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Are Earth’s species really doomed? This study has a hot new take.

by GreggHorgan Posted on February 10, 2020

When it comes to human-driven species slaughters, there’s (new) good news and there’s (old) bad news.

The bad news, as those of you who read that 2019 United Nations biodiversity report remember, is that experts predicted we are on track to wipe out 1 million species as a result of polluting, clearing forests for agricultural purposes, expanding cities and roads, overhunting, overfishing, mucking up water resources, spreading invasive species, and generally microwaving the planet. But take heart! A new paper shows some critters may be more resilient than scientists thought, and we still have a sliver of time to ensure that we don’t wipe out all the Earth’s animals (the bar is set so high these days).

Why the (slightly less awful) adjustment? Past studies on climate-driven extinction and biodiversity loss tended to lump a bunch of different factors under the climate change umbrella. But this paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, parsed some of the factors driving extinction in order to determine which aspects of climate change have the biggest impacts on species loss.

By looking at 581 sites around the world and 538 species across those sites, researchers found that the best predictor of a local extinction event was an increase in that location’s maximum annual temperature: when the hottest days of the year got hotter. “If it gets too hot, [some species] basically can’t live there anymore,” study co-author John Wiens told Grist. Surprisingly, the average increase in temperature in a given place over the course of a year — what we typically think of when we talk about climate change — didn’t appear to have much to do with extinction events at all. In fact, the researchers found local extinctions were happening more often in places where the mean annual temperature hadn’t increased a lot.

In short, it’s really those record-breaking hot days — the kind that has all of Paris splashing in fountains, or force normally temperate Washington state to open cooling centers — that spell doom for at-risk species.

How that actually plays out depends a lot on what, if anything, humans do to stem the climate crisis. The study found that if the hottest days of the year (the maximum annual temperature) increase 0.5 degrees C, half of the world’s species will go extinct by 2070. If those maximum temperatures increase by 3 degrees C, that is, if we continue to produce emissions business-as-usual, then 95 percent of species will go extinct. “That’s really bad,” Wiens said.

But if humanity can keep a handle on those uncharacteristic heat waves, plants and animals may still have some wiggle room for survival. That’s because a given plant or animal may be able to do something called a “niche shift,” which means the species can change the range of temperatures in which it is able to survive.

That versatility may buy some critters a little time, but experts caution it’s not an excuse for complacency about the climate crisis. “At some point,” Wiens said, “it’s going to get too hot.”

Here’s the good news: if we stick to the only global climate agreement we have — an agreement that aims to keep temperatures from increasing more than 1.5 degrees C. — those species loss numbers could be much, much lower. “We have to talk about the Paris Agreement,” Wiens said. “If we’re able to stick to that, then it might be a loss of only 15 percent or so.”

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Are Earth’s species really doomed? This study has a hot new take.

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From clean energy to racial justice, the Carolinas are tackling environmental challenges.

by OliviaShackell Posted on May 4, 2018

The prevailing wisdom is that U.S. air pollution has been on a steady decline since the 1970s. That’s not exactly the case, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals.

Starting in 2011, progress on cleaning up air pollution stalled — and in some places, smog levels actually increased. The U.S. saw a 7 percent drop in nitrogen oxides between 2005 to 2009, followed by just a 1.7 percent fall from 2011 to 2015.

The EPA had projected a 30 percent decrease in nitrogen oxides between 2010 and 2016. That’s a big difference. Researchers from the U.S., China, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands compared surface and satellite measurements of air pollutants to the EPA’s emissions estimates, and they were surprised by the discrepancies, which indicate that the EPA data paints an unrealistically rosy picture of our air quality.

The research is less clear about why smog hasn’t improved much in recent years. It could be that we’re past the point of seeing dramatic change after landmark policy changes like the Clean Air Act took effect. Diesel trucks and industry pollution are likely culprits, too.

What’s cause for more alarm are two factors making it even harder to tackle air pollution: the Trump administration and climate change.

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From clean energy to racial justice, the Carolinas are tackling environmental challenges.

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What would actually happen if we stopped eating so much meat?

by JarrodBevan29 Posted on March 23, 2016

What would actually happen if we stopped eating so much meat?

By on 23 Mar 2016commentsShare

If you follow the news about food, you’re no doubt aware that there’s a lot of concern over the impact of eating and raising meat, on both human health and the planet. A new study provides more to chew on: It suggests that if we halved our meat consumption by 2050, we could make huge emissions cuts and save millions of lives.

The Oxford University researchers who published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences don’t expect the whole world to suddenly switch to vegenaise. But they wanted to explore possible environmental and human health outcomes from different diets. So they started by assuming that more people in developing countries would be eating like meat-loving Americans — a logical assumption, since that’s the way the world is headed — then looked at what would happen if we somehow cut that projected meat consumption by half by the middle of this century.

Their conclusion: The world could cut greenhouse gas emissions from food (which currently make up a quarter of the total) by 29 percent, and save 5.1 million lives per year through reduced heart disease, cancer, stroke, and other illnesses associated with meat consumption.

Of course, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of diet advice: There are places where livestock form an important part of the ecosystem, and where people are making real efforts to raise more sustainable meat. But for those of us with abundant food choices, this study provides more evidence that less meat makes more sense.

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These species survived the last ice age but couldn’t survive people

by KristanTwp Posted on October 20, 2015

These species survived the last ice age but couldn’t survive people

By on 20 Oct 2015commentsShare

Screw Myers and Briggs. I’ve got a new personality test for you.

Read the following statement and choose the response that most accurately depicts how it makes you feel:

Statement: Ten thousand years ago, 22 species of birds, reptiles, and mammals on the Bahamian island of Abaco miraculously survived the rising seas and shifting climate at the end of the last ice age. Then, 1,000 years ago, humans showed up and took them out like trash on pick-up day.

Responses: A) Damn right! Humans are and forever will be the masters of this planet. B) Humans are everything that’s wrong with this world, and the sooner we die off, the better. C) Interesting … I wonder why this happened and what it means for species now dealing with both humans and climate change.

Now, based on the Psych 101 class that I took in college, here are your results: If you answered A, then you’re a psychopath; if you answered B, then you’re not helping; and if you answered C, then congratulations! You’re thinking like a scientist.

In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Florida researchers report that out of 100 species analyzed from fossils found in a flooded cave on Great Abaco Island, 17 bird species went extinct around the end of the last ice age, while 22 bird, reptile, and mammal species survived, only to succumb to humans a few thousand years later.

Here’s more from a University of Florida press release:

For species that were lost at the end of the ice age, climate change, habitat change and rising seas, with resulting smaller islands, may have caused their populations to become too small to remain genetically viable, resulting in inbreeding, (lead author Dave) Steadman said. A January 2015 study co-authored by Steadman found the Caribbean’s first humans depleted species as small as bats on Abaco. The new study shows several other species that endured until human arrival were lost to activities such as hunting and starting wildfires, he said.

The researchers plan to go back to the island later this year to study more fossils and get a broader picture of who died of what and why, according to the press release.

“What we see today is just a small snapshot of how species have existed for millions of years,” Steadman said. “The species that existed on Abaco up until people arrived were survivors. They withstood a variety of environmental changes, but some could not adapt quickly or drastically enough to what happened when people showed up.

“So, there must be different mechanisms driving these two types of extinctions. What is it about people that so many island species could not adapt to? That’s what we want to find out.”

What is it about people? I ask myself that same question every day on my way to work. Does that make me a sociopath? Who knows — I’ve only taken Psych 101. Either way, hit me up when you find the answer, Steadman.

Source:

Ancient fossils reveal humans were greater threat than climate change to Caribbean wildlife

, University of Florida.

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These species survived the last ice age but couldn’t survive people

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STUDY: Economic Hardship Makes People More Racially Biased

by HattieSpellman Posted on June 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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The economic collapse of the late 2000s hurt most Americans—but not equally. In fact, according to a 2011 Pew study (visualized above), while median household wealth dropped by 16 percent for white Americans, it dropped a stunning 53 percent for African-Americans.

What accounts for this dramatic disparity? Traditional explanations tend to focus on structural economic factors, such as the fact that African American families had a higher proportion of their total wealth tied up in the vulnerable housing market, and that they were targeted by predatory lenders. But according to a new paper just out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that may not be the full explanation. It looks as though a more subtle form of racial bias may have played a role as well—thanks to psychological factors that, in a recession, tend make those biases worse.

The new study is by Amy Krosch and David Amodio of New York University. Amodio in particular has extensively studied what are called “implicit” racial biases: Uncontrolled prejudices that manifest themselves in our split-second reactions to images or in other cognitive tests. According to one estimate, for instance, 75 percent of whites harbor these subtle, subconscious biases in favor of other whites, and against blacks.

The study adds a new twist to this large and well established literature on unconscious biases. It finds that when people are made to think about economic scarcity—as they inevitably are during a stressful recession—their subconscious perceptions of race change as well. In particular, they are more likely to internally visualize African American faces as being darker in color and more “stereotypically black”—perceptions related, in prior research, to the expression of higher levels of discrimination. The study even found that when asked to divvy up money between two people, white study participants allocated less money to an individual who was perceived as being more stereotypically black.

What might that mean in the real world? Racial biases, heightened by the downturn, might have filtered into “hiring or firing decisions, or decisions about home ownership loans, dealing with foreclosure, or other things that came out of the recession,” Amodio speculates.

The new study consists of four separate experiments, which bulwark this central conclusion using a variety of methodologies. In one of them, white study participants were asked to play a money allocation game. In some cases, they were told that it was possible to distribute up to $100 to a partner; in others, they were told that it was only possible to distribute up to $10. Either way, the participants were ultimately given the same amount of money—$10—to distribute. Thus, the scenario in which that $10 looked like only a small slice of the available pie (just 1/10 of the possible total) created perceptions of scarce resources. (The two scenarios were pretested on a different group of subjects to confirm that having only $10 out of a possible $100 to distribute made individuals feel that resources were scarce. It did.)

Afterwards, the research subjects were asked to looked at a series of images of paired faces. All of the images were actually based on the same original composite image, a mixed-race “morph” created from 100 black and 100 white faces, and then randomly degraded in quality by different patterns of visual noise. Here’s a helpful visualization, from the study, of how the process of creating the images worked:

Krosch and Amodio, “Economic scarcity alters the perception of race,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014. David Amodio

Individuals were then asked to pick which version of the face was “black.”

“We let them choose which faces most accurately matched the image of a black person in their minds, from a range of subtly different face images across hundreds of trials,” says Amodio. The subjects’ choices were then all combined together to make two new composite images: One of the research participants’ perceptions of a black person under conditions of scarcity, and one of their perceptions under control conditions. This was the result:

Economic conditions affected how study participants perceived race. David Amodio.

Sure enough, in the “scarcity” experimental scenario, research subjects collectively produced a very different picture of what they thought that a black person looks like. Their version was judged, by independent observers, to be both darker in skin color, and also more “stereotypically black.”

“Together, our results provide strong converging evidence for the role of perceptual bias as a mechanism through which economic scarcity enhances discrimination and contributes to racial disparities,” the authors wrote.

That conclusion is underscored by the final experiment of the paper. In it, a new group of white research subjects were shown the two images above, and asked to divide $15 dollars between the fictional people pictured in them (in whole dollars; thus, giving each $7.50 was not a possible option). In this scenario, people generally tried to be relatively egalitarian, but they could not divide the money 100 percent evenly. At best, somebody had to get $8, and somebody had to get $7. Sure enough, the research subjects ultimately gave the person with the lighter colored, less “stereotypical” face more money.

We already knew, based on a large body of science, that subconscious racial biases filter into our behavior in innumerable ways. The new research presents striking evidence that in times when we’re all facing hardship, it can be even worse.

We recently interviewed David Amodio about the emerging science of prejudice on the Inquiring Minds podcast; you can stream below:

Link:

STUDY: Economic Hardship Makes People More Racially Biased

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These are dark days for the Arctic — literally

by VivianOcasio Posted on February 19, 2014

These are dark days for the Arctic — literally

By

Sarah Sonsthagen / U.S. Geological Survey

Things are getting gloomy up north, where the Arctic region is losing its albedo.

No, not libido — this isn’t a problem that can be fixed with ice-blue pills and adventurous nature videos. Albedo. It’s a scientific term that refers to the amount of light that the surface of the planet reflects back into space. Reflecting light away from the Earth helps keep things cool, so the loss of Arctic albedo is a major problem.

And new research has concluded that the problem is an even greater one than scientists had anticipated.

Researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography used satellite measurements to discover that the region is darker than it was in the halcyon days of the late ’70s. Back then, Arctic temperatures were nearly 4 degrees F cooler on average and reflective summertime ice covered 40 percent more of the ocean than it does now. And back then, 52 percent of the sun’s rays bounced off the Arctic’s surface, while 48 percent were absorbed. By 2011, those figures had reversed — 48 percent of sunlight was being reflected away and 52 percent was being absorbed.

The drooping albedo is a consequence of climate change. And the region’s changing complexion is also accelerating the rate at which the world is warming. According to the scientists’ calculations, published in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the amount of extra energy accumulating on Earth because of declining Arctic albedo is equivalent to about a quarter of the amount of extra energy trapped here during the same period by the rise in carbon dioxide levels.

“We’re not really analyzing the subsequent increase in temperature,” Ian Eisenman, one of the authors of the paper, told Grist. “But that is an expected consequence of the increased absorption of solar energy.”

It’s not just melting snow that’s causing the top end of the Earth to darken. Eisenman said the influence of soot and other pollution settling on the snow and ice may also be important.


Source
Observational determination of albedo decrease caused by vanishing Arctic sea ice, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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These are dark days for the Arctic — literally

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