OrbitRock

Well, the increased variability itself may be a part of the climate change.

I’ll give an anecdote. I’m working on a project that tracks the length of the rainy season over time in a certain region. There is no clear trend one way or another, but what does stick out as a super strong and clear trend is that the variability of both extremes occurring is increasing.

> Of course, from a short-term timeline (say 100 years), the rate of species extinction from global warming will surely outpace the rate of species creation, since evolution has no time to act.

Which is really the only factor that matters here.

A large quantity of things will likely go extinct before being able to adapt or migrate sufficiently to keep up with the changes.

The re-development of biodiversity takes millions of years, and that’s basically irrelevant from the timescale of humanity.

Same here. I was a heavy smoker who struggled terribly to quit.

But once I quit, well, your “pay me to drink petrol” analogy is accurate. Its been this way for about 10 years now. I just don’t smoke, it’s now repulsive to me, and there’s almost no conceivable way for me to go back to it other than putting myself through the punishment of the early smoker again where it’s just disgusting and doesn’t feel good at all for several weeks.

Shifting baselines syndrome

> That “cow pasture/range” chunk is largely extremely low productivity scrub land owned by the federal government and leased basically for free by cattle folk. We could convert all of it to national parks without much more than a blip in food calories produced in the US.

Agreed!

I would emphasize restoration and protection in almost every case.

Just that there’s also ways we can work towards conservation on land that is being utilized too.

You talked about farms but there’s also: managed forests, anywhere anything is grazing, private lands, fisheries, artificial reefs and kelp forests, any area we already use which we can also stack on an incidental conservation benefit ontop of (as you mentioned renewable energy infrastructure will be a big one, the book I mention is full of other surprising examples such as military bases), things like wildlife underpasses, suburban lawns, and so on. This adds up to a lot of land.

I hope we protect half of the land and ocean like Edward O. Wilson and other major biologists recommend, but also I think it’s smart to look at everything and not just protected areas.

Well, there’s a tipping point of deforestation beyond which the Amazon rainforest might collapse.

I agree that we should ideally minimize our agricultural footprint and turn everything else into a nature reserve. But we’ve got to work from the realities of where we are today.

Consider this image: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/img/2018...

Notice that for the USA for example, not very much of the land is state or federal parks. The vast majority is used by humans in some way, and the reality is that they’re not about to turn it all into parks.

So, while pushing for the protection of as much land as possible, we should also study conservation on land that’s not already a protected area.

The book I mentioned has a number of examples where good conservation work has actually been done on such lands.

I disagree on the first note.

The human footprint already covers nearly the entirety of the planet. Conservation of systems that are within or directly adjacent to that footprint is actually very important. Extraordinary amounts of biodiversity are contained in these areas and we need to study how to reconcile our land use with the needs of that biodiversity. We shouldn’t ignore it out of a fear that people will get the wrong idea.

Woah, your shade map is awesome! I was playing around with it for a long time there, lol.

There’s a tool called landtrendr that sort of does this, but it’s less for visualization than for analysis of trends

https://emapr.github.io/LT-GEE/index.html

Yep, but now it’s on Google Earth instead of Google Earth Engine

There’s a conservation goal that’s going around.

30 by 30.

Or, 30% of the planet’s surface as protected areas by 2030.

The Biden administration adopted it, but it’d be cool to see it as a global goal as well.

Yup, to me it’s fascinating.

We’re another level of the fractal of life, replicating patterns seen in bacterial biofilms, slime molds, circulatory systems, nervous systems, leaves, all manner of multicellular architectures.

It’s certainly a bad thing that we are growing in a sort of zero-sum manner against many original ecosystems though.

We need to learn to restrain our own growth (a tough one that we’re in the process of trying to beat into all of our heads it seems), and also we need to learn how to maximize the potential for biodiversity to exist within the structure of human occupied areas as well. (A good book on this last subject is “Win-win Ecology”).

A problem like a traffic jam needs systemic coordinated action though to be able to solve. Complaining about the lack of perceived ability to get everyone acting is legitimate.

We understand it but humans are composed of a variety of minds and what the rational one wants isn’t necessarily what we do.

Although conservation probably has more to do with reality looking different depending on your own local observations, to a Brazilian cattle rancher or Indonesian logger at the frontlines of the biodiversity crisis, things look different. For a consumer of those goods and materials, they likely don’t realize the connection.

Pretty sure it’s just Landsat data, which is freely available. As is Sentinel, MODIS, and a number of other satellite platforms.

Google has been a pretty great pioneer on geospatial data science and visualization platforms, especially with Earth Engine (also free to use and allows you to access vast repositories of free geospatial data and use Googles computing resources to do data science with them).

I’m into geospatial science, and I get so much aesthetic appreciation out of it. It is super artistic. The earth is beautiful!

There’s lots of great tools to explore such things as well.

https://www.globalforestwatch.org/

https://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-...

I built an app which visualizes global fire history per year from 2001 to 2020, still working out some kinks but maybe will share here.

Great, now everybody will laugh when you try to name a variable “year”.

We really need an ñ operator

2030 is going to be a dystopia

Unless rising vapor pressure deficit undoes your gains from CO2 fertilization:

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396

There’s also a phenomenon that hotter conditions cause water to evaporate faster.

The term here is vapor pressure deficit (VPD).

VPD is the relationship between the amount of water in the atmosphere, temperature, and the rate of evaporation.

As temperature increases, rate of evaporation increases not linearly but exponentially.

VPD has been established as a major control on plant growth.

And there’s research showing that increasing VPD has already offset the gains we’ve seen from CO2 fertilization on plant growth:

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396

I’m pretty sure the oxygen comes from CO2.

Plant carbohydrates are made directly from CO2 in the Calvin Cycle.

The Calvin Cycle is the source of all of the carbohydrate building blocks in the plant, and I’m pretty sure that oxygen from H2O does not enter the equation, just CO2 and some enzymes and cofactors.

If so, the vast majority of the mass is from the air.

(H might originate from water but its mass is pretty trivial compared to C and O)

Lake Baikal is so large and ancient that it’s a major global hotspot for freshwater diversity, hosting entire families found nowhere else.

Well the stamp collecting is where the action is.

If you wanna cure cancer, resolve chronic diseases, conserve ecosystems under climate change, etc.

It’s cool to know that DNA exists and that life evolves by natural selection, but getting into the complex weeds of that fractal is where we discover that we know so little.

I once followed that thread of starting to observe nature around me so far that I ended up switching careers and became an ecologist, lol.

It’s definitely good for the mind!

My top language learning advice:

Get on an app to talk with natives. Plenty such apps exist, HelloTalk and iTalki being the main ones.

In the spirit of this post, this has probably radically increased my own happiness, because I’ve 1) met friends from all over the world, 2) went on really great travels that came out of that, and 3) ended up with a romantic partner in my target language.

Now I feel really enriched (cliche but true) for the ability to access the cultures of the languages I’ve learned, it’s a great experience.

> Main line of work (web) stalled but I picked up a solid amount of drone photography/videography work

Do you mind me prying into what field you’re doing drone photo/videography in?

I’ve done drone surveys before and always thought that that would be cool too, especially when combined with travel.