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Overnight Science News: Climate collapse is backyard news, can the media keep up? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-06-22  

Tonight’s science news this first week of summer 2024 leads off with the weather, repeating headlines from recent summers—dangerous heat, massive hail, exceptional floods. Following that,

astronomy has surprises (as usual),

Hawaii uses a new strategy to save endangered bird species,

H5N1 (avian) flu is expanding,

an alarming ability of leeches discovered,

communication by marine cyanobacteria,

DARPA has figured out how to switch a drug on/off in our bodies,

and more.

Plus, a poll at the end asks How are you thinking about humanity’s big climate chaos experiment?

My intro from a July 2023 OND “How to live on a scorched planet. 'It’s not game over. It’s game on'” is perfect for this moment a year later.

When we look back at 2023, will we call it the time when everything changed—when the media, governments, and individuals stared straight into the reality of our warming climate, and all that entails, and said “it’s happening to us/me?” Or will we go through numerous seasons of startled acknowledgement interspersed with seasons of forgetting or ignoring? [...] There is no “new normal” except perhaps change, but even the rate and scope of changes are changing.

Remember last summer? Smoke from wildfires across Canada choked areas far from the flames in 2023.

x Orange skies and smoke from Canada fire expected to linger across parts of North America for days



New York City skyline yesterday and today ⬇️ — BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) June 7, 2023

Fires and smoke wasn’t just in North America and wasn’t just in 2023 as this news from 2022 illustrates.

x The world is on fire. Temperatures in India & Pakistan have reached upwards of 50 degrees Celsius (122 F), while fires rage across parts of Europe. Thousands of people have evacuated France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, & Greece. THIS is a #ClimateEmergency https://t.co/9U74KyYI0K — Rainforest Action Network (RAN) 🌴 (@RAN) July 23, 2022

What has the media learned from several summers of climate change fueled weather catastrophes? The Guardian, apparently moving on to acceptance (momentarily?), relates extreme heat in India, Saudi Arabia, and Canada, and mentions heavy rains and large hail in Europe in “Weather tracker: Heatwaves have arrived in the northern hemisphere.”

The New York Times addresses climate change in a roundup of current heat wave woes (“Well Beyond the U.S., Heat and Climate Extremes Are Hitting Billions”), but also focuses on less apocalyptic heat-related feature stories (“These Common Medications Can Make Heat Waves More Dangerous”) and relative minutia (“Smartphones That Get Too Darn Hot”) without mentioning climate change.

The WaPo, however, treats climate change as worthy of specific mention in a headline: “Billions of people just felt the deadly intensity of climate-fueled heat waves.”

The scorching heat across five continents in recent days, scientists say, provided yet more proof that human-caused global warming has so raised the baseline of normal temperatures that once-unthinkable catastrophes have become commonplace. [...] What is obvious: The way humans have caused baseline temperatures to surge. “We’ve got the highest greenhouse gas concentrations in the last 3 million years. Carbon dioxide traps heat, so the temperature of the planet is rising,” said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It’s real simple physics.”

WaPo explains the climate change denouncement with specifics. For some 80 percent of the world’s population — 6.5 billion people — the heat of the past week was twice as likely to occur because humans started burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, according to data provided to The Washington Post by the nonprofit Climate Central. Nearly half that number experienced what Climate Central considers “exceptional heat” — conditions that would have been rare or even impossible in a world without climate change. “What is really standing out is how many [heat waves] are happening at the same time,” said Andrew Pershing, the nonprofit’s director of climate science. x Extreme rainfall (and snowmelt) leads to extreme consequences.



Swiss Alps yesterday pic.twitter.com/OgLgVCBJJJ — Dave Throup (@DaveThroup) June 22, 2024 Of course, not all extreme weather events are due to climate change, we’ve had bad floods, wildfires, and heat waves before, as people on social media are shouting in anger over the present heat dome that didn’t fry them (so far). However, climate change has intensified many of these emergencies, made them more frequent, and caused them to occur simultaneously in widely separated regions of the world. We must adapt everything to accommodate the higher temps, violent storms with high winds, heavy rainfall, and massive hail, severe droughts, massive wildfires, and incursion of deadly smoke into new areas. Emergency management experts and climate change activists are pushing for official acknowledgement that these heat waves are different and dangerous, but they see the problem differently. Why isn’t extreme heat considered a disaster in the U.S.? — npr FEMA responds to natural disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes — disasters with major and obvious damage to physical infrastructure. But the agency has not historically responded to extreme heat. Now, a coalition of environmental nonprofits, labor unions, health professionals and environmental justice groups is asking the agency to change that. In a petition filed Monday, the coalition asks FEMA to add extreme heat and wildfire smoke to the list of disasters to which they respond. “Hurricanes are terrible. Earthquakes are terrible. But actually, heat is the number one killer now of the climate emergency of any weather-related event,” says Jean Su, director of the Energy Justice Program at the Center for Biological Diversity and a leader of the new petition. x We are in desperate need of emergency management reform but instead of helping us do that climate organizations are wasting everyone’s time and their political capital on completely ineffective campaigns like this!! This is the shit that makes me pessimistic about the future. — Dr. Samantha Montano (@SamLMontano) June 18, 2024 The entire premise of this petition is wrong. Hazards aren’t classified as “major disasters” — specific events are… Declarations aren’t based on hazard type, they are based on impacts and needs (and sometimes a bit of politics). We are in desperate need of emergency management reform but instead of helping us do that climate organizations are wasting everyone’s time and their political capital on completely ineffective campaigns like this!! This is the shit that makes me pessimistic about the future. Public school teachers in Chicago center climate change in their union contract demands: Climate Action Is a Labor Issue for This Teachers Union’s Leaders (SciAm). The Chicago Teachers Union started contract negotiations last week with two unprecedented moves: It opened bargaining to the public and began talks by focusing on climate action. Stacy Davis Gates, president of the CTU since 2022, sees both of those strategies as pillars of winning a better contract for teachers. Climate impacts like extreme heat are becoming a classroom issue. And they’re an even bigger issue for the surrounding community — the same people whose support the CTU needs to win a better contract. x Last evening’s flash flood in Castle Valley, Utah. In ten minutes, the violence and column of the rain was twice the annual rainfall in June. Massive amounts of water with wind, first time rivers flowing through the valley finding their own paths cutting into the sage flats and… pic.twitter.com/vNduDvhzqZ — TerryTempestWilliams (@TempestWilliams) June 22, 2024 Terry Tempest Williams Last evening’s flash flood in Castle Valley, Utah. In ten minutes, the violence and column of the rain was twice the annual rainfall in June. Massive amounts of water with wind, first time rivers flowing through the valley finding their own paths cutting into the sage flats and grasslands. Waterfalls and pour offs collapsing embankments and walls of arroyos. The world is being redistributed, re constructed, and reimagined. A terrible beauty watching your home ground race past you — Erosion before our eyes. Climate collapse is backyard and front yard news — in the midst of the watchful eye of the a full Moon. Again this year, climate change intensified summer weather is big news, but as I wrote in 2022, There's no 'new normal' - that implies a stability that doesn't exist. On the other hand, I see evidence of a dawning awareness. x ‘This ain’t the same sun’: Extreme heat is changing summertime for kids in the South https://t.co/9aw8H9YwKf @WWNO — Dr. Solomon David (@SolomonRDavid) June 22, 2024

How does heat kill? It confuses your brain. It shuts down your organs. It overworks your heart. — phys.org Heat kills in three main ways, Jay said. The usual first suspect is heatstroke—critical increases in body temperature that cause organs to fail. When inner body temperature gets too hot, the body redirects blood flow toward the skin to cool down, Jay said. But that diverts blood and oxygen away from the stomach and intestines, and can allow toxins normally confined to the gut area to leak into circulation. But the bigger killer in heat is the strain on the heart, especially for people who have cardiovascular disease, Jay said. It again starts with blood rushing to the skin to help shed core heat. That causes blood pressure to drop. The heart responds by trying to pump more blood to keep you from passing out. "You're asking the heart to do a lot more work than it usually has to do," Jay said. For someone with a heart condition "it's like running for a bus with dodgy (hamstring). Something's going to give." The third main way is dangerous dehydration. As people sweat, they lose liquids to a point that can severely stress kidneys, Jay said. x A common response to mention of renewables is a denunciation of mining for battery materials by people who don't seem to notice that fossil fuel is also mined/extracted -- on a scale that dwarfs everything else. This pits them against the energy transition.... pic.twitter.com/XeX7QMSzOg — Rebecca Solnit (@RebeccaSolnit) June 21, 2024 Piping Up at the Gates of Dawn (nyt paywall removed)

Astronomers have found the earliest and most distant galaxy yet

Last month, an international team doing research as the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, or JADES, said it had identified the earliest, most distant galaxy yet found — a banana-shaped blob of color measuring 1,600 light-years across. It was already shining with intense starlight when the universe was in its relative infancy, at only 290 million years old, the astronomers said. The new galaxy, known as JADES-GS-z14-0, is one of a string of Webb discoveries, including early galaxies and black holes, that challenge conventional models of how the first stars and galaxies formed. “This discovery proves that luminous galaxies were already in place 300 million years after the Big Bang and are more common than what was expected,” the researchers wrote in a paper posted to an online physics archive.

Astronomers detect sudden awakening of black hole 1m times mass of sun — the guardian

The article includes an animation of a newly awakened black hole.

A black hole that’s more than one million times more massive than the Sun has suddenly woken up at the centre of a distant galaxy, dubbed SDSS1335+0728. The stirring black hole might be the culprit behind the galaxy’s unusual brightening, which has had scientists scratching their heads since 2019. The surge in light output is probably due to the presence of an active galactic nucleus, which occurs when a black hole begins chewing through the material that surrounds it. “It’s the first time we’ve seen this in real time,” says astronomer Paula Sánchez Sáez.

Conservationists have launched an ambitious project to slow the spread by mosquitoes of avian malaria in Hawaii. They have so far released 10 million male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes infected with a strain of Wolbachia, a naturally occurring bacterium that disrupts mozzie reproduction. The region’s birds, which have no natural immunity to avian malaria, can be killed with a single bite from an infected mosquito — and climate change is helping the invasive insects spread. The Wolbachia intervention is controversial, pricey and must be relentlessly repeated to have any hope of working. Meanwhile, wildlife centres are breeding the rarest birds in mosquito-netted enclosures in the hope that they can someday be released into the wild. “This is the last resort,” says bird conservationist Jennifer Pribble.

Uproar over an ocean alkalinity enhancement pilot project in St. Ives Bay raises an important question: who gets to decide where climate change projects are tested? Wilson Hodges had been researching a Canadian start-up called Planetary Technologies and was concerned about their activities in St. Ives Bay. Like many of her neighbors, she had only learned about the company a few weeks earlier, when an article in The Times detailed how, over several days during the previous fall, Planetary had added a slurry of magnesium hydroxide to the local water company’s sewage pipe and pumped it into the sea off St. Ives Bay. The experiment was meant to test a potential solution to climate change called ocean alkalinity enhancement. By raising the alkalinity of the seawater, Planetary hoped to coax the ocean into absorbing more atmospheric carbon dioxide and slow global warming in the process.

x More mammals positive for highly pathogenic bird flu #H5N1



This is NOT "wait and see" – yet its treated as such



If this was happening in China or any other nation, the US Government & public health agencies would be furious / demanding answershttps://t.co/wDrNJbLMKM — Michael Mina (@michaelmina_lab) June 20, 2024

It’s been nearly three months since the U.S. government announced an outbreak of the bird flu virus on dairy farms. The World Health Organization considers the virus a public health concern because of its potential to cause a pandemic, yet the U.S. has tested only about 45 people across the country. “We’re flying blind,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. With so few tests run, she said, it’s impossible to know how many farmworkers have been infected, or how serious the disease is. A lack of testing means the country might not notice if the virus begins to spread between people — the gateway to another pandemic.

Videos Show That Leeches Can Jump in Pursuit of Blood — nyt paywall removed

The article has a video of a leech questing for blood, coiling his body and then leaping … if you need nightmare material.

There has long been anecdotal evidence of the wormy creatures taking to the air, but videos recorded in Madagascar at last prove the animals’ acrobatics. Land-dwelling leeches can seem like placid creatures. But when they’re on the hunt for blood, look out. An appetite for blood may have provoked acts of startling athleticism, documented in a pair of videos released Thursday by two scientists alongside a study in the journal Biotropica. In each, a brown pillar of flesh and muscle, standing atop a green leaf, waves back and forth on its quest for blood. Then, it coils itself into a comma, bunching up its lower half. Finally, the leech leaps, flying through the air with a kind of wild abandon. [...] Mai Fahmy, currently a postdoctoral researcher at Fordham University and a visiting scientist at the American Museum of Natural History, took the first video in Madagascar in 2017 … Her 10 second clip, taken on a whim, turned out to be the first recorded visual evidence known to science of leeches jumping.

A new study reveals that marine cyanobacteria communicate — science daily

x A new study reveals that marine cyanobacteria communicate



Learn morehttps://t.co/UQxTp0ZgW8



📫🗞️ Join our newsletter today!https://t.co/DM64cAlen7



𝘐𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘦: 𝘊𝘩𝘰𝘬𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘪-𝘚𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘰/𝘴𝘩𝘶𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘤𝘬.𝘤𝘰𝘮 pic.twitter.com/WSArPsRBuo — ScienceDaily (@ScienceDaily) June 15, 2024

A breakthrough study changes the way we understand cyanobacteria, which are essential for the sustenance of life. The study shows that these organisms do not operate in isolation, but rather physically interact through membrane-nanotubes, which function as exchange bridges between cells.

A US military program led by DARPA is modifying the stimulant drug dextroamphetamine so it can be switched on or off in the brain using near-infrared light, avoiding risks like addiction

x A DARPA-led US military program is modifying a stimulant drug so it can be switched on or off in the brain, avoiding risks like addiction – and Air Force pilots can activate it with near-infrared light. https://t.co/PeVSjQqXrw — New Scientist (@newscientist) June 22, 2024

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