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Overnight News Digest: 3 years post-wildfire, old growth redwoods spring back to life [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-11-20
Let’s check in with the forest trees, it’s almost like (narrator: it’s exactly like) nature knows what to do with forests. Next up is a report of the first documented non-penetration mating in mammals, which scientists reportedly learned about from unsolicited dick pics videos.
Other news tonight includes
weather worries for most of the non-Pacific U.S. states this week,
another assault on voting rights,
more free covid at-home tests,
African and Caribbean nations to seek formal apologies (for slavery) from European nations,
new news about OpenAI’s deposed leader Sam Altman,
yet another bird species determined to be much smarter than humans expected,
two climate change stories that put responsibility for carbon emissions in perspective, and
as usual, the last few stories bring good news
Another nail in the coffin of even-aged single-species tree planting schemes.
x New research finding -- The largest/tallest trees in Sierra Nevada forests survived the 2012-2016 drought significantly better than expected -- perhaps bc of more developed root systems w/deeper zones of root-accessible water.
https://t.co/XVob0v3qWK — Evan Frost; wildwoods @ bsky.social (@EFrost_Wildwood) November 20, 2023
Implications for forest management under a changing climate Climate change is raising the frequency and intensity of chronic stresses and disturbances, not only causing widespread tree mortality in western USA, but also influencing forest health globally44. Forest restoration strategies primarily focusing on protecting big trees45 may not increase the overall sustainability of forest ecosystems. The heterogeneity and diversity of tree sizes and age groups at the forest-stand level are vital for the sustainability of forest ecosystems, particularly in areas with frequent disturbance and drought stress. Tree species diversity often shows a positive relationship with canopy structural complexity26,34, and the higher hydraulic diversity brought by high tree species diversity improves forest resilience to drought46. Our findings suggest that adopting a forest restoration strategy reestablishing heterogeneity in tree species diversity and canopy structural complexity can enhance forest resilience to extreme droughts47.
More than three years after a wildfire devastated Big Basin Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the massive redwood trees in California’s oldest state park continue to recover with surprising speed. But some wildlife species, particularly salmon and steelhead trout in the park’s streams, and some types of birds, are still struggling and could take many years to bounce back.[...] The best news: The park’s famed old-growth redwoods, some of which tower more than 250 feet and date back more than 1,500 years, are nearly all green again, showing significant amounts of new growth after the wildfire’s flames charred their bark black and for a while gave them a doomed appearance.[...] “Ecologically the park is doing just fine,” said Jon Keeley, a senior scientist at the US Geological Survey and biology professor at UCLA who participated in the symposium, in an interview afterward. “The forest is coming back the way it is adapted to. About 90% of the redwood trees are resprouting.”
You Know About the Birds and the Bees, but Guess What These Bats Do — NYT paywall removed
The NTY story has a video embedded and I removed the paywall so you can check it out. Rumor on BioTwitter is that the researchers were clued in to this novel behavior by “a citizen scientist filming bats in the attic of a church in the Netherlands” who emailed them the videos.
Serotine bats sport abnormally long penises with wide, heart-shaped heads. When erect, the members are around seven times longer than the female’s vagina, and their bulbous heads are seven times wider than the female’s vaginal opening. “We wondered: How does that work? How can they use that for copulation?” Dr. Fasel recalled. What they discovered has overturned an assumption about mammalian reproduction, namely that procreation must always involve penetration. In a study, published Monday in the journal Current Biology, Dr. Fassel and his colleagues presented evidence that serotine bats mate without penetration, making them the first mammals known to do so. Instead of using their penises to penetrate their partners, the scientists found, the male bats use them to push their partner’s tail membrane out of the way so they can align their openings and engage in contact mating, a behavior similar to one found in birds and known as “cloacal kissing.” [...] While this process took less than an hour for most of the couples the researchers observed, one pair went at it for nearly 13 hours.
x OH OH OH but no. Bold of you to assume that is how it went down, but it happened THE OTHER WAY ROUND.
The researchers got an unsolicited email and initially thought the video link was spam before deciding it was way too specific for scammers and clicked 😭 — Josh Luke Davis 🏳️🌈 (@JoshLukeDavis) November 20, 2023 Another round of 4 free covid tests available from NIH and USPS x 2 Major Resources for you this respiratory virus season:
Need Free COVID Treatment?
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https://t.co/DPAlyiy5pq pic.twitter.com/vQ3KXlGRmk — Michael Mina (@michaelmina_lab) November 20, 2023 Large storm to cause Thanksgiving travel trouble in eastern U.S. — wapo It’s going to be an unsettled lead-up to Thanksgiving in much of the eastern United States, as a large, moisture-loaded storm system sweeps across the region. The storm could slow air and ground transportation on Tuesday and Wednesday, two of the busiest travel days of the year. After spawning severe thunderstorms across parts of the South on Monday, the storm will produce a large swath of heavy rain from the Tennessee Valley to the Mid-Atlantic Tuesday into early Wednesday. The storm could also produce some wintry precipitation over parts of the Great Lakes Tuesday and interior portions of the Northeast Tuesday into Wednesday. Vermont, New Hampshire and interior Maine will see the greatest chances for accumulating snowfall. By Thanksgiving Day and into Friday, a new storm system will begin to develop over the northern Rockies, which could bring light amounts of snow from western Montana into Colorado.
Revealed: the huge climate impact of the middle classes — the guardian
I’ve seen this story reported widely today with headlines claiming the world’s wealthiest 10% cause 40 times more carbon emissions than the world’s poorest 10% and accepted this framing thinking Bezos, Swift, Gates, Zuckerberg, etc. The Guardian’s headline seemed like a different story at first, but Bezos et al. are the 1% not the 10%, check out the income level required to be included in the upper 10%.
The richest 10% of people in many countries cause up to 40 times more climate-heating carbon emissions than the poorest 10% of their fellow citizens, according to data obtained by the Guardian. Failing to account for this huge divide when making policies to cut emissions can cause a backlash over the affordability of climate action, experts say. The world’s richest 10% encompasses most of the middle classes in developed countries – anyone paid more than about $40,000 (£32,000) a year. The lavish lifestyles of the very rich – the 1% – attract attention. But the 10% are responsible for half of all global emissions, making them key to ending the climate crisis.
Billionaires are out of touch and much too powerful. The planet is in trouble — by rebecca solnit for The Guardian
Solnit puts the same data in perspective as the richest 1% compared to the poorest 66%.
When you talk about the climate crisis, sooner or later someone is going to say that population is the issue and fret about the sheer number of humans now living on Earth. But population per se is not the problem, because the farmer in Bangladesh or the street vendor in Brazil doesn’t have nearly the impact of the venture capitalist in California or the petroleum oligarchs of Russia and the Middle East. The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%. The rich are bad for the Earth, and the richer they are the bigger their adverse impact (including the impact of money invested in banks, and stocks financing fossil fuels and other forms of climate destruction). In other words, we are not all the same size. Billionaires loom large over our politics and environment in ways that are hard to understand without taking on the shocking scale of their wealth. That impact, both through their climate emissions and their manipulations of politics and public life means they are not at all like the rest of humanity. They are behemoths, and they mostly use their outsize power in ugly ways – both in how much they consume and how much they influence the world’s climate response.
x Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) signs into law gun safety legislation that prohibits individuals convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence from possessing firearms for at least eight years. pic.twitter.com/PYTpD1ee78 — The Recount (@therecount) November 20, 2023
The Next Power Plant Is on the Roof and in the Basement — the new yorker
x In at least one state, the biggest power plant is now composed of batteries in basements and solar panels on roofs, all controllable by the utility.
https://t.co/DHaU3zal0g — Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) November 21, 2023
Green Mountain Power’s former C.E.O., Mary Powell, left three years ago and soon took over Sunrun, which supplies rooftop solar panels and storage batteries for hundreds of thousands of homes nationwide, and serves as a third-party power aggregator for several utilities. “We’re sitting on more than 1.1 gigawatt-hours of installed storage capacities just with our customers now,” she told me recently, much of it in California, where the company is based. From August through October, as a series of heat waves pushed consumption up in that state, Pacific Gas and Electric was buying up to thirty megawatts of power through Sunrun every evening to keep peak demand down in its grid system. Sunrun’s customers who provided the energy got a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars. “We went from contract to operation in six months,” Powell said. “You simply could not get a resource of that size built and operationalized any other way in that time frame.” And, she added, “it’s not just that we can make a more reliable, resilient grid” by drawing on the scattered resources; “We can also make a much more affordable grid,” because being able to use residential power means not having to build big, new power plants to meet peak demand. Taking in that money saved, she added, “We can shave ten billion dollars a year off the price of the country’s power system.”
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