Hard hitting global and local news
Hard hitting global and local news
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This week’s Science Friday had a segment with Lincoln Brower , an entymologist who studies the monarch butterfly. The monarch population is collapsing faster than the Arctic ice cap, with the area of their wintering grounds in Mexico going from 52 acres to less than 3 in twenty years. In Brower’s words “In previous years we had seventeen sites with colonies, this year eight of those sites had zero butterflies, and the rest of them had very few butterflies. Only one of the colonies had significant numbers. My worry is that they are winking out one by one and they may not be able to recover” There are several reasons for this, among them that the Oyamel forest is being thinned which exposes the area under the canopy and makes it harder for the butterflies to shelter from winter frost in the high forest. Monarchs have an absolutely crazy life cycle . Simplified, overwintering butterflies in Mexico (there are also populations in California) leave Mexico in late March and head for Texas, where they feed on milkweed and create a new generation. The new generation is short lived, and starts the migration north to the Great Lakes region and the east coast. They, in turn, lead to two other short lived generation, with the fourth and final one being the one that migrates back to Oyamel and overwinters. You can follow this on Journey North , a science activity for young and old. Monarch larvae are fussy eaters, depending on milkweed the way that pandas depend on bamboo. It is the only thing that they feed on in all stages of their lives. This has made them indirectly vulnerable to GMCs. The introduction of Roundup Ready crops has lead to broadcast spreading of Roundup, which kills everything EXCEPT the Roundup Ready crops, including the milkweed (and also nectar yielding plants which does nasty things for pollinators). This breaks the Monarch’s lifecycle
Exxon must hate your children because their business model depends on drilling for more and more of the fuels that cause climate disruption, even though fossil fuel companies have already discovered significantly more oil, gas and coal than scientists say we can safely burn . They are creating climate chaos every day — and they’re getting rich doing it..
Tweet One of the surprising things is that the sea is not flat, but there are places where sea level is lower than others, rising faster than others or slower. Mostly bunnies just look at the averages, but the money, just as with temperature and precipitation changes is local. Turns out that the northeast US coast, from Cape Hatteras on north up to Maine is the so called Northeast Hot Spot (NEH) and the rate of sea level rise since 1950 or so is three times the global. Sallenger Doran and Howd explore the " Hotspot of accelerated sea level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America ". Turns out it’s not all bad news because In the late twentieth century, sea levels were relatively low along the North American east coast, particularly north of Cape Hatteras8,9
Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves.