wolfyvegan

When the state’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the nation’s most successful youth climate suit, it sparked a Republican backlash that could lead to fundamental changes in Montana’s courts and environmental laws.

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• Farmers in a cacao-producing region of southwestern Côte d’Ivoire have seen their yields decline so much that they’re abandoning their plantations and considering switching to other crops.
• They say cacao, long a mainstay of the agricultural economy of this region and the country, is no longer profitable due to changing weather patterns and an increase in plant diseases like swollen shoot.
• An agronomist says the changing weather is partly due to deforestation caused by the expansion of cacao production in recent decades, and recommends agroforestry and reforestation as a remedy.

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• Farmers in a cacao-producing region of southwestern Côte d’Ivoire have seen their yields decline so much that they’re abandoning their plantations and considering switching to other crops.
• They say cacao, long a mainstay of the agricultural economy of this region and the country, is no longer profitable due to changing weather patterns and an increase in plant diseases like swollen shoot.
• An agronomist says the changing weather is partly due to deforestation caused by the expansion of cacao production in recent decades, and recommends agroforestry and reforestation as a remedy.

archived (Wayback Machine)

archived (Wayback Machine)

When the Vietnam War finally ended on April 30, 1975, it left behind a landscape scarred with environmental damage. Vast stretches of coastal mangroves, once housing rich stocks of fish and birds, lay in ruins. Forests that had boasted hundreds of species were reduced to dried-out fragments, overgrown with invasive grasses.

Fifty years later, Vietnam’s degraded ecosystems and dioxin-contaminated soils and waters still reflect the long-term ecological consequences of the war. Efforts to restore these damaged landscapes and even to assess the long-term harm have been limited.

Although the war spurred new international treaties aimed at protecting the environment during wartime, these efforts failed to compel post-war restoration for Vietnam. Current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East show these laws and treaties still aren’t effective.

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Farming has always been at the mercy of the weather, but recent years have seen unprecedented swings in temperature, rainfall, and storms. Droughts dry up fields, floods wash away seeds, and heatwaves scorch crops. These shifts don’t just threaten harvests—they destabilize farm incomes. Solar energy offers a much-needed anchor. By capturing sunlight, a constant even when the weather is wild, farmers can generate reliable electricity regardless of the season. This newfound consistency helps them weather financial storms even when nature is unpredictable.

Recognizing the benefits of clean energy, many governments now offer attractive incentives for solar adoption. These include grants, low-interest loans, and tax breaks designed to lower upfront costs. For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s REAP program covers up to 50% of solar installation costs. Such support makes the switch to solar not just appealing, but financially feasible for small and large farms alike. It’s a win-win: farmers get affordable energy, and communities enjoy cleaner air.

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In Ecuador, Indigenous communities are fighting for stronger safeguards to protect their sovereignty as more oil drilling looms. A right to say no to unwanted development could revolutionize a consultation process used around the world.

“We reject this future. We want to shape our own destiny, to live well in our forests.” — Silvana Nihua, Kiwaro community

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fruit featured: Garcinia mangostana

Long live the queen!

Mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana var. mangostana) is a popular tropical fruit, yet many aspects of its biology and evolutionary history are little known. Its origin remains contentious, although recent findings suggest G. mangostana L. var. malaccensis (Hook. f.) Nazre (synonym: G. malaccensis Hook. f.) as the sole progenitor. We review hypotheses on the origin of mangosteen and clarify points that have been affected by errors of fact and interpretation. The narrow focus and lack of detail in published results make their interpretation difficult. When possible, we support our interpretations with field observations and examination of herbarium specimens. We outline the main biological traits (e.g., dioecy, facultative apomixis, and polyploidy) of mangosteen and its wild relatives to infer traits that might have evolved during domestication of mangosteen. We find no clear indication that apomixis and polyploidy evolved during domestication. Polyploidy is known in the wild relatives, but apomixis has not yet been demonstrated. Also, we propose a testable new evolutionary‐ecological framework that we call “Forest‐Dusun Interface” to infer processes in the origin of mangosteen. Dusun (Malay) refers to subsistence orchards in this context. Lastly, we propose future studies to address identified knowledge gaps.

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Thumbnail image by Ivar Leidus (CC BY-SA 4.0)

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

For those who prefer to read the information:

https://www.albartlett.org/articles/art_forgotten_fundamentals_overview.html

Global temperature leaped more than 0.4°C (0.7°F) during the past two years, the 12-month average peaking in August 2024 at +1.6°C relative to the temperature at the beginning of last century (the 1880-1920 average). This temperature jump was spurred by one of the periodic tropical El Niño warming events, but many Earth scientists were baffled by the magnitude of the global warming, which was twice as large as expected for the weak 2023-2024 El Niño. We find that most of the other half of the warming was caused by a restriction on aerosol emissions by ships, which was imposed in 2020 by the International Maritime Organization to combat the effect of aerosol pollutants on human health. Aerosols are small particles that serve as cloud formation nuclei. Their most important effect is to increase the extent and brightness of clouds, which reflect sunlight and have a cooling effect on Earth. When aerosols – and thus clouds – are reduced, Earth is darker and absorbs more sunlight, thus enhancing global warming. Ships are the main aerosol source in the North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans. We quantify the aerosol effect from the geographical distribution of sunlight reflected by Earth as measured by satellites, with the largest expected and observed effects in the North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans. We find that aerosol cooling, and thus climate sensitivity, are understated in the best estimate of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Global warming caused by reduced ship aerosols will not go away as tropical climate moves into its cool La Niña phase. Therefore, we expect that global temperature will not fall much below +1.5°C level, instead oscillating near or above that level for the next few years, which will help confirm our interpretation of the sudden global warming. High sea surface temperatures and increasing ocean hotspots will continue, with harmful effects on coral reefs and other ocean life. The largest practical effect on humans today is increase of the frequency and severity of climate extremes. More powerful tropical storms, tornadoes, and thunderstorms, and thus more extreme floods, are driven by high sea surface temperature and a warmer atmosphere that holds more water vapor. Higher global temperature also increases the intensity of heat waves and – at the times and places of dry weather – high temperature increases drought intensity, including “flash droughts” that develop rapidly, even in regions with adequate average rainfall.

Polar climate change has the greatest long-term effect on humanity, with impacts accelerated by the jump in global temperature. We find that polar ice melt and freshwater injection onto the North Atlantic Ocean exceed prior estimates and, because of accelerated global warming, the melt will increase. As a result, shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is likely within the next 20-30 years, unless actions are taken to reduce global warming – in contradiction to conclusions of IPCC. If AMOC is allowed to shut down, it will lock in major problems including sea level rise of several meters – thus, we describe AMOC shutdown as the “point of no return.”

We suggest that an alternative perspective – a complement to the IPCC approach – is needed to assess these issues and actions that are needed to avoid handing young people a dire situation that is out of their control. This alternative approach will make more use of ongoing observations to drive modeling and more use of paleoclimate to test modeling and test our understanding. As of today, the threats of AMOC shutdown and sea level rise are poorly understood, but better observations of polar ocean and ice changes in response to the present accelerated global warming have the potential to greatly improve our understanding.

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Climate models have a history of underestimating the cooling effect of aerosol pollution.

Related: Will Brazil’s President Lula wake up to the climate crisis? (commentary)

Tropical deforestation was found to cause large reductions in precipitation using a range of observation-based datasets1. However, the limitations of satellite-based space-for-time statistical analysis have hindered understanding of the roles of reshaped mesoscale atmospheric circulation and regional precipitation recycling at different scales. These effects are considered nonlocal effects, which are distinct from the local effects governed by deforestation-induced reductions in evapotranspiration (ET). Here we show reversed precipitation responses to Amazon deforestation across wet and dry seasons. During the wet season, deforested grids experienced a noteworthy increase in precipitation (0.96 mm per month per percentage point forest loss), primarily attributed to enhanced mesoscale atmospheric circulation (that is, nonlocal effect). These nonlocal increases weaken with distance from deforested grids, leading to significant precipitation reductions in buffers beyond 60 km. Conversely, during the dry season, precipitation decreases in deforested grids and throughout all analysis buffers, with local effects from reduced ET dominating. Our findings highlight the intricate balance between local effects and nonlocal effects in driving deforestation-precipitation responses across different seasons and scales and emphasize the urgent need to address the rapid and extensive loss of forest in the Amazon region.

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Archived (Wayback Machine):

• earth.com article
• full study in eLife