France takes a small step in the right direction

This isn’t world-changing, but it’s a first (to me, at least), and an encouraging thing to see. France has banned short-distance air travel along routes for which there exists a train ride of two and a half hours or less. This is, in case it needs to be said, a very narrow ban, clearly designed to cause as little disruption in daily life as possible. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if the people most upset about this are exactly the people who should be upset – rich dingdongs with private jets.

France has been given the green light to ban short haul domestic flights.

The European Commission has approved the move which will abolish flights between cities that are linked by a train journey of less than 2.5 hours.

The decision was announced on Friday. The changes are part of the country’s 2021 Climate Law and were first proposed by France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate – a citizens’ assembly tasked with finding ways to reduce the country’s carbon emissions.

France is also cracking down on the use of private jets for short journeys in a bid to make transport greener and fairer for the population.

Transport minister Clément Beaune said the country could no longer tolerate the super rich using private planes while the public are making cutbacks to deal with the energy crisis and climate change.

The super rich are not accustomed to having to follow rules, so we shall see whether they are held to this, or whether they manage to buy their way out of it. This is a trial run that will be re-assessed after three years, but I hope it’s just the start of a broader shift from air to rail travel, at least within Europe. I don’t have extremely high hopes for the U.S., but wouldn’t it be nice to have high-speed rail tying all of the Americas together? One baby-step at a time, I suppose.

Initially, the ban will only affect three routes between Paris Orly and Nantes, Lyon, and Bordeaux where there are genuine rail alternatives.

If rail services improve, it could see more routes added including those between Paris Charles de Gaulle and Lyon and Rennes as well as journeys between Lyon and Marseille. They currently don’t meet the criteria for the ban because trains to airports in Paris and Lyon don’t allow passengers to arrive early in the morning or late in the evening.

Others – such as routes from Paris Charles de Gaulle to Bordeaux and Nantes – weren’t included because the journey time is more than the 2.5 hour limit.

Connecting flights will also have to follow these new rules.

It’s a glimpse of a better world, if we can build it.

‘Cause to be victorious, you must find glory in the little things.

SLoSSing out climate conservation policy

There’s an old debate in the field of conservation, about what strategy is best when setting aside land for conservation. Should our efforts go into getting large contiguous areas, or would it be better to have a collection of smaller reserves distributed over a wider area: Single Large, or Several Small (SLoSS).

There are good arguments for both. A single, large area can allow for habitats that cannot occur in a smaller space. The edge of a forest, for example, lets light and wind penetrate into the understory from the side, spurring the growth of less shade-tolerant plants, different animals, and even affecting things like soil moisture. Deep forest habitats are much darker, tend to have less undergrowth, and can harbor very different kinds of life. This distinction is reliable enough, that undergraduate ecology students often do “research” on these dynamics as part of their training. It’s not generally a way to learn something new, so much as a way to practice the skills, knowing the results you should be getting. I know less about it, but I’m sure similar things exist in aquatic ecosystems, accounting for stuff like depth, fishing and other human activities, proximity to pollution sources like farms and factories, and so on.

The “Several Small” perspective is also generally about a diversity of habitats, but accounts for the way the changing landscape allows for different conditions over much wider areas. A mountaintop will have different life from a river, which will be different from a forest, or a plain, or a lake, or the boundary between those habitats. While one large place can encompass a good amount diversity in that regard, spreading your reserves out can cover more ground, so to speak. Having scattered nature reserves can also serve to create vital safe “pit stops” for migrating birds.

Both of perspectives are a form of triage, in the face of the relentless, escalating environmental destruction being driven by capitalism. The “ideal middle ground” could be described as a number of large reserves, connected by corridors, but that’s rather difficult to arrange in a world where capitalists get what they want by default most of the time.

I think this research supports my preferred approach of ending capitalism, and integrating our development into our surrounding ecosystems as much as possible (I mean, they don’t actually talk about capitalism, but in my opinion a growth-obsessed system like that can never allow for the kinds of change we need). Not only may the heat tolerance of sub-populations vary, but a population starting in a cooler area has more “room” for warming before temperatures start to get dangerous. This means that if you want a species to be able to survive global warming, the best thing you can do is make sure that the populations are not fragmented, and have space to move and change.

By conducting a metanalysis of 90 previously published studies, from which Cheng and his co-authors mined data on 61 species, the team was able to construct a set of “upper thermal limits”—specific temperatures above which each species could not survive. However, by zooming in further and looking at 305 distinct populations drawn from that pool of 61 species, they found that different populations of the same marine species often had widely different thermal limits. This suggests that some populations have evolved different abilities to tolerate high temperatures. The key then, is to keep different populations of the same species connected so that the populations that have adapted to the higher temperatures can pass this advantage on to the populations with the lower thermal limits.

In other words, imagine a wide-ranging marine species, such as the diminutive Atlantic killifish, which occurs from the warm Florida coast of the United States north to the frigid waters of Newfoundland, Canada. The northern killifish populations may be better able to withstand warming waters if some of their southern kin are able to naturally shift their range to the north.

“Scale matters,” says Matthew Sasaki, a marine biologist and evolutionary ecologist who completed this research as part of his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Connecticut and is the paper’s lead author. “The patterns you see across species aren’t the same you see within species, and the big-picture story doesn’t necessarily match what is happening on the local level.”

In case you need the refresher, working to preserve biodiversity can help us deal with climate change. That’s why I like the idea of, to the greatest degree possible, bringing nature into our cities and other developed spaces, both by setting aside land around us for wildlife, any by making “our” territory safer. Less dependence on cars for transit (and more rail and foot traffic) would also make it a lot safer for animals to move through our landscape as they go from place to place.

When it comes down to it, they key seems to be having a clear understanding of the local conditions, and the needs of local ecosystems. What works for one place, one species, or one community of interacting species, may not work for another:

In yet another twist, the team, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and was composed of biologists specializing in terrestrial as well as marine ecosystems, discovered that this intra-species variability was primarily a feature of animals living in the ocean and intertidal areas. Populations of widespread species that live on land or in freshwater exhibit far more homogeneity in their thermal limits, and thus could be more sensitive to rising temperatures. However, on land, plants and animals can take advantage of microclimates to cool down and avoid extreme temperatures, by moving into shady spots, for example.

Taken together, the research suggests that a one-size-fits-all-species approach to conservation and management won’t work. Instead, write the authors, we need to understand how populations have adapted to their local conditions if we want to predict their vulnerability to changing conditions. A more effective approach would include ensuring that marine species can find wide swaths of undamaged habitat throughout their entire range, so that different populations of the same species can mix and pass on the adaptations that help them survive warmer waters. And on land, we need to maintain large patches of cool ecosystems—such as old-growth forests—that terrestrial species can use as refuges.

“The glimmer of hope here,” says Cheng, “is that with conservation policies tailored to individual populations, we can buy them time to adapt to the warming world.”

As with antifascist action, and human climate adaptation, local understanding, local communities, and local solutions are going to be key. The big advantage we have over more locally-focused societies of the past, is that we can retain the ability to communicate and trade globally. We really can make this world more peaceful, just, and more beautiful, all as a part of saving ourselves from the disastrous conditions we’ve created.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Soggy Sunday: There can be no climate action without fresh water.

There are a lot of reasons why I keep stressing the need for ecosystem management as the core of our climate action. We have, throughout our history, been utterly dependent on the natural world, even as we have been destroying it in the name of endless “growth”. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the medicines that keep us alive, the materials we use to shelter ourselves from the elements – all of it ties back to so-called “nature”, because we are a part of it.

That means that as we work to end greenhouse gas emissions, and adapt to the changes we’ve already caused, we must also change how we do business in other areas. Ending our direct contribution to warming will mean little if we increase other forms of pollution as we do it. It’s not as simple as swapping out what kind of fuel powers our society, and if we pretend that the climate is our only existential environmental threat, then we will continue driving ourselves toward extinction through other means.

A holistic approach is going to mean a lot of things, but when it comes down to it, none of that is possible without continual access to fresh water. That may seem obvious, but it’s cause for real concern, as this report made for COP27 discusses:

The report titled: “The essential drop to reach Net-Zero: Unpacking Freshwater’s Role in Climate Change Mitigation,” released November 9 2022 at COP27 in harm El-Sheikh, is the first-ever summary of current research on the role of water in climate mitigation. A key message is the need to better understand global water shortages and scarcity in order to plan climate targets that do not backfire in future. If not planned carefully, negative impacts of climate action on freshwater resources might threaten water security and even increase future adaptation and mitigation burdens.

“Most of the measures needed to reach net-zero carbon targets can have a big impact on already dwindling freshwater resources around the world,” said Dr Lan Wang Erlandsson from Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. “With better planning, such risks can be reduced or avoided.”

The report describes why, where, and how freshwater should be integrated into climate change mitigation plans to avoid unexpected consequences and costly policy mistakes. Even efforts usually associated with positive climate action – such as forest restoration or bioenergy – can have negative impacts if water supplies are not considered.

Done right, however, water-related and nature-based solutions can instead address both the climate crisis and other challenges, said Dr Malin Lundberg Ingemarsson from Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).

“We have identified water risks, but also win-win solutions that are currently not used to their full potential. One example is restoration of forests and wetlands which bring social, ecological, and climate benefits all at once. Another example is that better wastewater treatment can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from untreated wastewater, while improving surface water and groundwater quality, and even provide renewable energy through biogas.”

That was when I decided I actually wanted to write about this a bit. “Nature-based solutions” are exactly what we need. As dangerous as heat waves and storms may be, one of the biggest dangers to our species is the breakdown of ecosystem services, of which most people seem to be largely unaware. I couldn’t say the exact numbers, but for all we must spend trillions on ending fossil fuel use, I think we should also spend trillions on ecosystem restoration and support. Even if we weren’t depleting both ground and surface water, and even if we weren’t poisoning what remains with reckless abandon, the melting of mountain glaciers around the world means that before long, billions could lose their primary water source. We need to be actively working to build up ecosystems, because they aren’t just affected by the weather, they affect the weather. Deforestation means less rainfall. That’s going to vary from ecosystem to ecosystem, but it’s not hard to understand.

Plants don’t just absorb rainwater, they also transfer it from the ground to the air. Trees in particular act as giant vaporizers, humidifying the air around their crowns. That, in turn, helps create rain downwind, or even sometimes right over the same forest. That movement of water, as I’ve discussed before, also moves heat around, which can help mitigate extreme heat, which affects everyone’s need for water. My insistence on viewing ourselves as a part of nature isn’t some spiritual feeling of connection, it’s a simple fact, supported by overwhelming evidence.

The report highlights five key messages on the interlinkage between water and mitigation:

• Climate mitigation measures depend on freshwater resources. Climate mitigation planning and action need to account for current and future freshwater availability.
•  Freshwater impacts – both positive and negative – need to be evaluated and included in climate mitigation planning and action.
•  Water and sanitation management can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. More efficient drinking water and sanitation services save precious freshwater resources and reduce emissions.
•  Nature-based solutions to mitigate climate change can deliver multiple benefits for people and the environment. Measures safeguarding freshwater resources, protecting biodiversity, and ensuring resilient livelihoods are crucial.
•  Joint water and climate governance need to be coordinated and strengthened. Mainstreaming freshwater in all climate mitigation planning and action requires polycentric and inclusive governance.

“Climate change mitigation efforts will not succeed if failing to consider water needs,” said Marianne Kjellén, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). “Water must be part of powerful solutions for enhancing ecosystem resilience, preserving biodiversity and regenerative food and energy production systems. In short, water security needs to be factored in to climate action,” she adds.

There’s a part of me that simply cannot believe that that last thought needs to be spelled out. How could anybody possibly think that we could respond to the threat of climate change without factoring in water? Hasn’t everyone been talking about “the coming water wars” for years? But, of course, action on that end of things has been woefully inadequate, just as it has been in every other area. Not only that, but the system we’re trying to change uses war not just to control people, but also to generate profit. Those of us still connected to our humanity hear “water wars” and think of the horrors of war, and perhaps the horrors of water scarcity. The rich and powerful, particularly in the United States, think of all the money they’ll make by converting raw resources into dead bodies, ravaged landscapes, and fat paychecks. There’s also a rather large portion of the population that is ideologically committed to the belief that a magical being put this entire cosmos here for “us” (which means the rich and powerful) to do with as we see fit. So yeah – it needs to be spelled out. For a lot of people, I’m afraid we’ll have to change the world around them, and hope their minds change afterwards, but in the meantime, it’s good to figure out what we should be doing about the water problem.

While I hope to go through the report more thoroughly, and write about its contents, I’ve had such intentions in the past. I’m approaching a year of daily posting (not counting the time I took off for Raksha’s death), which is a strange new experience for me, so hopefully I’ll actually be able to follow through this time. Still, maintaining work on my current novel is a more important right now, so in the meantime, here’s a link to the report, all nicely laid out by section. If you want me make this project (or any other) more of a priority, I’ll take that into consideration once you sign up at patreon.com/oceanoxia and send me a message about it.

It is a simple fact that on this planet, water is life. It’s also a fact that when we have tried to, we’ve been able to clean up polluted bodies of water, restore ecosystems, and bring species back from the brink of extinction. We do have the resources and understanding to make the world better, all we lack is a political an economic system that values doing so.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: Didn’t like the “Just Stop Oil” Soup Protest? Doesn’t Matter.

A few weeks back I wrote a blog post about what I called “Liberal Protest Activism”, in response to both the infamous souping of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and to the general response to said souping. What I didn’t mention was that that post was, in part, inspired by a Twitter disagreement with Michael Mann. Basically, someone had called the protest inappropriate, and I responded by pointing out that more conventional protest had not resulted in adequate action. Mann quote-tweeted me, and basically said I was lying, and that saying “nothing has been done” is being used to justify extremism. I pointed out that I hadn’t said “nothing”, and he blocked me.

Honestly, it hurt a little. I’ve looked up to Mann for a long time, and I still do. The work he’s done on climate science and advocacy is valuable, and he gets entirely too much hate. On the other hand, as I’ve said in the past, being an expert in climate science does not make you an expert in sociology, politics, or policy. Having him not only disagree with me, but point to me as someone being extremist and wrong was a shock, so I spent time thinking about it, which generated the blog post mentioned above. I also deleted that tweet, because I didn’t want to keep getting notifications from people responding to Mann calling me a liar. As far as I can tell, trying to “defend my honor” would end up benefiting no one worth considering. I wrote that blog post partly as a way to deal with my bad mood. I ended up writing this post, because Rebecca Watson has a new video out about the same subject, so now I feel a little braver in talking about it.

There’s a lot there that I agree with (as always, the transcript is at the link above), but I wanted to pause on one point that Watson made:

They were angry simply because young people were doing something for a cause they cared about, and the angry people know deep in their hearts that they do not have even a fraction of that courage and that conviction, and they know that the cause is a good one that SHOULD inspire us all to that kind of courage and conviction. But instead we’re at home eating Cheez-its and doom scrolling Twitter, and channeling our guilt by getting angry at someone who is actually out there doing something. My hypothesis is that NO protest these people could have done would ever have been widely considered to be “meaningful,” and “good” and “effective,” and despite that, there’s a good chance that this protest will historically be seen to be all of those things.

Oof. That hits a little close to home. Regardless of how you feel about their tactics, there’s no question that what they are doing takes courage, especially given the consistently hostile response they have gotten. They’ve put far more on the line for this cause than I have, and they’ve generated a great deal of conversation with the art protests – more conversation than came from their more direct act of spraying paint on the Bank of England to protest its investment in fossil fuels. I think I should have given them a bit more credit. I also very much agree with the guess that no protest the did would have gotten wide support

The reality is that protests generally aren’t popular, and the people who make headlines for protests share that unpopularity. From Watson’s video:

And that hypothesis is based on decades of research: as I said two years ago during the Black Lives Matter protests, “in 1961, 57% of Americans said that sit-ins hurt the cause of those fighting against segregation. By 1963 that number had risen to 60%. By 1964, after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it was 74%. Three quarters of Americans thought Martin Luther King’s “extreme” tactics were hurting the Civil Rights fight. He was one of the most hated men in America. And yet, the Civil Rights movement succeeded.” And even though “79% of people said the (LA) riots were not justified…nearly 30 years later, scientists can see that those riots helped “build support for policy by mobilizing supporters.” They found that both white and African American voters “were mobilized to register (to vote), that new registrants tended to affiliate as Democrats, and that voters shifted their policy support toward public schools, net of a general shift in support for education spending. This mobilization appears to have persisted: those mobilized by the riot remained regular participators over a decade later and remained more Democratic than the general population, even after accounting for demographics.””

She then goes on to talk about Mann’s response to the protest, and the result of his decision not to avoid getting embroiled in pointless internet arguments over tone. I knew he had an article tut-tutting about it, but I didn’t know he made himself a dishonest push poll to “back up” his opinion, and continued arguing about it. I expected better from him, but it’s a good reminder that people are just people are just people. What matters is that we keep working as best we can.

As of this recording, Mann is kind of losing it on Twitter and really insisting that this survey proves something about the relative effectiveness of the soup protest. It’s understandable, because I think he does good work in his own field (which is climatology, not public relations or sociology) and so he’s probably not accustomed to being corrected by people who actually know what they’re talking about. I hope he is able to take a step back and realize that this is just bad science with a dash of “bad understanding of history” thrown in. A well-designed survey could certainly find that people largely were turned off by this protest, but the people who study movements and social change understand that protests – nonviolent, disruptive, or outright violent – might work or not work, regardless of whether or not you like it.

Dealing with climate change does not mean an end to air travel.

I’m honestly a big fan of airplanes. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel a fair amount over the last couple decades, and that wouldn’t have been possible without the ability to fly. In my ideal world, I think there would be a lot less air traffic, but I don’t think we should get rid of it entirely. Obviously, the rich and their flying habits must go, and a better world would be a somewhat slower world, in which people can actually take the time to travel by boat, by zeppelin, or by train. When it comes to that, we should also have much more high-speed rail for transportation across continents. Even so, there are times when the speed and versatility of airplanes and helicopters will be indispensable.

That said, the way we do air travel needs to change, just like everything else. It’s possible that if all other fossil fuel use stopped, maintaining current airplane usage would be fine, but that seems very unlikely, and given the greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution coming from fossil fuel extraction, we need that to end. Fortunately, a lot of people have been working hard on finding alternative ways to make things like jet fuel, and they’ve been having real success! The question, with this sort of thing, is how well it can scale up. It may be that we can create this stuff under certain conditions, but will that be worth the energy and resources invested? I’ve generally been assuming so. When my friend was working on this a while back, the company he was with was using sugar beets as their starting point, but there’s a lot of vegetable matter that could be turned into fuel, which means a lot of the “work” is being doing as the plant grows. While my assumptions and anecdotes may hold credibility to some of you, for the others, here’s some research claiming that we can have an aviation industry that runs on plant-based fuel:

New research published today in the journal Nature Sustainability shows a pathway toward full decarbonization of U.S. aviation fuel use by substituting conventional jet fuel with sustainably produced biofuels.

The study, led by a team of Arizona State University researchers, found that planting the grass miscanthus on 23.2 million hectares of existing marginal agricultural lands — land that often lies fallow or is poor in soil quality — across the United States would provide enough biomass feedstock to meet the liquid fuel demands of the U.S. aviation sector fully from biofuels, an amount expected to reach 30 billion gallons per year by 2040.

“We demonstrate that it is within reach for the United States to decarbonize the fuel used by commercial aviation, without having to wait for electrification of aircraft propulsion,” said Nazli Uludere Aragon, co-corresponding author on the study and a recent ASU geography PhD graduate.

“If we are serious about getting to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, we need to deal with emissions from air travel, which are expected to grow under a business-as-usual scenario. Finding alternative, more sustainable liquid fuel sources for aviation is key to this.”

That caveat always looms over discussions of climate change, doesn’t it?

“If we are serious about getting to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions…”

It doesn’t generally feel like the “we” that has the power is serious about much of anything beyond keeping or increasing their power. Still, this research is promising, and I appreciate the bredth of the work they did.

In the study, the researchers used an integrated framework of land assessments, hydro-climate modeling, ecosystem modeling and economic modeling to assess where and under what conditions across the United States energy crops used for biojet fuels could be grown sustainably using criteria that evaluate both environmental and economic performance.

The criteria were extensive. The team first identified and assessed where optimal marginal agriculture lands already existed in the U.S. They then assessed whether one could grow the right energy crops on the land without using additional water.

The team then analyzed whether growing energy-crop feedstocks on these lands would have detrimental effects on the surrounding climate or soil moisture and predicted the potential productivity of yields of two different grasses — miscanthus and switchgrass — as suitable biomass-energy feedstocks. Finally, the team quantified the amount and the cost of biojet fuel that would be produced and distributed nationwide at scale.

“The current way we produce sustainable jet fuel is very land-inefficient and not on a large scale,” said Nathan Parker, an author on the study and an assistant professor in the School of Sustainability. “There are very limited ways that aviation could become low carbon emitting with a correspondingly low climate impact, and this is one way we’ve shown that is feasible and can get the aviation industry to be carbon neutral through agriculture.”

The scientists emphasized that this integrated systems perspective was critical to the study. In the past, research around the potential of biofuels has largely consisted of isolated assessments that have not been well integrated, for example, overlooking key data on how altering the crop cover influences the surrounding climate.

“When you plant crops over strategically designed areas, the planting of these crops has an impact on the climate,” said Matei Georgescu, co-corresponding author of the study and associate professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and director of the Urban Climate Research Center at ASU. “If there is a change in the underlying landscape, for example an increase or decrease in the amount of vegetation, there may be implications for local- to regional-scale climate, including more or less precipitation, or warmer or cooler temperatures.”

To account for these land-atmosphere interactions, the research team took outputs from their hydroclimate model to inform their ecosystem model. The team then evaluated the economic feasibility for farmers to grow these grasses.

Real-world solutions

For any uptake of an alternative-energy pathway, solutions need to make economic sense.

I get that they’re working within the world as it exists, and that makes perfect sense, but boy – “solutions need to make economic sense” is a phrase that makes me see red. So much about how our world is run right now makes zero economic sense, but exists anyway because it’s great for keeping money and power in the hands of the rich and powerful. Ian Danskin framed conservatism and capitalism as developed to protect the aristocracy from democracy, and if you look at the world through that lens, a lot of strange stuff starts to make more sense. Still, if something does “make economic sense” within the current paradigm, it seems likely that it would be at least as functional in the “ideal” scenario I discussed above.

The researchers, in their analysis, benchmarked the financial returns of the existing uses for the lands they identified — some already are used for growing corn, soy or various other crops, and others are being used as pasture — against those from cultivating either miscanthus or switchgrass as biomass feedstock.

Growing miscanthus or switchgrass needed to be more profitable to replace the existing use of the land in each area.

“These lands we identified are owned and operated by real people for different agricultural uses,” said Uludere Aragon, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The cost-effective biofuel potential from biomass feedstocks is influenced largely by the opportunity cost of alternative land uses.”

In the end, researchers found miscanthus to be the more promising feedstock and that biojet fuels derived from miscanthus can meet the 30 billion gallons/year target at an average cost of $4.10/gallon.

While this is higher than the average price for conventional jet fuel — typically about $2 per gallon — the team concluded it is reasonable when considering biojet’s potential to cut emissions. Notably, in 2022 jet fuel prices have varied from $2 to $5 per gallon (not to be confused with retail gasoline) due to changes in supply and demand, showing that prices above $4 per gallon are well within the range of possibility.

A template for the future

The researchers say that in finding further solutions to Earth’s climate crisis, it is important that the scientific community bridges disciplines and moves past incremental reductions in emissions. Rather, the researchers emphasize the importance of realistic solutions that scale.

“This was an interdisciplinary team with expertise from ecosystems sciences, climate modeling and atmospheric sciences and economics,” said Georgescu, who acknowledged this research was a culmination of eight years of modeling work and collaboration. “To truly address sustainability concerns, you need the expert skills of a spectrum of domains.

“As academics, we should remember economics drives people’s decisions on the ground. It is vitally important to find the circumstances when these decisions are also aligned with desirable environmental outcomes.”

The endless subsidies and wars propping up the fossil fuel industry, and the military-industrial complex, demonstrate that we have the ability to determine what is and is not “economical”, for all our leaders babble about “market forces”. Even so, there’s something cathartic about being able to point out that a huge number the changes we need are entirely feasible even within the system that’s resisting that change. At this point, I’m starting to wonder if I should just get a tattoo of this, but – the obstacles are social and political, not technical. There are absolutely technical challenges, and we’ll discover new problems as we work on new ways of doing things. All of that is to be expected, but none of it is why have failed to adequately address climate change.

We can do this. We can end fossil fuel use, and there’s no reason to think that doing so will result in anything other than a better standard of living for most of humanity. We just need to get around the money-hoarding doofuses that are currently in charge.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

It’s not just the flooding: Hurricanes as heat pumps

While I don’t know a whole lot about the demographics of my readership, I’m going to assume that most of you have at least a passing familiarity with the water cycle. Maybe it’s just me, but when I learned about it as a kid, I learned about it as a description of the movement of water around the surface of the planet. The water cycle is about water. Straightforward, yes?

Then, a few years ago, I was writing a climate science lesson, and I had a minor revelation. The water cycle also describes the movement of energy in our atmosphere. When water evaporates, it effectively absorbs the heat required to keep it in a gaseous state. That cools off the place where the evaporation happens, which is why our own ability to regulate our temperatures relies heavily on evaporation. So now you have that water vapor, kept in that state by a combination of temperature and pressure. It rises up, and after a certain point reaches a low enough pressure and temperature to condense, which turns it into water droplets (clouds, rain, mist, etc), and warms up the air around them. That heat was just transported, as water vapor, from one part of the world to another. Of course, that same bit of water might absorb and release heat like that many times over before it falls back to the ground. If you watch clouds for long enough, on a mostly clear day, you can see some of them forming, or even some that fade in and out of existence as they move through pressure gradients shifting from gas to droplets, and back to gas again.

As I said, this may all be obvious to you, but for some reason it never really clicked in my head until I was actually studying the movement of heat energy in our atmosphere. From that perspective, when enough water fell on Pakistan to submerge one third of the entire country, a huge amount of heat was released into the air above. It’s been interesting to think about, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what predictive value that has for our day to day lives. It could mean that we should expect heat to follow flooding, but if the air warmed is pretty high up to begin with, would that follow? Further, all that water starts evaporating again, sucking up more heat. Fortunately, the world need not wait for people like me to puzzle this stuff out. A team out of Arizona has  found that when a tropical cyclone hits a city, it causes a spike in temperature in the days that follow. 

Three days after Hurricane Fiona struck Puerto Rico in mid-September, the National Weather Service issued an extreme heat advisory, warning that the heat index – which incorporates humidity to calculate perceived temperature – could reach up to 109 degrees.

Above-average temperatures almost always follow tropical cyclones – which by definition include tropical storms and hurricanes – and may soar to nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than average, according to a new University of Arizona-led study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The study’s authors stressed that their results are likely conservative estimates of just how high temperatures can climb following a cyclone.

Tropical cyclones often cause damage from strong winds, storm surges, intense rain and flooding, but extreme heat is an additional hazard, the researchers found. Above-average temperatures can occur days later and even in nearby areas that were not directly impacted by the storm.

“Multiple extreme events happening within a very short window of time can complicate disaster recovery,” said lead study author Zackry Guido, an assistant research professor in the university’s School of Natural Resources and Environment and the Arizona Institutes for Resilience: Solutions for Environment and Societies, or AIRES. “To medical providers, heat is a concern. Our results suggest that tropical cyclone preparedness should also include public information about heat risk.”

The research team analyzed 53 tropical cyclones in the eastern Caribbean between 1991 and 2020 and 205 interactions between the cyclones and 14 Caribbean cities. They found that the cities’ heat index values were always warmer than average after the storm.

“Everyone’s focus is on the destructive power of tropical storms and hurricanes – the storm surge, winds, flooding – and that’s obviously quite substantial, but our focus is on the combined hazard of storm and subsequent heat,” Guido said. “Hurricanes are massive heat pumps, redistributing heat for a large spatial distance around the center of the storm, and they leave massive destruction in their wake that can knock out the energy grid. That combination is often dangerous because it slows recovery and poses risks to human health.”

While the paper doesn’t explore how climate change may be impacting the phenomenon, the authors expect that high heat index values following tropical cyclones will increase in the future.

“It’s very easy to understand the climate change impacts of this,” Guido said. “Our future will likely have hurricanes dropping more intense rain and have more people in harm’s way. Then, if you drape on top of that a hotter environment, you will therefore expect a greater overall impact.”

That makes a lot of sense to me. The proportion of tropical cyclones that become hurricanes or typhoons is increasing in part because weaker ones are being cut off by increased wind shear, and in part because the oceans are warming so rapidly. The strength of the storm generally ties directly to sea surface temperatures, which means that the amount of heat that that storm pumps into an area is also going to go up.

In terms of impacts, a big storm like that means that in addition to the heat dumped, there’s also an increase in humidity (the other factor in the heat index). That means a higher chance of hitting “wet bulb” conditions, in which people can die fast without artificial cooling. Losing power – as so often happens – becomes that much more dangerous. At the same time, floods can contaminate the water supply, which could leave those trying to survive with a choice between lethal dehydration or drinking water that will probably make them sick.

I get why the water cycle wasn’t taught to me as a way that heat moves around in the atmosphere, but it seems that that’s a perspective we’ll need to keep in mind going forward.

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Scientists give a grim warning on climate change and insect populations

I talk a lot about the need for a climate response that’s centered around ecosystem resilience. Our best defense against the existential crises that face us is to not only stop the destruction of ecosystems, but also to actively work to build them up. The problem is, the longer we take to accomplish the first half of that plan, the harder it will be to carry out the second half. We have a much, much better chance of success if we’re helping struggling, but extant ecosystems survive, than if we’re trying to build up new ones from what’s left after total collapse.

The problem is, we seem to be getting pretty close to the “total collapse” stage. Even without climate change, ecosystems around the world are suffering from chemical pollution, and for a while now pesticides have been the prime suspect in the ongoing decline in insects (PZ did a good post on that recently). We’ve always known that climate change would be rough for many insect species, but it now we’ve got a pretty stark warning. 70 entimologists have cosigned a letter warning that climate change threatens to push us into the “total collapse” scenario, through its effects on insects alone:

In a new scientific review, a team of 70 scientists from 19 countries warned that if no steps are taken to shield insects from the consequences of climate change, it will “drastically reduce our ability to build a sustainable future based on healthy, functional ecosystems.”

Citing research from around the world, the team painted a bleak picture of the short- and long-term effects of climate change on insects, many of which have been in a state of decline for decades. Global warming and extreme weather events are already threatening some insects with extinction—and it will only get worse if current trends continue, scientists say. Some insects will be forced to move to cooler climes to survive, while others will face impacts to their fertility, life cycle and interactions with other species.

Such drastic disruptions to ecosystems could ultimately come back to bite people, explained Anahí Espíndola, an assistant professor of entomology at the University of Maryland and one of the paper’s co-authors.

“We need to realize, as humans, that we are one species out of millions of species, and there’s no reason for us to assume that we’re never going to go extinct,” Espíndola said. “These changes to insects can affect our species in pretty drastic ways.”

Bees are probably the most well-known example of this right now, as they’re famous as pollinators, but there are many other insects that not only pollinate plants, but do a variety of things that, as part of a health ecosystem, make our own lives possible. As the paper explains, the process of responding to climate change as a population – range shifts, body changes, and behavior changes – is one that by necessity puts a strain on those populations, and makes them more vulnerable. Unfortunately, the other well-known problem with climate change and bugs is that some species seem to be fine with the change, and because we cannot catch a break, those seem to be the ones that cause us problems:

On the other hand, climate change may make some insects more pervasive—to the detriment of human health and agriculture. Global warming is expected to expand the geographical range of some disease vectors (such as mosquitoes) and crop-eating pests.

“Many pests are actually pretty generalist, so that means they are able to feed on many different types of plants,” Espíndola said. “And those are the insects that—based on the data—seem to be the least negatively affected by climate change.”

The concern about crop-eating pests is a small part of why I lean so hard on the idea of moving food production indoors. We’ll have enough trouble dealing with war, drought, heat, floods, and so on, without adding in more locust swarms. An added benefit of that would be less exposure to mosquitoes, ticks and the like for farm workers, and less exposure to, and use of pesticides.

When I have bad news to share – which seems like most days – I try to redirect focus to ways people can do something about the systemic problems dragging us towards extinction, and thankfully the authors of this warning do have a pretty clear action plan:

Though these effects are already being felt by insects, it is not too late to take action. The paper outlined steps that policymakers and the public can take to protect insects and their habitats. Scientists recommended “transformative action” in six areas: phasing out fossil fuels, curbing air pollutants, restoring and permanently protecting ecosystems, promoting mostly plant-based diets, moving towards a circular economy and stabilizing the global human population.

The paper’s lead author, Jeffrey Harvey of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said in a statement that urgent action is needed to protect insects and the ecosystems they support.

“Insects are tough little critters, and we should be relieved that there is still room to correct our mistakes,” Harvey said. “We really need to enact policies to stabilize the global climate. In the meantime, at both government and individual levels, we can all pitch in and make urban and rural landscapes more insect-friendly.”

The paper suggested ways that individuals can help, including managing public, private or urban gardens and other green spaces in a more ecologically-friendly way—for instance, incorporating native plants into the mix and avoiding pesticides and significant changes in land usage when possible.

Espíndola also stressed the value of encouraging neighbors, friends and family to take similar steps, explaining that it’s an easy yet effective way to amplify one’s impact.

“It is true that these small actions are very powerful,” Espíndola said. “They are even more powerful when they are not isolated.”

As with the rest of our environmental problems, while it’s good to know how we can work to fix them, that knowledge will not help us without building the power for political change. Do what you can – I’m actually going to set up that pollinator garden this spring – but part of helping save the insects (and ourselves) is building collective power, so that we can create revolutionary systemic change.

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Global warming is already causing measurable evolution in animals

One of my favorite things about science is the way, when you’re on the right track, the information you’re getting forms an increasingly coherent picture. For an example from atmospheric physics, it was predicted that because anthropogenic global warming would happen due to increased greenhouse gasses – increased insulation – then all that extra heat getting trapped in the atmosphere should mean that less heat was reaching the upper layers. That means that as greenhouse gas levels rose, and temperatures followed them, we should also be able to measure a decrease in temperature in the upper atmosphere. Sure enough, that’s exactly what’s happening:

Combined data from three NASA satellites have produced a long-term record that reveals the mesosphere, the layer of the atmosphere 30 to 50 miles above the surface, is cooling and contracting. Scientists have long predicted this effect of human-driven climate change, but it has been difficult to observe the trends over time.

“You need several decades to get a handle on these trends and isolate what’s happening due to greenhouse gas emissions, solar cycle changes, and other effects,” said Scott Bailey, an atmospheric scientist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, and lead of the study, published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics. “We had to put together three satellites’ worth of data.”

Together, the satellites provided about 30 years of observations, indicating that the summer mesosphere over Earth’s poles is cooling four to five degrees Fahrenheit and contracting 500 to 650 feet per decade. Without changes in human carbon dioxide emissions, the researchers expect these rates to continue.

With this trend being measurable, climate science deniers now have to answer another question – if the rise in greenhouse gases isn’t enough to trap significant amounts of heat in the lower atmosphere, then why is the upper atmosphere cooling and shrinking? If the rise in temperature is – as some still claim – due to increased solar activity, why isn’t the upper atmosphere even warmer than the lower atmosphere? Shouldn’t the external heat source be causing the opposite trend?

Of course it should. The reality is that over a century of climate science has given us a pretty decent idea of how things work up there, and so the predicted warming has come, along with its predicted effects.

And so that brings us to another predicted result of rising temperatures – that it would have an effect on ecosystems, and that the changing conditions would drive evolutionary change in plant and animal populations. The only question was how quickly they would evolve, and whether it would be fast enough for them to survive. It should not surprise you to hear that scientists have been measuring evolution driven by global warming for a while now, and as with the mesospheric cooling, if the planet’s not warming, and the warming’s not having an affect on ecosystems, then why are all these animals evolving as though that’s exactly what’s happening?

I want to note how this change is actually happening. It sounds almost cartoonish to say that lizards are evolving longer arms and shorter legs so they experience less drag when they’re flapping off a twig like a flag in a hurricane, but of course that’s exactly the kind of adaptation you’d expect in a world where the odds of encountering a strong hurricane are increasing. It’s one of the ways in which evolution tends to actually be pretty intuitive, once you get the hang of how it works.

I figure I’ll quickly go through the other changes for those of you unable to watch the video – In the Gulf of California, Humboldt squids, also known as jumbo squids, are becoming significantly less “jumbo” in response to higher temperatures. Apparently they have a high degree of plasticity in how their phenotype responds to the environment, one generation to the next, and so the population in question has apparently cut its size and life cycle in half. I also like how the video emphasizes that not all species are capable of such dramatic change in so little time.

In the arctic, little auks (also known as dovekies, apparently) historically exploit the intense temperature gradient around melting sea ice to eat cold-stunned plankton that encounter the meltwater. The melting ice has moved that feeding ground from being right by where the auks breed, to an hour away, as the dovekie flies. That’s a lot of extra energy to spend – enough that it could doom the species – so they just… didn’t. They found a different temperature gradient just four minutes away, where the fjord’s meltwater met the ocean, and they’ve been feeding on the cold-stunned plankton there.

As the video goes on to state, this doesn’t mean all species are capable of adapting to climate change. When the average limb length of a Caribbean anole population changes, that doesn’t mean that we’ve got the same number of lizards and they all just have different legs. It means all of the ones with different proportions died. If you lay tens of thousands of eggs at a time, like the squid, then your population can probably bounce back pretty quickly if a few of you adapt to changing conditions. For those of us who reproduce more slowly, a drop in population like that means that it will take that much less to kill off everyone that remains. We’re the only species we know of that has – at least in theory – the ability to adapt our behavior and surroundings before it’s forced on us by disaster. Unfortunately, we also seem to be the only species on this planet that has to deal with ideology and propaganda designed to suppress that ability. This is a fascinating time, from a scientific perspective, and the adaptability of these critters is a good reminder that the end of this is not yet written. We can’t predict all of the changes that will occur as a result of the rising temperature and some of those changes may end up making our own adaptation a little easier, in ways we’ve yet to predict.

A man can dream, anyway…

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Hurricanes are on track to being too much for the U.S. economy to handle

It kinda feels like hurricanes are getting worse, doesn’t it?

Back in August, I talked about how we’ve entered what I call The Age of Endless Recovery after researchers at UC Davis actually put numbers on how extreme weather events are hurting economic growth in the United States. Since then, the hurricane season has hit, devastating communities from the Caribbean north. The thing is, a lot of our awareness of these events depends on news corporations choosing to cover them. There’s been a lot of news about named storms, but I haven’t seen nearly as much attention paid to the drought in China, for example (and yeah, I haven’t been better on that). I also can’t help but think about the way crime reporting has convinced many people that violent crime is increasing, even as the trend has been in the opposite direction. I also know that the rhetoric about extreme weather getting more frequent and worse has led some people to think that climate scientists have been predicting that hurricanes specifically will be getting more frequent and worse. The actual prediction has been that while rising ocean temperatures will increase the number of tropical cyclones, the increase in wind shear will lead to a decrease in the number of those cyclones that survive long enough to become actual hurricanes. So, fewer hurricanes. The problem is that the warmer water that makes more of those cyclones will also make the hurricanes that do form much more likely to be powerful. I’ll let Peter Hadfield explain in this old Potholer54 video:

 

I think the effect of this is that it will feel like there are more storms, because there are more that are big enough to require politicians to request aid, and get good ratings over multiple news cycles. Unfortunately, this isn’t just a matter of things making sense on the surface. Research out of UW Madison found that hurricanes really are getting stronger:

In almost every region of the world where hurricanes form, their maximum sustained winds are getting stronger. That is according to a new study by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Center for Environmental Information and University of Wisconsin–Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, who analyzed nearly 40 years of hurricane satellite imagery.

A warming planet may be fueling the increase.

“Through modeling and our understanding of atmospheric physics, the study agrees with what we would expect to see in a warming climate like ours,” says James Kossin, a NOAA scientist based at UW–Madison and lead author of the paper, which is published today (May 18, 2020) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research builds on Kossin’s previous work, published in 2013, which identified trends in hurricane intensification across a 28-year data set. However, says Kossin, that timespan was less conclusive and required more hurricane case studies to demonstrate statistically significant results.

To increase confidence in the results, the researchers extended the study to include global hurricane data from 1979-2017. Using analytical techniques, including the CIMSS Advanced Dvorak Technique that relies on infrared temperature measurements from geostationary satellites to estimate hurricane intensity, Kossin and his colleagues were able to create a more uniform data set with which to identify trends.

“The main hurdle we have for finding trends is that the data are collected using the best technology at the time,” says Kossin. “Every year the data are a bit different than last year, each new satellite has new tools and captures data in different ways, so in the end we have a patchwork quilt of all the satellite data that have been woven together.”

I actually really like this article, because of its links to Kossin’s other work, because in addition to being stronger, he’s found evidence that they’re traveling further (makes sense to me), but moving more slowly, which means much more flooding:

Kossin’s previous research has shown other changes in hurricane behavior over the decades, such as where they travel and how fast they move. In 2014, he identified poleward migrations of hurricanes, where tropical cyclones are travelling farther north and south, exposing previously less-affected coastal populations to greater risk.

In 2018, he demonstrated that hurricanes are moving more slowly across land due to changes in Earth’s climate. This has resulted in greater flood risks as storms hover over cities and other areas, often for extended periods of time.

“Our results show that these storms have become stronger on global and regional levels, which is consistent with expectations of how hurricanes respond to a warming world,” says Kossin. “It’s a good step forward and increases our confidence that global warming has made hurricanes stronger, but our results don’t tell us precisely how much of the trends are caused by human activities and how much may be just natural variability.”

Now, those of you who’ve been paying attention will know already that there’s no such thing as a natural disaster. In this age of science and technology, we have both the knowledge and the resources to largely disaster-proof our populations. Horror shows like Hurricane Katrina, or any recent catastrophic storm, are almost always so devastating because those in power didn’t think that adequate infrastructure was worth the expense. We prioritized money over life, and so life was lost. You may also be familiar with the saying, “an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure”. If we prepare for conditions that we know will occur; if we build real levees and sea walls, if we reinforce and maintain the electrical grid, if we move communities away from places where sea walls won’t work – if we do the things that science has shown will help to mitigate the harm done by extreme weather events – we can save both lives and money.

Unfortunately, that is not the trend we’re on right now. A new study out of the Pottsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research shows that we’re on track for hurricanes that do more damage than the US economy can handle:

“Tropical cyclones draw their energy from ocean surface heat. Also, warmer air can hold more water which eventually can get released in heavy rains and flooding that often occur when a hurricane makes landfall,” says Robin Middelanis from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Potsdam University, lead author of the study. “It’s thus clear since long that hurricane damages will become bigger if we continue to heat up our Earth system.” While we might not have more hurricanes in the future, the strongest among them could get more devastating.
“Now, one of the important questions is: can we deal with that, economically? The answer is: not like this, we can’t,” says Middelanis. “Our calculations show, for the first time, that the US economy as one of the strongest on our planet, will eventually not be able to offset the losses in their supply chains on their own. Increasing hurricane damages will exceed the coping capacities of this economic super-power.”

I think it’s worth noting here that for poorer countries, natural disasters are probably at or beyond that threshold already. It’s also worth remembering that the poverty of those countries is almost invariably due to the abuses of imperialist powers. Haiti is probably the best example, at least in the “New World”, as they were forced to pay France for the crime of winning their independence, and have been repeatedly invaded, robbed, and otherwise harmed by the United States in particular. As we work to change our relationship with the environment, we must also work to end these economic injustices that have been deliberately maintained by the rich and powerful of the world. Unfortunately, this research shows what we’ve known for a long time: if we don’t change course in a big way, even wealthy nations are going to get stuck in a downward spiral, and they will absolutely steal more resources from poorer nations in an attempt to maintain their own comfort. The grim reality is that our entire system, from food production, to infrastructure, to trade, is all set up to work in climate conditions that no longer exist. The farther away we get from those conditions, the more things will break down.

The scientists looked at the 2017 hurricane Harvey that hit Texas and Louisiana and already then cost the enormous sum of 125 billion US Dollars in direct damages alone, and computed what its impacts would be like under different levels of warming. Importantly, losses from local business interruption propagate through the national and global supply chain network, leading to additional indirect economic effects. In their simulations of over 7000 regional economic sectors with more than 1.8 million supply chain connections, the scientists find that the US national economy’s supply chains cannot compensate future local production losses from hurricanes if climate change continues.
“We investigated global warming levels of up to 5°C – which unfortunately might be reached by the end of our century if climate policy fails us,” says Anders Levermann, head of complexity science at PIK and scientist at New York’s Columbia University, a co-author of the study. “We do not want to quantify temperature thresholds for the limit of adaptation of the US economy’s national supply chains, since we feel there’s too much uncertainty involved. Yet we are certain that eventually the US economy’s supply chain capacities as they are now will not be enough if global warming continues. There is a limit of how much the US economy can take, we just don’t know exactly where it is.”

“Bad for people”

Ironically, in the case of hurricane Harvey it is in particular the oil and gas industry in Texas which suffers from the impacts of hurricanes driven by global warming – while global warming is in turn driven by the emissions from burning oil and gas, plus of course coal. The fossil fuel extraction sector is big in that region of the US, and it is vulnerable to cyclone damages. The computer simulations show that production losses in the fuel sector will be amongst those which will be most strongly compensated by countries like Canada and Norway, but also Venezuela and Indonesia, at the expense of the US economy.
“When things break and production fails locally, there’s always someone in the world who is happy to make money by selling the replacement goods,” says Levermann. “So why worry? Well, reduced production means increasing prices, and even if that means it’s good for some economies, it is generally bad for the consumers – the people. Also from a global economic perspective, shifts due to disrupted supply chains can mean that less efficient producers step in. It’s a pragmatic, straightforward conclusion that we need to avoid increasing greenhouse gas emissions which amplify this kind of disruptions.”

It seems likely that I have different political and economic goals from the people who wrote this article, but I think their analysis is solid when it comes to how global warming will affect the United States, absent significant change. It’s important to remember that even within the economic framework that neoliberals claim to believe is so perfect, the rising temperature means disaster on the horizon. It’s also important to remember that the people in power almost certainly know this, and rather than trying to change course, they seem to be preparing to set themselves up in fortress bunkers while the rest of us starve, burn, drown, or agree to serve them in exchange for the scraps they decide to give us (I’ll probably have a rant about that out soon).

In the end, it comes back to the same thing. We need revolutionary political change if humanity is to have a future worth fighting for. Giving all the power to pathological money hoarders has led to global catastrophe, and there is no real plan, within this political and economic system, to make the world better. At most, some of the people at the top are hoping for a technological miracle that will save everyone else without them having to give up anything. Revolutionary change doesn’t have to mean war, though people in power tend to choose that over losing their power, but it does mean we need lots of people working together in an organized fashion. Things aren’t likely to collapse all at once, but it seems pretty clear where we’re heading. Our ruling class sees all of us as expendable, and as less important than their hoards, so we will have to figure this out for ourselves.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!