dogz
We have to tell our friends, the bloody cats and our dogs, about our destruction of the planet. We have to apologise to the goats and to all the vanishing species — to the goats because we make too many jokes about them and to the other species because we are destroying their world — our world. The cats and dogs are clever: they let themselves into our houses. There was a fascinating documentary on quolls, last night on ABC TV (14/02/2021). The Eastern Quolls have disappeared from mainland Australia. In the doco, we saw how quolls had adapted to the settings of an abandoned farm house in Tasmania — even becoming familiar with the film-maker. But vandalism, bushfires, drought and other threats like BLOODY cats — alien domestic cats that had escaped our kindness to find better pastures in the wild — and foxes, both imported for the tickle of our European pleasures of patting cats and hunting foxes — had threatened the lives of the spotted animals, the quolls… They shared the space with possums but were also under threats from their cousins, the Tasmanian devils… We’ve made a mess of the wild. We can also mess up our gardens… Every-time we slash a jungle path, we bring in exotics that do not mix well in the local environment. Every-time we use a commercial compost bag, we don’t know what we import in our gardens. While no brand names are mentioned in this article, the results are sad. Even if we make our own “organic” compost, some of the items in our mix might have been treated with chemicals we don’t know the effects of. Some of the worse chemicals come from our “pharmaceuticals". For years, the leaded petrol used in cars ended up as heavy fumes on topsoils. Lucky to a point, plants do not intake lead, but by taking other elements in the soil, the concentration of lead apparently had been going up. Sometimes, it could be better to let a garden-patch to regenerate itself. This eventually leads to an explosion of insect life, including spiders. I talk to "my" spiders. There are hundreds of them weaving webs in the garden. Quite a few different species with different techniques. As seen by looking at my pictures on this website, some of them are huge… I say: “you moron, build your web higher up, so I can go through the garden path without being caught in your sticky stuff!” They don’t really listen, but after a couple of destroyed webs below a certain level, they move up. Spiders are clever gamblers. They build a web where they think they will catch the best insects, by chance — as long as there are insects. Then they wait patiently motionless. Inside the house, they will not move for day. Like the fisherman with a finger on the line, they have a leg extended on one of the main threads that trembles should an insect be caught on the web. By the direction and vibration, they know exactly where to go and prevent the intruder to escape. Soon the bee, the cicada, the fly is wrapped up in a cocoon of spider threads… But insecticides and even herbicides can kill insects and prevent their coming to the garden. There are battles between the ladybugs and the aphids, but should you spray against aphids, you won’t have ladybugs. I talk to the ladybugs. I see a lot of people talking to pets. You can watch dogs patiently sitting, trained to await for the green light at pedestrian crossings, but dogs cannot see the green because for them the world is in black and white. Pity. But dogs await for instructions. They sense the importance of directions. Cats give instructions to their owners. Cats own their humans. I suspect dog owners are global warming experts while cat owners are independently sceptics. But this does not mean anything. The only thing that matters is the calculations based on observations of climatic changes. As Europe is now under a mountain of snow, with record falls in Moscow, we would think that global warming has been licked. It has not. The polar vortex has become so weak that the northern jet stream has flopped below normal high latitudes, while feedback mechanisms speed up beyond beliefs the demise of Arctic ice. This is phase two. Meanwhile in the great southern land, the weather has become weird. La Niña has drenched the eastern side and scorched the earth in the West. Sydney summer has been like a hot winter with rain. We don’t pay much attention because we are still “comfortable”. The sea level is rising. From Canada comes pictures of a tsunami of ice blocks breaking over a levee of the Niagara River, in Ontario. Quite impressive. And a lonely tornado has hit Izmir in Turkey. But climate change by anthropogenic means — aka global warming from our burning of fossil fuels — isn’t the local weather, though the local weather will be impacted. And this is the crux. How much effect on local weather is global warming going to have — incrementally? Sometimes none, sometimes plenty. We will assume without possibility of allocation of damages. But the actuaries for insurance companies know the damage is going to cost them more and more. Money is somewhat irrelevant. The important level at which we should care is about people’s lives being impacted. Yes we’ve seen images of thousands of poor people in trouble in low countries of the subcontinent, but then these numbers can only increase and become beyond “acceptable”. Yes, because despite our knowledge of things, we’ve come to accept collateral damage in what we do. We will bicker about responsibility because responsibility cost money… And in come the coconut trees… On some pacific islands, coconuts are not endemic species. They have been introduced to make them look like paradise or to make money from copra. This led to a devastating environmental imbalance. It still looks “green”, but some local species there are under threat of extinction because of the bloody coconuts. We’re nuts. But more than apologise, we need to give animals room to roam and live wildly. The long summer is getting longer…
One of the aspect of nature that allowed the expansion of humanity beyond subsistence has been the climate. By the end of the last ice age, roughly 10,000 years ago, came the "long summer”… This has been described such by Tim Flannery in the Weather Makers. What happened then, had been the end of a “normal” cool climatic cycle and the beginning of a warm climate. By 8,000 years ago, agriculture and herding had become ingrained in the human moire. Until the mid of the 19th century, this was the principal activity of human endeavour. There had been some cooler and warm periods till then, but nothing like the ice age cold nor the heat that we are starting to experience. Contrarily to the natural cycle, the surface of the earth is warming more than previously. The long summer is getting longer. This is the gist of Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers… We would be nuts not to recognise that our activities do not influence our climates… Of course there were some variations due to latitude. Some regions that were fertile 8,000 years ago are now desert. This was not due to human activities, but was part of the natural cycle, even up until the industrial revolution. Energy became cheap by burning fossil fuels, rather that use horse-power, slave power or convict power. We should be more economical, like spiders...
And we should prevent over-heating of the engine...
GL.
Talking to spiders...
cold global warming...
How global warming can cause Europe's harsh winter weather
Climate deniers are using a spell of unusually cold weather in Europe to incorrectly argue that CO2 emissions are not warming the planet.
As Germans shiver through double-digit negative temperatures and more than 80 centimeters (30 inches) of snow in parts of the country, climate science deniers have taken to social media to argue that global warming is a hoax.
Their claim — which has been repeatedly debunked by climate scientists — is that extremely cold weather shows that carbon dioxide emissions are not warming the Earth.
In fact, the effects of global warming may even have favored the extremely cold temperature.
Why is it so cold?
The past week's sub-zero temperatures and heavy snowfalls are more than just a cold winter. They are made more likely by the collapse of the polar vortex — a huge ring of cold winds raging in the Earth's stratosphere — at the North Pole.
The polar vortex is closely connected to the jet stream, a band of strong winds about 10 kilometers above the ground. At the polar front, this flows between warm air from the tropics and subtropics, and cold polar air. The pressure extremes that form in this transitional area at lower layers are sometimes referred to in weather reports as the Icelandic low or the Azores high.
The jet stream usually determines the winter weather in Europe: if it is strong and flows from west to east, it brings mild, windy and rainy weather from the Atlantic, and holds the cold air from the Arctic.
But if the jet stream is weak and wavy, the polar vortex also weakens, and sometimes breaks down completely. The cold snap across Europe is the result of a weak jet stream — more precisely a dip — that has caused a strong and long-lasting collapse of the polar vortex.
How can climate change make the weather colder?
Through the burning of fossil fuels, people have heated the planet by more than 1 degrees Celsius (1.8 F) since the Industrial Revolution. The decade from 2010 to 2019 was the hottest on record. Climate change, however, doesn't only lead to higher temperatures, but more extreme weather.
This is where the disproportionate warming of the Arctic comes into play, said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of the Earth System Analysis research department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Temperatures in the Arctic have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the past 40 years. "These changes are affecting the weather in Europe.”
Arctic warming is particularly strong in winter, said Dörthe Handorf, who researches the physics of the atmosphere at the Alfred Wegener Institute of the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). "As many studies show, this weakens the jet stream."
The wind stream begins to fray, said Handorf, which could lead to more dips that affect temperatures in Europe.
Will climate change make European winters colder?
Climate change won't necessarily make European winters colder because the outbreaks of cold air from the polar vortex are sometimes milder than the current cold snap. The Arctic is also not the only part of the world where air currents are changing because of rising temperatures.
Strong warming over the subtropics also affects the jet stream, said Handorf. While the Arctic warming tends to direct the jet stream southwards and cause cold spells in Europe, the subtropical warming generally sends the band northwards. If this is the case, she said, the winter weather in Europe will be milder. Climate models do not yet know which warming trend will dominate in the future, she added
Why global warming can lead to snow
Snow forms when warm, moist air meets very cold air. Over the flatlands in western Europe, the air is rarely cold enough for the volume of snowfall that has blanketed the region this winter.
But on this occassion, an area of high-pressure air called Gisela brought cold Arctic winds to the center of Germany, where it collided with two low-pressure areas called Tristan and Reinhard. As they were carrying warm sea air, the moisture was turned into snow.
Because warmer air holds more moisture, rising temperatures mean air masses will transport more water. This moisture can then become snow wherever it gets cold enough — typically at higher altitudes.
The massive snowfalls in the Alps in the winter of 2019 were also triggered by unusually moist and warm air masses. At that time, said Peter Hoffmann, meteorologist at PIK, the oceans were still quite warm in winter due to the long, hot summer — and so a lot of water evaporated.
The air currents then took it to the Alps, where an enormous amount of wet snow fell at high altitudes, causing chaos on the roads and increasing the risk of avalanches.
What's the difference between weather and climate?
Changes in local weather can be different to changes in the global climate. This can cause confusion.
While average temperatures have warmed to record-breaking levels — making regional heatwaves and wildfires more intense — climate change does not make temperatures everywhere rise. In the past 20 years, for example, winters in many areas of temperate latitudes have not been much warmer than the long-term average, said Handorf.
Complex weather systems such as the polar vortex, for instance, could be cooling parts of Europe even as the Arctic warms. And though February may be particularly cold this year, January — compared to the long-term average — might have been too warm.
"Although we don't always see warming regionally or locally, we have no signs that global warming is weakening," said Handorf. "On the contrary."
The changing jet stream also affects summer temperatures, she added. "There are studies that show we also have a more meandering jet stream in summer. And these meanders, these bulges, tend to remain more stationary." In other words, just like a cold spell in winter, the heat can last for an unusually long time in summer.
If hot Saharan air then reaches Europe through the jet stream, as it did in June 2019, for example, it can cause a long heat wave. During such scorching weeks and months, it seems obvious that the climate crisis is upon us — but the same it true when it snows.
This article was adapted from German by Ajit Niranjan
https://www.dw.com/en/cold-winter-global-warming-polar-vortex/a-56534450
See also:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56054975
lonely at the zoo...
If only we could walk with the animals, talk with the animals, grunt, squeak, squawk with the animals. Well, at Sydney's Taronga Zoo, throughout this interminable lockdown, there's at least been the odd outbreak of squawking with the animals.
In the stark absence of daily human visitors, PA system announcements by zoo staff have been crackling across the 28-hectare harbourside site as a means of maintaining a daily regimen for Taronga's original creatures of habit.
The objective is to present, as far as possible, a business-as-usual atmosphere at the zoo so that the animals don't suffer stress, which could lead to other issues, and also to ensure that they retain their fitness.
Despite our dumb human propensities, it seems zoo animals may well miss us when we're not around. Pre-lockdown, Taronga's usual attendances fluctuated from less than 1000 guests on rainy days to more than 10,000 over the course of sunny Saturdays or Sundays. Now the animals need to be content with seeing staff only.
"A day-to-day routine is essential for the animals," explains Cameron Kerr, chief executive of Taronga, "and, yes, this does mean the occasional PA announcement. While it might seem amusing to make announcements to a largely empty zoo, it does help us ensure we're providing a consistent environment for the animals in our care."
Taronga is home to more than 4000 animals across 350 species, and all have learned to live with the odd "dad joke" over the PA by zoo staff and are accustomed to the daily procession of visitors.
"Many of our animals, like chimpanzees and giraffes, have a good view of the visitors and would be engaged by their movement and chatter on a daily basis," Kerr says. "What we're learning - or confirming - during these lockdowns is that the animals spend a lot of time watching the visitors, just as visitors watch them. And that changes to the visitor [numbers] are noticed by our animals."
Even some of the animals that the zoo expected would be less likely to notice the drop-off in visitors, such as frogs, also appear to have registered the lockdown. They are apparently less likely to reveal themselves without lots of people around.
During Taronga's temporary, though indefinite, closure to the public, keepers are providing the animals with "daily enrichment to stimulate mental and physical activity" including training for the seals and birds for their popular daily displays which, during normal times, can attract hundreds of spectators.
Read more:
https://www.traveller.com.au/covid19-and-zoos-why-sydneys-taronga-zoo-animals-miss-humans-during-lockdowns-h1xisg