Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The modern notion that human CO2 emissions are equivalent to a “deadly poison” may one day be viewed as “the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world.”
The modern notion that human CO2 emissions are equivalent to a “deadly poison” may one day be viewed as “the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world.”
In a new paper published in the Journal of Sustainable Development, Manheimer (2022) summarizes some of the evidence for the lack of correlation between CO2 and temperature in the paleoclimate as he rips apart the claim that humans are driving a changing climate.
About 4000 years ago the limit of Northern Hemisphere tree growth extended 322 km (200 miles) farther north than it does today, as it was much warmer back then.
During Medieval times the Vikings were able to grow barley for centuries. Today Greenland is too cold to grow this crop.
The Romans grew wine grapes in northern Britain, indicating the climate was much warmer than today about 2000 years ago. Wine vineyards cannot flourish at these latitudes today (unless the new “hybrid” grapes, bred to survive in colder climates, are used).
Observing paleo temperature and CO2 concentration charts for the last hundreds of millions of years, it can be affirmed there is “no particular correlation between CO2 and temperature.”
So what? The rate at which the planet is warming now is far higher than at any rate in the last 500,000 years. That is the point you are missing, it is not natural.
Adam Mastroianni has written a marvelous article at his substack, Experimental History, evaluating the history, the function and the misfunction of the peer review process.
For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.
Most of those folks didn’t even realize they were in an experiment. Many of them, including me, weren’t born when the experiment started. If we had noticed what was going on, maybe we would have demanded a basic level of scientific rigor. Maybe nobody objected because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don’t pass muster. They called it “peer review.”
This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church. Scientific journals appeared in the 1600s, but they operated more like magazines or newsletters, and their processes of picking articles ranged from “we print whatever we get” to “the editor asks his friend what he thinks” to “the whole society votes.” Sometimes journals couldn’t get enough papers to publish, so editors had to go around begging their friends to submit manuscripts, or fill the space themselves. Scientific publishing remained a hodgepodge for centuries.
It is an exceptional essay which helps to explain much of what is occurring in “science” and academia.
Here is a list of his section titles and some excerpts.
A WHOLE LOTTA MONEY FOR NOTHIN’
POSTMORTEM
If reviewers were doing their job, we’d hear lots of stories like “Professor Cornelius von Fraud was fired today after trying to submit a fake paper to a scientific journal.” But we never hear stories like that.
PEER REVIEW, WE HARDLY TOOK YE SERIOUSLY
CAN WE FIX IT? NO WE CAN’T
Making peer review harsher would also exacerbate the worst problem of all: just knowing that your ideas won’t count for anything unless peer reviewers like them makes you worse at thinking.
PEER REVIEW IS WORSE THAN NOTHING; OR, WHY IT AIN’T ENOUGH TO SNIFF THE BEEF
Peer review doesn’t work and there’s probably no way to fix it. But a little bit of vetting is better than none at all, right?
I say: no way.
SCIENCE MUST BE FREE
HOORAY WE FAILED
Nobody was in charge of our peer review experiment, which means nobody has the responsibility of saying when it’s over. Seeing no one else, I guess I’ll do it:
After this discussion he explains:
What should we do now? Well, last month I published a paper, by which I mean I uploaded a PDF to the internet. I wrote it in normal language so anyone could understand it. I held nothing back—I even admitted that I forgot why I ran one of the studies. I put jokes in it because nobody could tell me not to. I uploaded all the materials, data, and code where everybody could see them. I figured I’d look like a total dummy and nobody would pay any attention, but at least I was having fun and doing what I thought was right.
Then, before I even told anyone about the paper, thousands of people found it, commented on it, and retweeted it.
This is how fun and genuine science could be! Can't believe there is a paper that I could finish reading at 6:30 am laying in bed – if that helps prove how stunning this work is. Absolutely recommend! https://t.co/eRetO96MID
Total strangers emailed me thoughtful reviews. Tenured professors sent me ideas. NPR asked for an interview. The paper now has more views than the last peer-reviewed paper I published, which was in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And I have a hunch far more people read this new paper all the way to the end, because the final few paragraphs got a lotofcomments in particular. So I dunno, I guess that seems like a good way of doing it?
I have talked a few times about the conferences organised by Westminster Energy, Environment & Transport Forum (WEET). Despite its name, WEET’s conferences almost always seem to be about something to do with the net zero/”carbon” reduction agenda, and precious little to do with the environment.
And so it made a pleasant change to receive an email today telling me about a WEET conference to take place on 25th April 2023 with the title “Next steps for the natural environment in the UK” and the sub-heading “Policy, regulation, implementation and the way forward for ELMs, biodiversity net gain and the UK’s approach”.
On reading the notes about the conference, it was a pleasure to find not a single reference to net zero or climate change and only a single reference to “carbon storage” (in the context of a session about “the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment: development – investment – environmental reforms – addressing air quality, biodiversity, carbon storage, habitat protection, and resilience”.
It is gratifying to see a conference devoted to environmental issues without there being an assumption that concern for the environment and attempts to “deal with” climate change are just two sides of the same coin, when the reality is that they are often in direct conflict.
Environmental Land Management Schemes
In case you’re wondering (I was), ELM is apparently short for Environmental Land Management Scheme. This is another new area for me, and I have an open mind about it.
DEFRA put up a fairly detailed explanation of the plans on its website on 22nd August 2022, and for those interested in this kind of thing, it’s well worth a look. In essence they say “we [of course they mean we the taxpayer] will pay farmers and land managers to enhance the natural environment alongside food production.” This will be done via the Sustainable Farming Incentive:
Through the SFI, farmers will be paid for looking after the natural environment in the course of their farming.
This initial offer will pay farmers for taking care of their soil or assessing the condition of moorland.
In future, we’ll add more actions that farmers can get paid to take.
Perhaps inevitably, at this point net zero and climate change receive a mention, but at least they aren’t high on the list of priorities:
Through Local Nature Recovery, farmers will be able to contribute to important national priorities, including:
reversing the decline in biodiversity
improving water quality
net zero
building the resilience of the environment to climate change
improving air quality
natural flood management
coastal erosion risk mitigation
heritage and access
Reading further, climate change and net zero seem to move up the pecking order. Nevertheless, it doesn’t sound too bad, from an environmentalist’s perspective, albeit there is a mildly worrying lapse into the borderline meaningless language of bureaucrats everywhere:
We will work with farmers and other experts to design the detailed options over the course of this year. In designing options for the scheme, we will take into account:
their potential contribution to the statutory targets we will set under the Environment Act, including our new target to halt the decline in species abundance by 2030, and our Net Zero and climate change adaptation commitments
affordability and value for money for the taxpayer
their coherence with private schemes and markets for climate and environmental outcomes such as carbon offsets, biodiversity net gain, and nutrient credits
their viability as options for farmers and land managers to deliver and for government to manage effectively
Assuming DEFRA is true to its word and there are no hidden catches, farmers should be happy:
There are already around 30,000 farmers in existing schemes and we have reviewed the payment rates and revised them up, on average, by around 30%.
Environmental Improvement Plan
Apparently there is a 25 year plan in place to improve the UK’s environment, and there is a 151 page document to prove it. The introduction starts well, but in short order I start to worry:
By using our land more sustainably and creating new habitats for wildlife, including by planting more trees, we can arrest the decline in native species and improve our biodiversity.
By tackling the scourge of waste plastic we can make our oceans cleaner and healthier. Connecting more people with the environment will promote greater well-being. And by making the most of emerging technologies, we can build a cleaner, greener country and reap the economic rewards of the clean growth revolution.
It’s those “emerging technologies” that have the potential to be a concern.
If they include wind farms, then we have an immediate contradiction, since filling our oceans with them, whatever else it does, won’t make them cleaner and healthier. And putting them onshore has to date involved cutting down rather a lot of trees, ploughing up a lot of peat, and killing a lot of bats and birds.
It was signed off by Theresa May in 2018, and we’re on our third Prime Minister since then, with the prospect of another one after the next general election, so who knows whether all this still holds good.
That said, it’s easy to be cynical, and the document does make a reasonably impressive read. It’s nice to know that somebody in a position of authority is thinking about these issues, however it all plays out in the end.
Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment Programme
Again, who knew? Not I. More can be found about it here. It seems to be about better data capture, in order to enable better decision-making to take place:
Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment (NCEA) is a science innovation and transformation programme, which spans across land and water environments. It has been set up to collect data on the extent, condition and change over time of England’s ecosystems and natural capital, and the benefits to society.
All the groups one might hope to see being involved in this collaborative exercise do get a mention – Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas); Environment Agency; Forest Research; Natural England; Joint Nature Conservation Committee; Marine Management Organisation; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
There are a few references to “carbon stocks” and “carbon accounting”, but not so many as to skew the programme unduly, so far as I can see.
There is also a reference to the announcement of some (in the scheme of things – certainly in the scheme of things net zero – minor) funding: £30m to the Big Nature Impact Fund, aimed at unlocking significant private investment into nature projects, such as new tree planting or restoring peatlands and £12m to the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance, to protect and restore vulnerable coastal communities and habitats.
Conclusion
I am grateful to WEET for the information set out as background to its forthcoming conference, for drawing all this together in a single place. It is good to know that a lot is going on.
From a brief perusal it seems a bit scatter-gun and a bit repetitive; concerns remain that net zero, “carbon” reduction schemes, and “green” energy plans seem in the eyes of most government officials to be synonymous with environmentalism, when the reality is that they are often in conflict with it; and the sums available for real environmental projects look like chickenfeed compared to the money thrown at climate change projects.
On the other hand, it seems that a lot is going on and that a lot of thought is being given to important issues. I am not as depressed as I might be if I relied solely on the environment pages of the Guardian website for my news.
This article is sourced from Mark Mills new book The Cloud Revolution: How the convergence of new technologies will unleash the next economic boom and a roaring 2020s.
This article is sourced from Mark Mills new book The Cloud Revolution: How the convergence of new technologies will unleash the next economic boom and a roaring 2020s.
Physical libraries have been the principal repositories of information since at least the great library of Alexandria about 250 BC. It was thought to house at least half a million volumes.
This concentration of information and knowledge gave the city both political and economic power. It attracted the geniuses of the world including Aristotle, Euclid and Archimedes.
Before the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press in 1440, it took scribes up to 4 months to reproduce a book, that could only travel at the speed of a horse. Knowledge took a Great Leap Forward when books could be produced 200 times faster, but it would be nearly 500 years before the next revolution combined the rotary steam powered printing press with the chemistry revolution that created the pulp paper that oenabling the rate of physical information production to soar 1000 fold.
Historians think formal numbering began around 4000 BC but previously the Egyptians actually had a word which stood for a million, a million of what is very surprising. The expanding scales of consumption and services in societies have required the use of a familiarity with big numbers.
Creating names for big numbers roughly tracks history’s expansion in what we can measure and count.. If you are not familiar with the system we use, it is simply that we generate a new prefix to a number when it increases 1000 times.
The “kilo was first assigned to 1000 things late in the 18th century, followed by 1000 kilos which is a “mega” number developed late in the 19th century. In 1960 we adopted “giga” for billions of things and “tera” for a trillion things. In 1975 1000 giga was named to be a “peta” then 1000 peta was coined as an “exa” and the zetta is a 1000 exa.
Don’t even bother to remember all this; even Mark Mills in his wonderful book had trouble keeping it straight. At best use a cheat sheet like the folks at the check out counter of your grocery store to calculate the tax on your food bill.
Annual food and mineral production is now counted in millions of tons, people and their devices capacity is counted in billions of units, airway and highway usage of trillions of collective miles.
Electricity and natural gas in trillions of kilowatt hours or cubic feet; economies in trillions of dollars, but at a rate of a trillion of anything per year it takes a billion years to total a “zetta”. Get the picture.
We now live in a time where astronomically greater scale in information acquisition is obvious. But the sheer magnitude of information accessible today and in our near future is one of the key triggers for this consequential phase change in information.
Our older generation was educated primarily by books and the printed page while the young learn from their many devices. But surprisingly to some the digital library has not eliminated the desire for books.
More books are being sold than ever, tens of billions Mark Mills tells us with 3 billion sold in the US. Hardcover books have now even outdistanced e-books.
MIT computer scientist J.C. Licklider was hired by the Library Council in 1962 to write a report on the Future of Libraries.
They correctly anticipated that the future was more in computer storage in the cloud than on book shelves. Organizations of every kind are shifting to the cloud for most applications because it is a lower cost means not just to store data, but to process and secure it in addition to eliminating on-site physical and maintenance tasks.
In 2006, Clive Humby, a British mathematician, coined the phrase that “data is the new oil” and indeed his analogy was prescient.
Petroleum fueled the combustion engines that created so many new kinds of services and products and drove the economic rise of the 20th century. Now we find that raw data is the fuel for silicon engines that are creating an even greater array of new products and services during the growth of our 21st century.
We create data by simply imagining what things we want to measure which turns out to be anything and everything. While all trends face eventual saturation, humanity is a very long way from any prospect of peak information supply. It is perhaps a limitless resource.
Note: Portions of this essay are excerpted from the outstanding book Cloud Revolution with Permission of the author Mark Mills and publisher Endeavor Books.
CFACT Senior Science Analyst Jay Lehr has authored more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books. Jay’s new book A Hitchhikers Journey Through Climate Change written with Teri Ciccone is now available on Kindle and Amazon.
As winter bites, as ordinary Britons struggle with energy bills, as gas and electricity prices skyrocket, these rich kid green dilettantes have decided now is the time to reach out to ordinary people and convince us to accept more of the same.
Extinction Rebellion announces move away from disruptive tactics
Climate protest group says temporary shift will ‘prioritise relationships over roadblocks’
Robert Booth Social affairs correspondent Mon 2 Jan 2023 00.19 AEDT Last modified on Mon 2 Jan 2023 08.55 AEDT
The climate protest group Extinction Rebellion is shifting tactics from disruptions such as smashing windows and glueing themselves to public places in 2023, it has announced.
A new year resolution to “prioritise attendance over arrest and relationships over roadblocks”, was spelled out in a 1 January statement titled “We quit”, which said “constantly evolving tactics is a necessary approach”.
The group admitted the move would be controversial. Other environmental protest groups, such as Just Stop Oil, have stepped up direct actions, notably throwing paint at art masterpieces.
…
“In a time when speaking out and taking action are criminalised, building collective power, strengthening in number and thriving through bridge-building is a radical act,” the group said.
Extinction Rebellion’s attempts to reach out to ordinary people have not always worked out the way they wanted.
As for their building bridges campaign, it is difficult to imagine a worse case of bad timing. Almost as ridiculous as their plan for an April 1st 2022 mass uprising.
As winter bites, as ordinary Britons struggle with energy bills, as gas and electricity prices skyrocket, these rich kid green dilettantes have decided now is the time to reach out to ordinary people and convince us to accept more of the same.
Two nuclear power stations crucial to keeping Britain’s lights on risk being closed next year as a result of Jeremy Hunt’s windfall tax, their French owner warns today.
Two nuclear power stations crucial to keeping Britain’s lights on risk being closed next year as a result of Jeremy Hunt’s windfall tax, their French owner warns today.
It would mean the sites close in March 2024, potentially removing the “cushion” of spare capacity used by the National Grid to avoid blackouts and reducing nuclear power generation in Britain to its lowest level since the 1960s.
Mr. Hunt’s windfall tax levy on electricity generators, which was announced in the Autumn Statement in November, comes into force today. Conservative MPs have warned that the raid will reduce investment in the UK’s energy market at a time when the country needs dependable energy sources to balance more intermittent wind and solar power.
The two nuclear stations supply more than two gigawatts of electricity to the grid, typically providing enough power for four million homes per year and around four per cent of the power the UK uses on a cold day.
She told The Telegraph: “We accept there’s definitely a need for a levy of some kind – you’ve got to break the link between really high gas prices and the impact they have on power prices.
“But of course that’s going to factor into the business case of life extension and we’ll have to take that [the windfall tax] into consideration. It’s not going to make it easier.
“We will review the technical aspects but we also need a business case to support any life extension, so that has to be factored in as well, and we will have to work out what the right balance is between those two things.”
Experts last night warned that closing the two nuclear power stations would mostly wipe out the four-gigawatt spare capacity the National Grid maintains to avoid blackouts on still, overcast days when wind and solar generation is limited.
Kathryn Porter, an energy analyst at consultancy Watt Logic, said: “Going into winter 2024, we will lose all the coal power stations and could also lose two nuclear plants, so we will be losing roughly the same amount of power as we currently have in spare capacity now.
“We will pretty much be replacing it with wind – and that is replacing readily dispatchable generation with intermittent generation.
“So if you have periods of still winter weather where wind output drops, then you could be in a situation where you really struggle to keep the lights on.”
Two of EDF’s fleet in the UK have already closed this year due to age, making it more difficult for National Grid to cope with power shortages.
Heysham 1 in Lancashire and Hartlepool are meant to close in March 2024 because they are getting old, but EDF is considering a two-year extension to their lifespan to ease the energy crunch.
The move is regarded as feasible following recent safety inspections, although it would depend on regulatory sign-off.
EDF is expected to take a decision on Heysham 1 and Hartlepool within the next two months.
I don’t place too much store in EDF’s threats. If market prices had stayed around £50/MWh, would they have gone ahead with the extension anyway?
The real issue of course is the energy crunch, whether it hits in 2024 or two years later. As the Telegraph note, Heysham and Hartlepool have 2GW of capacity, while the 3GW of remaining coal capacity at West Burton and Ratcliff will also disappear next year, as the government was delighted to brag about two years ago:
The UK government is running short of electricity supply options due to net zero policies based on climate obsessions, as well as years of reluctance to believe that renewable energy is, and will always be, too erratic and unreliable. A power supply crunch is looming.
Heysham power station [image credit: Belfast Telegraph]
The UK government is running short of electricity supply options due to net zero policies based on climate obsessions, as well as years of reluctance to believe that renewable energy is, and will always be, too erratic and unreliable. A power supply crunch is looming. – – – The Telegraph reports: Two nuclear power stations crucial to keeping Britain’s lights on risk being closed next year as a result of Jeremy Hunt’s windfall tax, their French owner warns today.
EDF, which operates all five of the country’s serving nuclear plants, said the Chancellor’s raid on power producers will make it harder to keep the ageing Heysham 1 and Hartlepool stations open as long as hoped.
It would mean the sites close in March 2024, potentially removing the “cushion” of spare capacity used by the National Grid to avoid blackouts and reducing nuclear power generation in Britain to its lowest level since the 1960s.
Mr Hunt’s windfall tax levy on electricity generators, which was announced in the Autumn Statement in November, comes into force today. Conservative MPs have warned that the raid will reduce investment in the UK’s energy market at a time when the country needs dependable energy sources to balance more intermittent wind and solar power.
The two nuclear stations supply more than two gigawatts of electricity to the grid, typically providing enough power for four million homes per year and around four per cent of the power the UK uses on a cold day.
Rachael Glaving, commercial director of generation at EDF UK, which is owned by the French state, said the windfall tax will damage the business case for the facilities at a time when inflation is already pushing up other costs.
She told The Telegraph: “We accept there’s definitely a need for a levy of some kind – you’ve got to break the link between really high gas prices and the impact they have on power prices.
“But of course that’s going to factor into the business case of life extension and we’ll have to take that [the windfall tax] into consideration. It’s not going to make it easier.
“We will review the technical aspects but we also need a business case to support any life extension, so that has to be factored in as well, and we will have to work out what the right balance is between those two things.”
Experts last night warned that closing the two nuclear power stations would mostly wipe out the four-gigawatt spare capacity the National Grid maintains to avoid blackouts on still, overcast days when wind and solar generation is limited.
The government of Italy is planning to build new nuclear power plants. And if it happens, it marks an astonishing turnaround.
This was the Garigliano Nuclear Power plant in Italy in 1970. They already had the solution to it all, energy wars, Vladimir Putin, and fantasy “climate control” fifty years ago.
But Italy abandoned nuclear energy thirty years ago. It’s the only major European country to have stopped using nuclear power. (Though Germany is trying to).
Italy had four nuclear plants in the early 1980s but after the Chernobyl accident, they held a referendum on nuclear power, and the voters didn’t want it anymore, so they closed the last two reactors by 1990, (back in the days when voting made a difference). Furthermore, Italy held another referendum in 2011, and 94% of the voters rejected it again, which shows how desperate the situation must be now if an opinion poll like that has shifted so far in 11 years?
The thing is, Italy only makes 25% of its energy itself, and so it is suddenly very attuned to “geopolitical risk”.
Under the pressure of the energy crisis, however, the Italians suddenly became painfully aware of their heavy dependence on electricity from abroad. The topic moves the citizens because they clearly feel the increase in their electricity bills despite government support.
Although renewable energies have been significantly expanded in recent years, the production of green electricity is far from sufficient.
No wonder that the new government around the right-wing populist Giorgia Meloni regards the return to nuclear energy, which the Italians had renounced following a referendum in 1987, as a solution to the energy problems.
The Infrastructure Minister (who happens to lead the second largest party in the Coalition) is dead keen:
“Italy cannot be the only major country in the world without nuclear energy. We cannot talk about phasing out gas, petrol and diesel without discussing nuclear energy,” [Matteo] Salvini explained, proposing that a nuclear power plant could be built in Milan, in his Baggio district.
When environmentalists objected that Italy was a densely populated country prone to earthquakes, landslides and floods, and on whose soil it would be better not to build nuclear reactors, Salvini replied that there were 440 nuclear reactors in operation worldwide, including several in seismically active Japan and a dozen of them in France, just over the Italian border. “Reactors of the latest generation are the safest and cleanest form of energy production, that’s the future,” assured the Lega boss.
As usual the left-leaning parties that want to reduce emissions will do anything to Not achieve that. Apparently, the big problem with nuclear power is that even though it will solve their emissions fears, it won’t meet some arbitrary committee deadline that no one else is going to meet anyway:
The Social Democrats see this “green transition” as an opportunity for the country’s economy. They oppose nuclear energy because, in their view, the timeframe and existing technologies are incompatible with a significant reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030.
It’s almost like the Social Democrats are just the useless minions for the big bankers or the renewable industry. What they fear more than the climate catastrophe is the end of their fake crisis.
So the big question then, is will Italians accept a nuclear plant now?
(The translation here is just from Chrome, don’t blame Pierre! )
Today Australians put up with mosquitos, horse flies, ticks, termites and sand flies, insects which simply weren’t a problem for our ancestors, who weren’t afraid to use powerful chemicals to make the places where they live comfortable and free from insect pests.
TENNANT CREEK, Australia — In a forgotten restaurant behind a gas station in this country’s red center, only metal and plastic parts remain unscathed.Chris Cook grabs at a timber door frame, which crumples like paper in his hand.
“This has all just collapsed,” says Cook, a manager at Territory Pest Control in Australia’s Northern Territory. He eyes boards hanging in ragged pieces from the ceiling. Since he last visited the abandoned building three years ago, thousands of uninvited guests have been busy.
The destruction at Galaxy Auditorium restaurant at Wycliffe Well — a tiny highway stop calling itself the “UFO capital of Australia” — is the destruction that could lie ahead for many places on the continent unless Mastotermes darwiniensis can be stopped.
These termites are the last survivors of an ancestral species that shared space with dinosaurs 150 million years ago. They’re voracious and relentless.And because of climate change, they, like their fellow kin, are expanding their range.
The article also cites a 98 author study which suggests termites become more active in warm weather;
Termite sensitivity to temperature affects global wood decay rates
AMY E. ZANNE, HABACUC FLORES-MORENO, JEFF R. POWELL, WILLIAM K. CORNWELL, JAMES W. DALLING, AMY T. AUSTIN, AIMÉE T. CLASSEN, PAUL EGGLETON, KEI-ICHI OKADA, CATHERINE L. PARR, E. CAROL ADAIR, STEPHEN ADU-BREDU, MD AZHARUL ALAM, CAROLINA ALVAREZ-GARZÓN, DEBORAH APGAUA, ROXANA ARAGÓN, MARCELO ARDON, STEFAN K. ARNDT, LOUISE A. ASHTON, NICHOLAS A. BARBER, JACQUES BEAUCHÊNE, MATTY P. BERG, JASON BERINGER, MATTHIAS M. BOER, JOSÉ ANTONIO BONET, KATHERINE BUNNEY, TYNAN J. BURKHARDT, DULCINÉIA CARVALHO, DENNIS CASTILLO-FIGUEROA, LUCAS A. CERNUSAK, ALEXANDER W. CHEESMAN, TAINÁ M. CIRNE-SILVA, JAMIE R. CLEVERLY, JOHANNES H. C. CORNELISSEN, TIMOTHY J. CURRAN, ANDRÉ M. D’ANGIOLI, CAROLINE DALLSTREAM, NICO EISENHAUER, FIDELE EVOUNA ONDO, ALEX FAJARDO, ROMINA D. FERNANDEZ, ASTRID FERRER, MARCO A. L. FONTES, MARK L. GALATOWITSCH, GRIZELLE GONZÁLEZ, FELIX GOTTSCHALL, PETER R. GRACE, ELENA GRANDA, HANNAH M. GRIFFITHS, MARIANA GUERRA LARA, MOTOHIRO HASEGAWA, MARIET M. HEFTING, NINA HINKO-NAJERA, LINDSAY B. HUTLEY, JENNIFER JONES, ANJA KAHL, MIRKO KARAN, JOOST A. KEUSKAMP, TIM LARDNER, MICHAEL LIDDELL, CRAIG MACFARLANE, CATE MACINNIS-NG, RAVI F. MARIANO, M. SOLEDAD MÉNDEZ, WAYNE S. MEYER, AKIRA S. MORI, ALOYSIO S. MOURA, MATTHEW NORTHWOOD, ROMÀ OGAYA, RAFAEL S. OLIVEIRA, ALBERTO ORGIAZZI, JULIANA PARDO, GUILLE PEGUERO, JOSEP PENUELAS, LUIS I. PEREZ, JUAN M. POSADA, CECILIA M. PRADA, TOMÁŠ PŘÍVĚTIVÝ, SUZANNE M. PROBER, JONATHAN PRUNIER, GABRIEL W. QUANSAH, VÍCTOR RESCO DE DIOS, RONNY RICHTER, MARK P. ROBERTSON, LUCAS F. ROCHA, MEGAN A. RÚA, CAROLINA SARMIENTO, RICHARD P. SILBERSTEIN, MATEUS C. SILVA, FLÁVIA FREIRE SIQUEIRA, MATTHEW GLENN STILLWAGON, JACQUI STOL, MELANIE K. TAYLOR, FRANÇOIS P. TESTE, DAVID Y. P. TNG, DAVID TUCKER, MANFRED TÜRKE, MICHAEL D. ULYSHEN, OSCAR J. VALVERDE-BARRANTES, EDUARDO VAN DEN BERG, RICHARD S. P. VAN LOGTESTIJN, G. F. (CISKA) VEEN, JASON G. VOGEL, TIMOTHY J. WARDLAW, GEORG WIEHL, CHRISTIAN WIRTH, MICHAELA J. WOODS, AND PAUL-CAMILO ZALAMEA
Deadwood is a large global carbon store with its store size partially determined by biotic decay. Microbial wood decay rates are known to respond to changing temperature and precipitation. Termites are also important decomposers in the tropics but are less well studied. An understanding of their climate sensitivities is needed to estimate climate change effects on wood carbon pools. Using data from 133 sites spanning six continents, we found that termite wood discovery and consumption were highly sensitive to temperature (with decay increasing >6.8 times per 10°C increase in temperature)—even more so than microbes. Termite decay effects were greatest in tropical seasonal forests, tropical savannas, and subtropical deserts. With tropicalization (i.e., warming shifts to tropical climates), termite wood decay will likely increase as termites access more of Earth’s surface.Read more: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo3856
Strangely our ancestors managed to build long lived wooden structures which weren’t instantly destroyed by termites.
What did our ancestors do differently?
I think you can guess from the image at the top of the page.
Termites can and are controlled by regular building inspections and five year applications of short term poisons. But if you want long term protection, there is no substitute for injecting DDT into the structural beams, and spraying the entire building with DDT.
It is not just termites. Where I live, there’s a nasty variety of sand fly, biting insects which live in the soil, especially loose sandy soil near beaches. But sand flies only seem to be a problem in some areas – mostly new developments which were built after DDT spraying was stopped. Old established areas of town, where massive public spraying with DDT was a regular event until the 1972, don’t seem to have a similar level of difficulty with sand flies.
Today Australians put up with mosquitos, horse flies, ticks, termites and sand flies, insects which simply weren’t a problem for our ancestors, who weren’t afraid to use powerful chemicals to make the places where they live comfortable and free from insect pests.
You must be logged in to post a comment.