The Fool Environmentalist Notes

The Fool Environmentalist

[detective profile]

The following articles should be read with utmost care. Some of them are naughty in important senses, usually one can pick them out for their lame fearmongering character. The fact many authors are unaware or unconscious of their unseemingly blatter should not be much relevant. Sometimes specific knowledge repertoirs may be required to not fall victim of their tactics.

Beware of conservationism

Think about dynamic structures and how their components are never truly in equilibrium. Systems with more than two variables are called complex systems. I reckon that is much better for us to think about integration with our environment.

Equilibrium may seem attractive at first, but further investigation will prove that after a rise, equilibrium, climax or plateau may mean trend reversal and decline. Equilibrium is worse than a continuous rise, only better than decline. Equilibrium is very monotonous and more alike mineral matter.

Cautela com conservacionismo

Pense sobre estruturas dinâmicas e como seus componentes nunca estão realmente em equilíbrio. Sistemas com mais de duas variáveis são sistemas complexos. Acredito ser melhor pensarmos em integração com nosso meio ambiente. A expressão equilíbrio pode soar atraente no primeiro momento porém não resiste ao escrutínio maior. Equilíbrio, clímax ou platô podem ser um sinal de reversão de tendência e próxima queda.

Aqui no Brasil, perdemos muito espaço no mercado de trabalho para os engenheiros agrícolas, florestais, gestores de águas, veterinários e biomédicos. Não podemos continuar com o dogma da conservação a todo custo sem entendermos que é necessário o gerenciamento dos recursos para podermos continuar crescendo de forma saudável. Acho que os biólogos deveriam entender melhor a respeito de ciclos naturais para podermos promover a riqueza da população humana, assim como acalmá-la, pois o medo enfraquece o homem. Quando a população tiver garantida a sua subsistência e saúde, poderá pensar mais sobre outros problemas e se dedicar a eles.

O grande problema ambiental brasileiro é a falta de saneamento básico e a pobreza de sua população.

The Bad and the Ugly

Nasty papers and reality distortion.

Climate Summit 2021
That is such a shame powerful politics meet sometimes to discuss global warming and how humans are doing harm to the Planet. Not.
They shuld get together and try to vanquish hunger, disease and poverty. As these events go (and there is COP26 coming this year..), they are ridiculous.. There are really serious problems humans are facing and politics are blind to them.
Bringing the chill of the cosmos to a warming planet
That is a little outrageous such misleading news built upon a private company (SkyCool) and a patented technology from 2014. The material, made of seven layers of silicon dioxide and hafnium oxide on top of a thin layer of silver, and is meant to be applied on top of already existing cooling systems, reducing system spending of electricity. Is not so cheap: [the tester] would only owe SkyCool Systems the savings from his electricity bill for the first two years and [it saved an experimental client] $3,000 over the course of the summer, but also requires addition of a coupled water pumping system. Where are they going to extract those minerals to make the films from? I dare say the generation process of this nanotech film consumes a lot of electricity, too, so I wonder how long before implementation of this system will actually start saving electricity.. There is something worse on top of it all, it seems there is much broken physics for merchandising. While system optimisations are welcome, the energy reflected from these super mirrors will be absorbed by atmosphere solid particles much before reaching stratosphere, so that is not going to help cool the planet, however they may think and be literal in the world now cools off with the help of more than 3.5 billion refrigerators and air conditioners. See also (a) or (copy).
Ice shelves propping up two major Antarctic glaciers are breaking up and it could have major consequences for sea level rise
The systems depicted in the paper are highly unstable and have a high coefficient of roughness, and as such could only be well represented stacking multiple snapshots of the system within a time range. Anyway, much of the photos and videos span Summer time periods in the Southern Hemisphere. The paper is actually published at end of Winter in SH (end of Summer in NH), and much data was collected within the previous Antarctic Summer! Accumulation of new ice upstreams will push older ice, that is actually called Calving, you can see very sharp ice slobs. Glacier shrinkage happens when ice melts from the borders upwards, so you cannot really have calving at the same time as melting.
See also (a)
Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse
One problem here is their sample size, animals can move a lot and be hard to find, they may actually be hiding. I will comment more on this later, for now, see a video of similar subject (in English): WWF 2018 Living Planet Report Rebuttal
Para um vídeo de assunto similar em Português, veja: Relatório da WWF -- Índice do Planeta Vivo de 2018
750 million genetically engineered mosquitoes approved for release in Florida Keys
I researched about Oxitec and their chimeric mosquitoes last year a lot. About 5% of the synthetic mosquitoes released are males because Oxitec has not got a technique to remove all males. Plus, their chimeric mosquitoes are a blend of various exotic strains, so they are effectively spreading new genetic mobile elements (transposons) to environments where otherwise there was only endogenous strains. Remember Ian Malcolmn: Life finds a way.
Microplastic particles now discoverable in human organs
The title is misleading. The researches grew human tissue in petri discs and added microplastics. Then, they devloped a technique which can detect the plastic they added in the first place and are advertising that.
Saco de lixo que inativa coronavírus é aprovado em teste da Unicamp
Aqui é só uma notícia sensacionalista, o vírus só poderia ser inativado por contato com o plástico, sendo que é muito mais provável um vírus sofrer dessacação ou oxidação, pelo oxigênio ou luz forte do que pelo contato com o plástico.
PCC officials admit mistake over melting Himalayan glaciers
If only they all would apologise and get things correctly for the benefit of us all..
Global Biodiversity Outlook 5, Plant Conservation Report 2020 and Local Biodiversity Outlooks 2 from the Convention on Biological Diversity.
I will try and comment a litlte more later but these report goals seem much more a wishlist, how feasible are they in reality? There is a lot of beautiful words and images. I fear much is vague, unpractical.
What’s causing climate change, in 10 charts
None of the charts plots Nature's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which would make it difficult to actually see human contribution to CO2, because it is very small, comparatively. Nature emmits at a rate of roughly 600-900 GTons of CO2/year, while humans contribute with ~40 GTons/year..
See (a), (b). Also, you can look for natural carbon cycle in academic books; hopefully, where they can ackowledge proportions adequately. If you need more references, I can help.

The Good

Remarkable papers for their temperance or relevance. I may add some neutral papers here, too.

Rare fish set for return to River Severn breeding grounds, but really the title should be Unlocking Upstream Barriers for Fish and Hoping for Their Population Increase in Future Years
Aside from the bad title, which is not clear and is actually merely the author objective of the experiment itself BBC talks about in its article, this effort seems like a worthy attempt to circumvent upstream barriers for migration of some fish species of River Twaite. However it is anyone's wonder which species this action will reallly benefit, as the river ecosystem has dynamically stabilised over the decades already..
The said conservation project seems to be this one.
I am worried this may develop into a series of unfortunate events such as those of conservation history of Yellowstone Park, which records still grow with bad or neutral experiments today.
Fear-Based Appeals Effective at Changing Attitudes, Behaviors After All
This is very useful information about fear in news.
The good news on climate
A very nice article about many points about climate stuff.
It's the product not the polymer: Rethinking plastic pollution
See also Science Daily article on that paper. Much papers are written to say micro plastics are everywhere but adverse effects other than their presence is not well known. Far too many assumptions are made about plastic danger and damage to the environment, specially plastic fibers, without almost any factual support. Most plastic types are chemically inert and should not present further problems other than their physical property of dimension and scale. At least the authors recognise that climate change may not have to do with plastics in the following passage: 5. Capitalize on public interest and concern for the problems associated with plastic waste to raise the profile of greater, if less tangible, environmental concerns such as climate change and biodiversity loss in which they mean to using plastic controversy in favor of awareness of other more tangible and bigger problems. This is probably a neutral paper because I cannot agree with some of their statements about higher-level implications for the environment, but mostly this an effort of a step in the right direction for science.
Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born
Population stagnation is not good, what may be lurking after is decline. We can probably grow a large world population ever healthier if we can can lay hands on cheap energy. A sociologist friend of mine alerted me of this upcoming fenomenon: Europe is going to become black. Africans will be able to enjoy what richess was stolen from them. The comments section has about 2200 comments and still most want a shrikling population! Look at how badly some websites can interpret this same data. If we have got a larger population and give them the minimum necessary health, we may have thousands more very intelligent people who can deal with any nasty problem we face, how else will we produce more geniuses?
Oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance on a millennial timescale, Zharkova VV, 2019
Mrs Zharkova is a solar physicist. She has got one lecture on youtube and I find very good. That is a shame how her paper was retracted by the Editors of Nature. I found their retraction note a lame excuse to try and censor her paper! Fortunately we have got links from another source; Mrs Zharkova has given alternative links to her paper in the comments section of her retracted paper at Nature's website, too, and she will publish the paper again soon.
Her paper is actually good, she describes the Sun Inertial Motion(SIM). As the sun orbits the mass centre of the solar system (barycenter) a little independently of Earth's and other planets barycenter orbits, the star and the planets come closer together and farther apart every amount of years. Currently, the sun comes closer to Earth at a rate of 0.00025 au per 100 years until 2700. This will warm the baseline Earth temperature in 0.5º C every 100 years, but other forcings will be stacked on top, in such a way the current grand solar minimum, which started in 2019, will last until 2055 and is going to be similar to the Maunder Minimum.
See also (a), (b) and (c).

Quotes

Attention people. The earth is tilted on its axis, and it WOBBLES !!!!! Earth's orbit around the sun is not circular, it is somewhat elliptical. And the ellipse varies !!!! No joke !!!! All of that makes for many variations of every variable to weather !!!! Got that ?
--dks13827
WE ARE NOT TO BLAME! According to the Vostok Ice Core Records, CO2 level changes have followed Earth's overall temperature changes at an 800 year lag for the last 800,000 years. That means that our current CO2 levels are the result of Earth's overall temperature 800 years ago, which coincides with the Medieval Warm Period (950-1250 CE). World leaders have convinced their dependents that this works in the reverse order, relatively quickly, and that we are to blame, so that they can tax us out of a false shared guilt in order to be able to afford to "fight" climate change, an unstoppable natural cycle. The warming pattern follows the increase and decrease in sun spots, a 22-year-cycle. What we may need are commercial solutions that will aid in the survival of the human race throughout the coming centuries.
Click to expand the source list
  • Barnola, J.-M., D. Raynaud, A. Neftel, and H. Oeschger. 1983. Comparison of CO2 measurements by two laboratories on air from bubbles in polar ice. Nature 303:410-13.
  • Barnola, J.-M., D. Raynaud, Y.S. Korotkevich, and C. Lorius. 1987. Vostok ice core provides 160,000-year record of atmospheric CO2. Nature 329:408-14.
  • Barnola, J.-M., P. Pimienta, D. Raynaud, and Y.S. Korotkevich. 1991. CO2-climate relationship as deduced from the Vostok ice core: A re-examination based on new measurements and on a re-evaluation of the air dating. Tellus 43(B):83- 90.
  • Delmas, R.J., J.-M. Ascencio, and M. Legrand. 1980. Polar ice evidence that atmospheric CO2 20,000 yr BP was 50% of present. Nature 284:155-57.
  • Jouzel, J., C. Lorius, J.R. Petit, C. Genthon, N.I. Barkov, V.M. Kotlyakov, and V.M. Petrov. 1987. Vostok ice core: A continuous isotopic temperature record over the last climatic cycle (160,000 years). Nature 329:403-8.
  • Lorius, C., J. Jouzel, C. Ritz, L. Merlivat, N.I. Barkov, Y.S. Korotkevich, and V.M. Kotlyakov. 1985. A 150,000-year climatic record from Antarctic ice. Nature 316:591-96.
  • Neftel, A., H. Oeschger, J. Schwander, B. Stauffer, and R. Zumbrunn. 1982. Ice core measurements give atmospheric CO2 content during the past 40,000 yr. Nature 295:220-23.
  • Pepin, L., D. Raynaud, J.-M. Barnola, and M.F. Loutre. 2001. Hemispheric roles of climate forcings during glacial-interglacial transitions as deduced from the Vostok record and LLN-2D model experiments. Journal of Geophysical Research 106 (D23): 31,885-31,892.
  • Petit, J.R., I. Basile, A. Leruyuet, D. Raynaud, C. Lorius, J. Jouzel, M. Stievenard, V.Y. Lipenkov, N.I. Barkov, B.B. Kudryashov, M. Davis, E. Saltzman, and V. Kotlyakov. 1997. Four climate cycles in Vostok ice core. Nature 387: 359-360.
  • Petit, J.R., J. Jouzel, D. Raynaud, N.I. Barkov, J.-M. Barnola, I. Basile, M. Benders, J. Chappellaz, M. Davis, G. Delayque, M. Delmotte, V.M. Kotlyakov, M. Legrand, V.Y. Lipenkov, C. Lorius, L. Pépin, C. Ritz, E. Saltzman, and M. Stievenard. 1999. Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica. Nature 399: 429-436.
  • Raynaud, D., and J.-M. Barnola. 1985. An Antarctic ice core reveals atmospheric CO2 variations over the past few centuries. Nature 315:309-11.
--Jason Melton
Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
--Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials