Celebrate Polar Bear Day While You Can. The Science is In and Their Future Looks Bleak

Polar bears are finished.

There, I’ve said it. Let the cries of heresy begin.

It’s Polar Bear Day today, and I say: If not today, when?

Optimists say we still have time to reverse the trend, but look around. Never mind the “pretty words,” as Greta Thunberg calls them: Who is actually working to reverse the trend?

The remarkable thing about scientists’ climate predictions over the past 25 years or so is that, if anything, they’ve proven too conservative. The science is in, and while it would be easy — and right — to say it was obvious all along, the reality is there are still those climate deniers who dismiss the growing alarm as yet more handwringing and pearl-clutching, even as the winters grow darker and colder and summers hotter and more prone to fires.

Oh, and did I mention? The polar ice is melting.

This is a big deal for polar bears, as anyone with even a basic knowledge of Arctic bears’  habits knows apex predators that size need a lot of food energy to survive minus-50°C temperatures in early spring, when mothers with newborn cubs emerge from their winter snow dens. Polar bears eat seals, but they need the ice to get to the seals, and that ice is disappearing. Seals aren’t faring too well, either, owing to changes in the ocean currents that are robbing seals of their favoured fish food. Life below zero is not what it was.

We knew this, of course, even if deep down we couldn’t produce the science to prove it to the skeptics — those skeptics willing enough to consider the facts in the first place.

Last summer scientists predicted most polar bear populations would disappear by 2100, with all but a few surviving a collective reproductive failure as early as 2040.

Troubling, but still vague. Vague enough that a climate-denying skeptic could accuse  scientists of being serial doomsayers hoping to cash in on gullible donors.

Now, a review article published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Experimental Biology has honed in on science data that shows precisely how much ice has disappeared, at what rate, and how that affects bear physiology in mathematical terms.

Sea ice has dwindled 13% every decade since 1979. This matters because polar bears, physiologically evolved to use as little energy as possible in the Arctic cold, are “sit and wait” hunters, adapted to grabbing seals at breathing holes in the ice. Seals are vital to the bears’ survival because their blubber is rich in the fat bears need to survive the cold.  Polar bears now swim an average three days to find seals. That’s a lot of energy.

Polar bears are not suited to foraging on land. Even a moron can figure out that the contents of a garbage dump are unlikely to provide sufficient nourishment for an apex predator that needs rich, calorie-high food to survive, but it’s not as simple as saying, ‘Let them forage in the wilderness like other bears.’

According to the researchers, “A polar bear would need to consume (about) 1.5 caribou, 37 Arctic char, 74 snow geese, 216 snow goose eggs (ie 54 nests with four eggs per clutch) or 3 million available crowberries to equal the digestible energy in the blubber of one adult ringed seal.”

And that just ain’t gonna happen.

This new study is instructive because it takes a simple and irrefutable idea — calculating the energetic cost of the loss of sea ice to apex predators like polar bears and narwhals — we can foretell the probable consequences to their reproduction rate and long-term odds for survival long before we see actual evidence of their declining numbers.

Food for thought.

https://jeb.biologists.org/content/224/Suppl_1/jeb228049

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“Insta”-gram from California: On Heat Waves, Firestorms, a Teenage Climate Activist and Now, “Firenados.”

“This is the moment we need to save November, to save the planet.”

— Alexandria Villasenõr, climate activist

Ironies abound. The first time I learned of the teenage climate activist Alexandria Villasenõr, age 15, was on Twitter, when I happened to be following the better-known teen activist Greta Thunberg.

Villasenõr, demonstrating against climate change at the time, was huddled with a hand-made sign on a bench outside a New York museum during one of the worst blizzards in the city’s history. Horrified museum workers begged her to come inside; she refused, and they sent her hot coffee instead while she tweeted a series of real-time updates, tapping her smartphone in a whirlwind of driving snow. I sent a tweet of encouragement, assuming it would vanish into the ether, and she replied immediately. The power of social media. I’ve followed her, through thick and thin, ever since.

Fast-forward 18 months.

Villasenõr, now in California where her family lives, where she was born, grew up and went to school, has been active again on Twitter these past few days, because she’s now in the middle of another weather-driven firestorm.

Only this firestorm is literally that — a storm made of fire.

The on-going heatwave across California and up the coast all the way to the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada, has sparked some of the most violent fires in a region already known for its volatile summer fires.

The climate crisis, as we all know, doesn’t exist — it’s a Chinese hoax, perpetuated by libtards, bunny huggers and radical lefties hidebound determined to sully the environmental record of the US Trump administration — the eternal sunshine of spotless minds! The Trump administration — paragons of virtue, educated, well informed and true believers in empirical evidence and the power science — never enact policy without first thinking of the public interest.

Right.

The facts are these: This past weekend, the US National Weather Service’s automated weather station at aptly named Furnace Creek — in equally aptly named Death Valley, just inside California’s border with Nevada — registered a record breaking high temperature of 54.4Cº.

That might not sound like much but it is the hottest reliably recorded temperature since temperatures first started being recorded by equipment specifically calibrated to take precise measurements — as opposed to, you know, taking a wild guess.

The record high — which equates to 129.9ºF, roughly speaking, in New World money — was registered at 3.41pm, confirming my theory (anecdotal, but scientifically unproven) that late afternoon is the hottest time of day, not high noon, regardless of how high in the sky the sun might be at any given time.

The official world record, according to the World Meteorological Organization, remains 56.7ºC

(134ºF), also taken at Death Valley, on 10 July 1913.

Private meteorological services, though, have challenged the validity of the 1913 figure. Weather monitoring instruments at the time were not what they are today. 1913, after all, was only a year after the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, and just one year before the outbreak of the First World War. Twitter was not a thing, and neither were GPS tracking devices and smartphones.

More importantly for 2020, the latest temperature record coincides with a scorching heat wave that has burned its way across the entire west coast of North America, especially Southern California — no stranger of late to summer drought and violent, weather-driven firestorms in the peak summer months of August and September. (Little-known fact: September is traditionally the driest, hottest month of the year in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area, ahead of June, July and August. Now you know.)

The ongoing heatwave has sparked numerous fires, one of which news sources local to the area dubbed a “firenado.”

Firenados are rarely recorded. They occur when the hot air from a fire on the ground rises in a tall, tornado-like column and rotates in winds higher off the ground, creating what appears to the outside eye to be a tornado made of fire.

Even in a region already baking from successive summers of fire and record-breaking heat, firenados are uncool.

Villasenõr again, on Twitter, mere hours ago.

“Crossing ‘eavesdropping on my parents while they discuss where they can drive me if the smoke outside gets worse”’ off my 2020 Bingo card.”

If this keeps up, one will no longer be able to see the forest or the trees — quite literally, because there will be no forest or trees to see.

What does this all mean? It seems crazy to have to say this in the year 2020, but one thing it means is that the climate crisis is not a hoax, Chinese or otherwise, and the libtards, bunny huggers and Trump doubters may be onto something after all.

It also means that when Villasenõr, Thunberg and other teenagers around the globe say something needs to be done, and done now, we need to listen. Never mind their future. The future health of the entire planet is at stake.

“In 2018,” Villasenõr posted in a pinned tweet on Aug. 11 of this year, “scientists said we have 12 years to reduce emissions and address catastrophic climate change. Since then we’ve only gone backwards. We can’t wait 4 more yrs to change the course we’re on, we have to do it now.”

And how.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/19/another-two-years-lost-to-climate-inaction-says-greta-thunberg

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COVID-19 and a Greening Planet: Where the Hot Zone Meets the Green Zone

“We have long exceeded our limits; it is time to try something new.”

— Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Project Syndicate

I saw a harbour seal at the lighthouse just the other morning, near where I live. There were hardly any other people around, no container ships, no tankers, no cruise ships lining up to dump thousands of tourists on the local pier. A city of 2 million people was eerily quiet, and the seal splashed around happily, oblivious to any talk of pandemics and economic lockdowns.

One planet, one world, our world. The greening of Planet Earth — one of the unintended, if entirely predictable, side-effects of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic — continues unabated, even as the crisis itself shows no sign of abating. Satellite imaging from NASA and the European Space Agency continues to show pollution on the wane across industrial cities in central China and northern Italy, the areas most affected by the pandemic. And while it will take a lot more than this for the polar ice sheets to recover, early signs are, if not definitive exactly, at least encouraging.

Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg has self-isolated herself for the past two weeks, living in a borrowed apartment at an undisclosed location with her dad Svante, who’s also showing symptoms, but she’s doing fine, she told her followers early Tuesday on Instagram. Viruses take no prisoners, and they make no exceptions.

The Fridays For Future school protests have migrated online, and though they may not be so visible on the nightly news, the climate kids now have a wider reach — the worldwide web — and they have a captive audience, as more countries impose a total lockdown.

If nothing else, the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that human societies are capable of changing behaviour virtually overnight, even as it threatens millions of lives. Donella Meadows, lead author of the 1972 Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth and its follow-up 20 years later, Beyond the Limits, warned at the time that humanity’s future would be defined not by a single crisis but by many separate-yet-related crises, owing to the innate connectivity of the global village.

It isn’t just that today’s pandemics can be spread around the world in little more than 24 hours, owing to airline travel, but rather the wider view of an ever-growing human population depleting the Earth’s resources faster than they can be restored, coupled with our collective failure to live a sustainable lifestyle. It isn’t just burning through natural resources at an unsustainable rate but the constantly growing amounts of plastics, toxins and industrial waste into the Earth’s atmosphere, into the planet’s ground water and into the world’s oceans. Everything is connected. Climate change, biodiversity loss and economic collapse do not recognize national borders — and viruses do not recognize physical borders.

COVID-19 is being likened to a wake-up call to stop exceeding the planet’s limits, if only because scientists can show how deforestation, habitat destruction and extinction events make pandemics more likely.

Deforestation, to cite just one example, drives wild animals closer to human populations, increasing the likelihood that zoonotic viruses

like SARS-CoV-2 will make the cross-species leap from animals to humans. (The prominent science writer David Quammen wrote an entire book about this, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, in 2012.)

Renewable energy — both the idea and the practice — has received a sudden shot in the arm, even as the fossil fuel futures markets have crashed. 

As those satellite images show, fewer people chewing up fewer natural resources — including fossil fuels — has already had a noticeable effect on the air we breathe and the way we live.

Some good can still come from COVID-19. China has vowed to impose a temporary ban on the wildlife animal trade, though only time — and transparency — will tell if he ban is more than just temporary.

This is an issue because COVID-19, as with SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) before it in 2003, has effectively  been traced to China’s so-called “wet markets” – open-air markets where animals are bought live and then slaughtered on the spot for customers. As Project Syndicate’s Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri reported earlier this month, virtually everyone affected by the virus since December has some link to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale wet market in Wuhan, a city of some 11 million people in China’s Hubei province.

“In tropical and subtropical areas of the planet, wet markets sell live mammals, poultry, fish, and reptiles, crammed together and sharing their breath, their blood, and their excrement,” they noted. “In China’s wet markets, many different animals are sold and killed to be eaten: wolf cubs, snakes, turtles, guinea pigs, rats, otters, badgers, and civets.”

Similar markets exist in many Asian countries, including Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines

“Scientists tell us that keeping different animals in close, prolonged proximity with one another and with people creates an unhealthy environment that is the probable source of the mutation that enabled COVID-19 to infect humans,” Singer and Cavalieri added — though, in truth, we probably didn’t need scientists to tell us that. 

Some truths tend to be self-evident, especially when, as NPR’s Jason Beaubien reported, “Live fish in open tubs splash water all over the floor; the countertops of the stalls are red with blood as fish are gutted and filleted right in front of the customers' eyes; live turtles and crustaceans climb over each other in boxes and melting ice adds to the slush on the floor. There’s lots of water, blood, fish scales, and chicken guts.”

Given all that, it’s harder to believe a deadly virus wouldn’t get loose than it is to believe that one did exactly that.

There is room for hope, though, as Jane Goodall keeps reminding us. Throughout human history, tragedies have often led to important changes.

The evidence is there in front of our very eyes — in the form of satellite images — if only we choose to see it.

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Coronavirus’ Unintended Side Effect: Smogocalypse Emissions Fall As Virus Spreads

“This is the first time I have seen such a dramatic drop-off over such a wide area for a specific event.”

— Dr. Fei Liu, NASA Airbone Science Program

The planet needed to catch a break, and it has caught a break — however temporary that break turns out to be. The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and ensuing government edicts in developed countries to ‘social distance’ and ‘self-isolate’ has led to an unexpected side effect. As the normally traffic-clogged streets of Wuhan in China’s Hubei province — and the crowded canals of Venice, for that matter — slow down in the wake of pandemic quarantines, pollution levels have dropped and the brackish water in Venice’s canals has cleared, thanks to the decrease in activity.

Of course, social media being what it is, some reactions have been overheated, with everything from  reports of dolphins cavorting in the newly clear canals (not true) to a fanciful tale about a dozen elephants that invaded a village in China’s Yunan province in celebration and drank 30kg of corn wine, getting stinking drunk in the process and passing out in farmers’ fields. (Sadly, also not true.)

Research from a 2016 study, as cited just this past  week in National Geographic, shows that our need to share emotional, positive posts on social media during moments of crisis follows the same model as the contagion of pandemics — when fake news goes viral, if you will.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-fake-animal-viral-social-media-posts/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=social::src=facebook::cmp=editorial::add=fb20200320animals-coronavirusfakeanimalnews::rid=&sf231736060=1&fbclid=IwAR1rETPYvfWG3uQeZDIhIq93MkLxDhjw2VzkiGf0-x3uy_XKP5m_bkASI34

That said, there are indications, based on hard science, such as the attached heat imaging satellite captures from NASA that show a marked decrease of pollution in central China over an eight-week period — from Jan. 1, 2020 to Feb. 25, roughly over the course of the coronavirus contagion in Wuhan, the city where the pandemic is said to have started, if not originated exactly. (The jury is still out on that question, and involves everything from bats and flying foxes to pangolins and so-called “wet markets,” meat markets where living animals are sold as delicacies.)

CNN International’s Hong Kong bureau reports that the number of “good quality air days” increased by 20% in February over the same period last year, citing figures provided by China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment. (Yes, China has an environment ministry.)

China was at the tip of the spear in taking dramatic  measures to minimize the spread of the virus — measures that are now being repeated across Europe and North America.

Even as the price of oil has crashed, slowed use of burning fossil fuels such as coal has shown carbon emissions to drop by 25% or more across China, this according to the research NGO Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

As China is responsible for 30% of the world’s carbon emissions, that drop is substantial and has had a noticeable effect on the environment, not just locally to Hubei province but across wide swaths of central and southeast Asia.

There is a concern that once the coronavirus threat has passed — if it passes — the world’s efforts will be focused solely on rebooting the economy, which would come at the expense of the environment.

That said, the decline in harmful pollutants comes in direct correlation with government measures requiring more people to work from home, the closure of public facilities and the closure of international borders, which has reduced traffic congestion at the very least.

However brief this period of respite proves to be, it hints at a need to make longer-term changes — more solar power, for example, and less electricity generated by fossil fuels.

At the time of the NASA study, China was the country most seriously affected by coronavirus, since surpassed — in deaths, anyway — by Italy. At the time there were nearly 3,000 deaths across 56 countries. As of writing, there have been 10,500 deaths based on 260,000 cases, 160,000 active and 100,500 closed. The clock is ticking. Business as usual is no longer all that.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51944780

@NASA via Twitter

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Vanessa Nakate and the Fight to Keep Mama Africa Green

“It’s really amazing to see that the numbers are really big in Europe. And I wish that the young generation in Africa would also pick up and fight for their future. Because it’s our future. But I think the problem is that most of them are either not confident enough or they don’t have the knowledge about it. Or their parents can’t let them do it. And some actually fear the government. But I’m really impressed by Europe. I’m seeing on Twitter there are many, many activists. And I really look for activists in Africa, I’ve really been looking.”

— Vanessa Nakate

This one is in praise of Vanessa Nakate.

Who, you ask?

Well, yes, exactly.

Nakate, who prefers to go by her Twitter handle of @Vanessa_Vash, is a 23-year-old climate activist from Uganda. She says, only half-jokingly, that she is the only climate activist from her home country, and while that may not strictly be true, chances are she was the only youth climate activist at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Davos is where the world’s elite, many of them flying in private jets, lecture Greta Thunberg and the other climate kids about how they should study economics before lecturing the rest of the world about what much of the rest of the world already knows.

Two days ago, Nakate posed for a now infamous news photo in Switzerland, alongside fellow youth climate activists Luisa Neubauer, Greta Thunberg, Isabelle Axelsson and Loukina Tille.

The photo, by photographer Markus Schreiber for the Associated Press (AP)) news agency, was not the problem.

The problem was what happened afterwards.

The photo appeared online and in several news zines with Nakate cropped out of the frame.

Admittedly, Nakate was off to one side, and framed by a nondescript building behind her, while the other young climate activists were framed by snow-peaked Swiss mountains in the background.

It was one of those hurried decisions hard-news photo editors have to make all the time, where “Get It First” counts for more than “Get It Right.” (I worked much of my adult life in hard news, and I’ve seen from the inside how it works.)

The optics were bad enough — the young-woman-of-colour is edited out of the frame — but it wouldn’t have mattered so much if the decision hadn’t rattled Nakate to the core.

She made a video, which has since gone viral, in which she said she now understands what the word racism really means.

Worse — yes, the story gets worse — other news agencies, including Reuters, according to an account in, you guessed it, The Guardian, confused Nakate with fellow climate activist Natasha Mwansa, who’s from Zambia.

Africa is vast, as continents go; confusing Zambia with Uganda is a little like confusing Beijing with Tokyo.

Nakate shared another inconvenient truth — that while the industrialized world goes whole-hog on fossil fuels, it’s continents like Africa that bear the brunt of the worst effects of climate change. For now, anyway.

“Africa is the least emitter of carbons,” she said in her video, “but we are the most affected by the climate crisis.”

Residents of Kiribati, the Maldives and other low-lying tropical islands might disagree on that point, but she’s right on the broad strokes.

“You erasing our voices won’t change anything,” she added, sounding eerily like Thunberg on message.

“You erasing our stories won’t change anything.”

Nakate went to Switzerland hoping to shed a light on climate justice; instead, she inadvertently ended up in the harsh glare of the social justice spotlight.

AP scrambled to correct their initial oversight, and sent out a less hurriedly, more thoughtfully cropped version of the photo. In a statement, AP noted that Nakate was cropped out of the photo for compositional reasons, not anything to do with racism.

Photo editors work hurriedly and on-the-fly; there’s never enough time to do anything properly, especially when “Get It First” is the rule of the day. Corporate media organizations have fixed it, too, so that newsrooms are chronically short-staffed and over-worked. It’s perfectly understandable that a news photo might be cropped so that it’s easier to fit on a page, whether that page is a newspaper page or an image on the web.

It’s also true that, on a deeper, more subliminal level, race plays a part. One could argue that the photographer could have asked the five young women to move away from the building, so that he could get all five in the frame with the  mountains in the background, but for all I know he could have been rushed, or they could have been rushed, and he had only a split second to get the photo.

This is why many hard-news photographers make the best nature photographers, because their job demands that they get the image quickly, sometimes in a split second, while it’s  there.

This is also a teachable moment, though, about Nakate herself — who she is, what she’s done, and how hard she’s worked for her cause, and the world’s cause, and how she ended up representing her country.

In an interview last year with the group The Kids Are All Right published on the website Climate Kids — comments from which were extrapolated for an article in The Nation newspaper headlined Uganda’s Young Climate Activists Are Going on Strike, Nakate is pictured in the street in front of Uganda’s parliament, much like her spiritual mentor Thunberg, holding a hand-made sign about the climate, later posted on Twitter.

In some pictures, Nakate, like Thunberg, is sitting on the ground; in others, she’s standing.

The signs share a similar theme: Green love, peace and  continuing the fight against single-use plastic, polythene and pollution.

Nakate, a business major and recent university graduate from the Kampala suburb of Nakawa, explained she’s afraid for the future of her country.

Uganda sits on the equatorial belt of Africa, in a region made green by the bands of year-round rain that extend through the heart of the continent and across coastal West Africa — hence the name “rain forest.”

Like much of equatorial Africa, though, Uganda is feeling the effects of desertification, which manifests itself in drought and higher temperatures, exacerbated by man-made deforestation.

According to a 2016 country report by the group Future Climate for Africa, the total number and frequency of unseasonably hot days in Uganda increased by 20% between 1960 and 2010.

Temperatures are projected to rise a further 0.9 to 3.3 degrees by the 2060s.

Ironically, developing countries like Uganda contribute the least to the fossil-fuel emissions that are accelerating climate  change worldwide, and yet are most vulnerable to its consequences.

Entire regions of Africa have already suffered the widespread loss of farmland and resulting mass starvation, which in turn leads to political and social instability.

Foreign-affairs analysts across the world warn that many of the next wars will be fought over water and dwindling natural resources. 

Nakate has said she wants more people in her home country to know what ’s going on, and why.

Right now, she says, too many of the people she knows don’t know enough about climate change. 

Climate activism is — or rather was — virtually unknown in Africa. Nakate first learned of it when she came across Thunberg’s #FridaysForFuture movement on Twitter.

Most young people in urbanized areas of Africa now connect, communicate and get most of their news from social media.

“When it comes to my friends, most of them support me, but then of course there’re the ones that laugh about it,” Nakate said. “They say, how can I go and just hold a poster — like, how can I do that? But there’s always people who put you down. You just have to stand your ground. My parents, they don’t even know about it. I do it alone.”

Not anymore.

https://climatekids.net/ugandan-business-student-brings-climate-strike-to-central-africa-meet-vanessa-nakate/

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