “Māori-centered focus.” The question at hand is clearly what using that focus, or using mātauranga Māori (Māori “ways of knowing”, henceforth “MM”) can tell us about climate change, and how to ameliorate its effects.

Sadly, nowhere in the entire presentation and question session could I find a single contribution that a Māori perspective contributes to our understanding of and work on climate change. Listen for yourself and tell me if you find anything substantive.

That’s not surprising: after all, it was modern (not “Western”) science that discovered the issue of anthropogenic climate change and is now working on how to ameliorate it, though that will involve not just science but politics.  And if the Māori perspective can contribute to the political solution at least, or provide useful scientific viewpoints, we’d like to know. But the effort here comes up dry, with the climate scientist spouting bromides that you’ll see below. In the end, I felt as if I had given up 45 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back.  All I can do with that lost time is show the readers what the Māori themselves present as their best case for contributing to science. And the case is pitiful.

Here are the YouTube notes:

In our first Climate Conversation, Akuhata Bailey-Winiata (University of Waikato) will speak specifically about his work on the relevance and application of mātauranga and te ao Māori in climate change. The session will be facilitated by Glen Cornelius (Chief Executive, Harrison Grierson and Deputy President, Te Ao Rangahau). Bailey-Winiata is a climate change scientist.

Click to watch.  The take-home lesson is in a series of slides, some of which I’ve put below, but there’s not much to take home:

In lieu of his inability to really nail down proposals and solutions that differ between Māori and “Western” viewpoints,  Bailey-Wineata simply discusses the differences in between Māori and “Western” worldviews, and then makes up reasons why they’re relevant. One of the differences is said to involve the “Western” concept of linear time and the Māori concept of “Indigenous time” (slide below).  This turns out to be irrelevant because of the false suggestion that while Westerners have linear time, and don’t really look back much, the Māori view of time sees it as “event based” and “nonlinear”, with the “past and future just as important as the present.” Since climate change is really a problem for the future, but is detected by comparing past with the present, and solved by extrapolating into the future, this is a distinction without a difference, and not a contribution of MM to science. The slide:

When asked how MM-based scientific methods differ form those of modern science, Māori tend to emphasize the “interconnectedness of everything”, as opposed to the supposedly “Western” view that things aren’t much interconnected. Here’s the slide that emphasizes that supposed difference, but I see nothing relevant between this Māori view and the way modern science tackles climate change, which of course involves thinking about both past and future generations (cf. Greta Thunberg):

Below a slide meant to emphasize how Māori “long term views” can contribute to the climate change problem. Note that the lecturer brings in storytelling and water spirits, but again, this leads at best to only a week and unenlightening analogy between the dangers of water spirits and the dangers of climate change. I won’t get into the tail-flicking of the water spirit, supposedly a metaphor for a river changing course and causing flood damage (see here).

The lesson from the above: don’t put houses where they can be affected by climate change. But that’s just common sense, not a unique Māori-centric conclusion. Every insurance company in the US knows this.

Here’s a slide that again relies on weak metaphor: just as rivers in NZ can be “braided,” so, says Bailey-Winiata, so we need both Māori and “Western” approaches to science. (The constant use of the words “Western science” to refer to “modern science” irks me, but I use the term because the lecturer does.) At any rate, he says over and over again that both approaches are needed, but never says one tangible thing about what the Māori approach can add to how science is presently addressing climate change.

The Māori answer to the question “what can you add to how science is currently done?” invariably involves simply emphasizing the difference between Māori and non-Māori world views, but never translates these into tangible actions, much less telling us how they add to science in general.

Finally, here are Bailey-Winiata’s “take home messages”.   Again, they emphasize the difference in world view, but never tell us how those differences promote fruitful cultural interaction when it comes to scientific problems that affect society.

 

If you think I’m deliberately distorting what the lecturer says, and leaving out valuable contributions that a Māori view can bring to climate change, then by all means watch the video for yourself.

Bailey-Winiata‘s presentation is finished in 25 minutes, and in the rest of the video he answers listeners’ questions fed to him by moderator Grierson. Here are a few questions and answers. I’ll paraphrase some of them, and give quotes (using quotation marks) when I had time to write them down.

Question: “Are there difficulties matching the timelines from the event-based sense of time [hundreds of years] to a Western sense of time?”?

Answer: Yes, for Māori culture gives us a long-term view, so this changes “how policies and industry has been done.”  The Māori view tells us that “building the capacity to do these things within that spaces of change and policy is going to be crucial heading into the future, but yeah. . . it’s a hard question to answer in terms of. . .yeah.”

In other words, it’s gobbledygook.

Question:  “What challenges could you give us as engineers and as climate-change practitioners to embrace teo Māori and empower the use of MM amd mauri in the work we do?”

Answer: “The challenge is just to be open to new ideas to new concepts and new ways of knowing, of being, of doing. . . . we need to open ourselves up to these different knowledge systems. . .have conversations with your Maori colleagues, have a cup of tea with them, and just talk.” Answer: “be openminded and understanding. .  see the other side.

There’s a strong smell of kumbaya in such answers.

At one point, when asked what kind of new Māori-centric institutions we need to promote indigenous world views, Bailey-Winiata says that the Māori need “safe spaces” for discussion.

“Be openminded, be aware of time, everything is interconnected. . . “:  this is what we hear over and over again. What we don’t hear is how MM adds to modern science.

Question: How can we use the past to inform how we deal with climate change (emphasis on the past is part of the Māori “nonlinear” view of time)?

Answer:  We can “use history to understand how we can look forward in the future.” Māori tradition tells us “what can we draw resilience and inspiration from.”

Of course using the past to inform the future is already an integral part of climate-change solutions.

Question:  Is there existing literature in Maori available on climate change for the general public?”

Answer:”It’s very sparse. . . . . there’s a lot about Māori natural hazards that you can draw parallels with, but not much historical work has been done.”

Short answer, “no.”  Bailey-Winiata then lists several Māori people who are “pushing the boundaries of this area of climate change in Maori, and the literature is bound to come out”. But where is that literature? I look forward to it.

Finally,

Question: “Do you think that Pākehā [the Māori word for European descendants] need to get on board with accepting some of the Māori values when planning projects, especially when accepting climate change.”

Answer; Bailey Winiata mentions the famous Listener letter of 2021, in which seven University of Auckland academics argue that MM should not be taught as if it were equivalent to modern science, and then claims that this misguided viewpoint is spreading.  Instead, he says, we need to “be open to the idea of new ways of knowing and new ways of doing”. and “we need to move forward because climate change is happening.”   The moderator, of course agrees, as he has with everything that Bailey-Winiata says.

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends: a presentation of the value of Māori ways of knowing in addressing anthropogenic climate change—and from a Māori climate-change scientist with a Ph.D.  Either he’s totally unable to express the values he sees in using MM to address the problem, or there is no value of using MM to address the problem. I tend toward the latter view, for MM was developed before “Western” scientists raised the problem of climate change, and MM is a worldview that contains a bit of practical knowledge but nothing that bears on climate change unless you think that the “long view,” supposedly contributed by Māori lore, has something to add. In fact, that could even be deleterious, for at one point Bailey-Winiata mentions even bigger climate change in the past—something that climate-change denialists often cite when arguing that today’s changes are simply part of the historical cycle of climate change on Earth.

Since this is a half-hour lecture by a credentialed Māori climate-change scientist, I take it to be the best case that can be made for infusing MM into modern science, at least in terms of climate change. And the case is not only weak, but nonexistent. There is no “there” there.

Let me emphasize that by criticizing MM as a valuable contribution to modern science, I am not criticizing the Māori people themselves, who had a rough time of it, but are now reaping reparations in the form of affirmative action, jobs, grants, and the like. But I will argue that their “way of knowing” is way overemphasized, and that the government and academic powers of New Zealand, in a desire to cater to “the sacred victim,” are being sold a bill of goods.

Mainstream media accused of censoring William Shatner’s post-spaceflight comments

October 15, 2021 • 9:15 am

It appears that William Shatner made a pointed remark about global warming after his successful 11-minute trip to space in the Blue Origin capsule, but, as reader Plunky says, “This perspective wasn’t widely reported in MSM” [mainstream media].  Shatner’s musings on life and death, and his emotional reaction to the trip, however, was reported all over the place.

Indeed, if you search for “William Shatner global warming” on the Internet, you find precious little save at yahoo! entertainment and MEDIAite, and nothing about the omitted sentence that this piece gives. (Of course, I must have missed some stuff.) Plunky called my attention to the piece below from Informed Comment (click on screenshot) noting the omission.  They impute it to Bezos cutting off Shatner because of possible bad publicity for his mission.

From Cole’s reporting:

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Wednesday, pop culture icon William Shatner, Star Trek‘s Captain James Tiberius Kirk, explained the enormity of seeing the earth from a suborbital flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepherd space craft. Part of what he said when he returned from 66 miles up got lost in all of the news reports I’ve seen, and it is the most important part.

Here’s a portion of what CNBC printed in what they alleged was the complete transcript of Shatner’s remarks:

    • “I mean, the little things, the weightlessness, and to see the blue color whip by and now you’re staring into blackness. That’s the thing. This covering of blue is this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue around that we have around us. We think ‘oh, that’s blue sky’ and suddenly you shoot through it all of a sudden, like you whip a sheet off you when you’re asleep, and you’re looking into blackness – into black ugliness. And you look down, there’s the blue down there, and the black up there, and there is Mother Earth and comfort and – is there death? Is that the way death is?”

But here’s the crucial takeaway, the last phrase of which is omitted by CNBC:

      • “What I would love to do is communicate as much as possible the jeopardy, the moment you see how vuln– the vulnerability of everything. It so small. This air which is keeping us alive is thinner than your skin. It’s a sliver. It’s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe. It’s negligible, this air. Mars doesn’t have it. It’s so thin. And to dirty it…”

In fact, Shatner adds, after “to dirty it”, “I mean that’s another whole subject.” So it wasn’t just the four words that were omitted, but an entire sentence. And then Bezos breaks in. I have to say that he looks like a bit of a jerk, especially when he interrupts Shatner to spray champagne all over the place.

Informed Comment continues:

“The jeopardy . . . And to dirty it!” To fill this precious atmosphere, unique in our solar system, with clouds of burned coal dust and with greenhouse gases, Shatner says, is . . . what? Despicable. Unthinkable.

Just when Shatner is getting on to the subject about how what he saw reinforced his horror at the way we are polluting the atmosphere and imperiling the earth with man-made global heating, Bezos interrupts him: “It goes so fast.” Bezos doesn’t want Captain Kirk expounding on the evils of climate change on his promotional clip. He gets him talking about the experience again. Not the conclusion he drew from that experience.

And yes, Shatner did say that and yes, Bezos interrupted him. You can see it at 7:13 in this video, as well as the “I mean, that’s another whole subject” comment.

Even the New York Times reports only these words of Shatner’s:

It was unbelievable … To see the blue cover go whoop by. And now you’re staring into blackness. That’s the thing. The covering of blue, this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue that we have around us. We say, ‘Oh that’s blue sky.’ And then suddenly you shoot through it and all of a sudden, like you whip the sheet off you when you’re asleep, you’re looking into blackness.

. . . You look down, there’s the blue down there, and the black up there. There is Mother and Earth and comfort and there is … Is there death? I don’t know. Was that death? Is that the way death is? Whoop and it’s gone. Jesus. It was so moving to me.

You’ll be hard pressed to find that whole paragraph beginning “What I would love to do is communicate as much as possible the jeopardy. . . ” in the mainstream media, ad I  haven’t found “And to dirty it. . . ” anywhere, not even The New Yorker’s report.   The Informed Comment piece observes that Shatner has been deeply concerned with climate change for at least five years.

I suppose are a couple of explanations for their omission. The innocuous one is that the MSM just omitted one phrase from Shatner’s soliloquy—a fragment that wasn’t even a complete sentence (but was followed by a complete sentence, also omitted!). After all, the “MSM” largely leans Left, and reports frequently on climate change, so what motivation would they have for omitting that bit?

On the other hand, that phrase was important, and should have been part of the story, even though in some accounts (not the NYT’s above), they do say Shatner’s worried about humans despoiling our planet.

Informed Comment appears to be a progressive Leftist site, so they of course impute this to Bezos trying to keep Shatner from damaging the Blue Horizon enterprise, which of course is a for-profit operation. Cole quotes the Washington Post‘s 2016 interview with Shatner to show his concern, and winds up this way:

“People like yourself — young people like yourself should be screaming at the top of your lungs to the people who lead.”

That’s what Shatner wanted to say on his return to earth. He wanted to say that our thin, fragile, vulnerable, unique atmosphere is in danger from petroleum, gas and coal, that this mothering “blue blanket” of the earth is in danger of being enveloped by the grim blackness of galactic emptiness because of the way we are treating it.

That is what for-profit news did not report about Shatner’s profound experience and his articulation of it. He wants you screaming at the top of your lungs that our pale blue dot is in danger of being burned up and engulfed by an unfeeling, black cosmos. And that only we can stop it from getting worse, because we are the ones making it worse.

Well, maybe Cole is wrong trying to psychologize Shatner in this way. After all, Shatner did say “that’s another whole subject”, and may have left it there. But surely the media could have reported that final phrase, particularly in what was purported to be a complete transcript.

You be the judge!

 

“Climate change” redacted from U.S. Geological Survey press releases

July 10, 2019 • 9:00 am

I’m rereading Orwell’s novel 1984, and so this new report from Science reminded me of the Party’s attempt to change language into “Newspeak” and, by purging old words, creating a new language with a new ideological slant. (That, of course, derived from Orwell’s earlier but superb essay Politics and the English Language.)

The Science article relates, at some length, how studies by several federal agencies—mainly the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), but also the Department of Agriculture and the Interior Department—have been deleting references to climate change from press releases. It appears to be a deliberate but unofficial policy of the government.

Click on the screenshot below to read:

To be sure, there are no accusations that the Trump administration is forbidding the agencies from conducting studies on global warming, or from publishing the results in journals. The accusation is that in the press releases—often the only thing journalists read or care about, since they’re averse to reading papers—expunge mention of global warming as a cause of various damages or potential damages to the environment. This redaction has been going on for some time, but this useful article collects several instances of press-release censorship.

This contrasts with the Obama administration, which quickly released press releases mentioning climate change and approved more of them. According to the article, in the last year of Obama’s administration USGS distributed at least 13 press releases that dealt with climate change and even mentioned it in the headlines, while in the Trump administration—from early 2017 to the present—the figure has been zero.

I’ll give just two examples, as quotes from the article:

a.) “A March news release from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) touted a new study that could be useful for infrastructure planning along the California coastline. At least that’s how President Donald Trump’s administration conveyed it.

The news release hardly stood out. It focused on the methodology of the study rather than its major findings, which showed that climate change could have a withering effect on California’s economy by inundating real estate over the next few decades.

An earlier draft of the news release, written by researchers, was sanitized by Trump administration officials, who removed references to the dire effects of climate change after delaying its release for several months, according to three federal officials who saw it. The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, showed that California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, would face more than $100 billion in damages related to climate change and sea-level rise by the end of the century. It found that three to seven times more people and businesses than previously believed would be exposed to severe flooding.

‘We show that for California, USA, the world’s fifth largest economy, over $150 billion of property equating to more than 6% of the state’s GDP and 600,000 people could be impacted by dynamic flooding by 2100,’ the researchers wrote in the study.

The release fits a pattern of downplaying climate research at USGS and in other agencies within the administration. While USGS does not appear to be halting the pursuit of science, it has publicly communicated an incomplete account of the peer-reviewed research or omitted it under President Trump.

‘It’s been made clear to us that we’re not supposed to use climate change in press releases anymore. They will not be authorized,’ one federal researcher said, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisal.”

Note, however, that later in the article, when summarizing the press release, author Waldman does quote the final press release as saying this:

 “The authors then translated those hazards into a range of projected economic and social exposure data to show the lives and dollars that could be at risk from climate change in California during the 21st century.”

So it’s not completely kosher to imply that all mentions of climate change were expunged from press releases. The article could have been a bit more honest about this.

And on the incipient demise of polar bears:

b.) “A release in 2017 that publicized a study on how polar bears were expending more energy due to a loss of sea ice did not mention climate change. It noted that a ‘moving treadmill of sea ice”’ in the warming Arctic forced polar bears to hunt for more seals and placed pressure on their population in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, without stating that climate change is a key driver of sea ice conditions.”

That is even more dishonest.  And we all know why this censorship is happening: economic interests come to bear on the government that impel a Republican administration to downplay the results of anthropogenic climate change. The “moving treadmill of sea ice” is an Orwellian euphemism for “icecaps melting because of climate change.”

All this does, of course, is convince people that if there is a problem, it has nothing to do with greenhouse gases or human energy change. And that reduces the urgency of reducing emissions.  If there is any humanity to look back on our species in the future, they’ll marvel at how much we ignored an exigent problem. But of course nobody may be left to chastise us for our shortsightedness. It all seems unstoppable.

Templeton gave big money to climate-denialist organizations

May 29, 2019 • 12:00 pm

Reader Robert called my attention to a 2013 paper in Climatic Change (described by Drexel University as “one of the top 10 climate science journals in the world”) that tracked the source of money given to American climate-denialist organizations. While the results may be out of date, it shows that over at least seven years, the Templeton Foundation gave more than twenty million dollars to organizations—mostly think tanks—opposing the idea of anthropogenic climate change. (Note added in proof: I discovered that I’d written a long post about this paper six years ago, but, rather than repeat what I said, or call your attention to an earlier post, I’ll give a shorter version here.)

The paper’s author is Robert Brulle, described by Wikipedia as

. . . . [an] environmental sociologist and professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University. He is also an associate professor of public health at the Drexel University School of Public Health. He advocates aggressive political action to address global warming.

A free pdf of the full paper can be downloaded at this link or by clicking on the screenshot below.

Or click here to see a Drexel-written summary of Brulle’s paper:

Brulle used Internal Revenue Service data to find out both which organizations were making donations to climate change counter-movement (CCCM) organizations (see the list below) as well as data from the CCCM groups’ tax reports to find out where their money was coming from. In total, he found data from 91 different CCCM organizations funded by 141 foundations between 2003 and 2010. It would be nice to have a more recent sample, though some foundations, as reported below, hide their contributions by funneling them through untraceable sources. 

The four main points of the paper are outlined by the Drexel site (quotations direct).

1.) Conservative foundations have bank-rolled denial.The largest and most consistent funders of organizations orchestrating climate change denial are a number of well-known conservative foundations, such as the Searle Freedom Trust, the John William Pope Foundation, the Howard Charitable Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. These foundations promote ultra-free-market ideas in many realms.

2.) Koch and ExxonMobil have recently pulled back from publicly visible funding. From 2003 to 2007, the Koch Affiliated Foundations and the ExxonMobil Foundation were heavily involved in funding climate-change denial organizations. But since 2008, they are no longer making publicly traceable contributions.

3.) Funding has shifted to pass through untraceable sources. Coinciding with the decline in traceable funding, the amount of funding given to denial organizations by the Donors Trust has risen dramatically. Donors Trust is a donor-directed foundation whose funders cannot be traced. This one foundation now provides about 25% of all traceable foundation funding used by organizations engaged in promoting systematic denial of climate change.

4.) Most funding for denial efforts is untraceable. Despite extensive data compilation and analyses, only a fraction of the hundreds of millions in contributions to climate change denying organizations can be specifically accounted for from public records. Approximately 75% of the income of these organizations comes from unidentifiable

The fact that organizations are hiding their donations is of course worrying, but also shows that the companies know they’d get bad publicity from giving money to CCCMs. Donors Trust, which gives 25% of all money to CCCM over the period, is designed to hide the source of donations. As Brulle’s paper states:

Of special interest in this regard is that Donors Trust and Donors Capital are both “donor directed” foundations. In this type of foundation, individuals or other foundations contribute money to the donor directed foundation, and it then makes grants based on the stated preferences of the original contributor. This process ensures that the intent of the contributor is met while also hiding that contributor’s identity. Because contributions to a donor directed foundation are not required to be made public, their existence provides a way for individuals or corporations to make anonymous contributions. In effect, these two philanthropic foundations form a black box that conceals the identity of contributors to various CCCM organizations.

While I suppose this is legal, I don’t know why it should be, for the donations still go to the specified recipient.

And here’s the breakdown of money given to CCCMs from 2003-2010 by various foundations. Brulle’s paper summarizes the results visually presented in the pie chart (my emphasis in both the words and the chart):

Figure 1 shows the overall amount and percentage distribution of foundation funding of CCCM organizations. The single largest funders are the combined foundations Donors Trust/Donors Capital Fund. Over the 2003–2010 period, they provided more than $78 million in funding to CCCM organizations. The other major funders are the combined Scaife and Koch Affiliated Foundations, and the Bradley, Howard, Pope, Searle and Templeton foundations, all giving more than $20 million from 2003–2010.

The size of the donations, in descending order are given as the pie slices going clockwise from “others” at the bottom:

Here is the money received by various CCCM organizations; if you study global warming, you’ll be familiar with many of them, with the largest being well known conservative think tanks. In other words, the pie chart above shows the amount of money given by foundations to organizations shown below, who use the dosh to create climate-change-denialist propaganda.

Sunny Bains’s 2011 article in Evolutionary Psychology, “Questioning the integrity of the John Templeton Foundation,” details more involvement of Templeton in climate-denialism.

Given Templeton’s predilection for selling itself as a science-friendly organization, and the number of genuine scientists who swill at the Templeton trough, I’d hope that the Foundation would have stopped this behavior, though of course they continue funding ludicrous religion-and-science-are-bffs initiatives. I can’t find any information later than this study, but that means nothing. If Templeton lets me know that not a penny of their resources goes to organizations involved in climate-change denialism, I’ll be glad to issue an update. But for the nonce, no scientist with any self-respect should be taking money from Templeton.

Maybe people will listen to David Attenborough about climate change

December 3, 2018 • 9:15 am

Right now we are facing a manmade disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change.
If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.
—David Attenborough

Some research has shown (I can’t be arsed to find it) that people tend to most trust the advice and beliefs of those considered members of their “tribe.” Well, who doesn’t see David Attenborough a member of their tribe?  A few days ago, as The Guardian reports, there was a United Nations climate change summit in Poland, and Attenborough was chosen to be the one representative speaking for the world’s people as a whole. That’s a big responsibility! And he’s 92 years old.

As part of that summit, and to inform Sir David’s address, messages from many people were collected. Buttressed by their views, Attenborough delivered the following short but powerful two-minute talk, also presented by The Guardian:

We all know that he’s right, and that without immediate action on the part of industry, government, and the world’s citizens, our future—and that of many species—is bleak. Yet the disaster is far off, and people are too consumed by politics, their tribe, and their business interests to worry about a distant futurity. Steve Pinker holds out hope that technology can solve the problem, but where is the will to do that until the disaster is upon us, at which time it will be too late? The “simple everyday actions” that we can all take, and that Attenborough mentions, pale before what governments can do.

h/t: Michael, Raymond

New report again raises the alarm about climate change

November 23, 2018 • 3:00 pm

Trump’s own government’s study shows him to be a mendacious moron. Click on the screenshot below to go to the CNN story, and you can find the government report it mentions at this site. (Note: the report is very long.)

An excerpt from CNN:

The report’s findings run counter to President Donald Trump’s consistent message that climate change is a hoax.

On Wednesday, Trump tweeted, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?” as some Americans faced the coldest Thanksgiving in over a century.

But the science explained in these and other federal government reports is clear: Climate change is not disproved by the extreme weather of one day or a week; it’s demonstrated by long-term trends. Humans are living with the warmest temperatures in modern history. Even if the best-case scenario were to happen and greenhouse gas emissions were to drop to nothing, the world is on track to warm 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit.

As of now, not a single G20 country is meeting climate targets, research shows.

Without significant reductions in greenhouse emissions, the annual average global temperature could increase 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 Celsius) or more by the end of this century, compared with preindustrial temperatures, the report says.