Stop and Smell the Roses

While they still have fragrance...

"Air pollution from power plants and automobiles is destroying the fragrance of flowers and thereby inhibiting the ability of pollinating insects to follow scent trails to their source, a new University of Virginia study indicates. This could partially explain why wild populations of some pollinators, particularly bees -- which need nectar for food -- are declining in several areas of the world, including California and the Netherlands."

Oh, just GREAT! We're already losing the trees, the fish, the walruses, and now the scent of flowers? On Sunday, after I read this, I decided to go to Cross Mansion to look for some. Formerly a private residence, it is now a park, next to Jockey Hollow of Revolutionary War fame. There weren't very many flowers, but I did find a few sweetly modest blossoms remained in the formal gardens.

Along the way I passed this monstrosity. I try not to be critical because it's impossible to live in this society without SOME carbon footprint, but surely there is a line and a house this ridiculously large must have crossed it!No matter how fancy your mansion is though, it won't save your trees. The poisonous gasses are quite democratic, there is no other atmosphere. We all share the same one.

And it has nothing to do with age! This young tree above is deader than the older ones.

I used to pass the gardens on my daily path and often stopped in. This section has lovely stonework and an arbor. That white oak above the wisteria is very old and its crown is extremely thin.

This allee of Japanese Andromeda once had a dense canopy of leaves but there is not much left now but spindly bare trunks.

This splendid huge silver maple has many bare branches. It is obviously very old but that is NOT the reason for the thinning and loss of foliage - such trees are genetically evolved to live for hundreds of years! In the foreground is a small replacement, caged against the deer. But the leaves on the young tree are damaged as well.This is called a twin leaf.I don't know all the names of the many groundcovers here, but looking at the foliage in an established garden such as this, that boasts a huge variety of plants and trees, is a useful exercise because it demonstrates quite conclusively and irrefutably that the symptoms of atmospheric poison are widespread amongst every conceivable species that needs to photosynthesize in order to survive.

These are the leaves of an Oriental lily.The Mountain Laurel has leaves that are yellow or just plain missing.The peony leaves go from scorched to flamed.Here in this perennial geranium is evident the loss of chlorophyll thanks to toxic greenhouse gasses.Phlox is no better.These conifers are pathetically thin, as is the pin oak by the house.The tower was once almost invisible behind evergreens but now there are stumps instead.

This is a cedar that should be blocking out all light.

Sassafras leaves fading from a lack of photosynthesis, and even worse:

"The scent molecules produced by flowers in a less polluted environment, such as in the 1800s, could travel for roughly 1,000 to 1,200 meters; but in today's polluted environment downwind of major cites, they may travel only 200 to 300 meters," said Jose D. Fuentes, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and a co-author of the study. "This makes it increasingly difficult for pollinators to locate the flowers."
The result, potentially, is a vicious cycle where pollinators struggle to find enough food to sustain their populations, and populations of flowering plants, in turn, do not get pollinated sufficiently to proliferate and diversify.
Other studies, as well as the actual experience of farmers, have shown that populations of bees, particularly bumblebees, and butterflies have declined greatly in recent years. Fuentes and his team of U.Va. researchers, including Quinn McFrederick and James Kathilankal, believe that air pollution, especially during the peak period of summer, may be a factor.
To investigate this, they created a mathematical model of how the scents of flowers travel with the wind. The scent molecules produced by flowers are very volatile and they quickly bond with pollutants such as ozone, hydroxyl and nitrate radicals, which destroy the aromas they produce. This means that instead of traveling intact for long distances with the wind, the scents are chemically altered and the flowers, in a sense, no longer smell like flowers. This forces pollinators to search farther and longer and possibly to rely more on sight and less on smell.
The scientists calculated scent levels and distances that scents can travel under different conditions, from relatively unpolluted pre-industrial revolution levels, to the conditions now existing in rural areas downwind from large cities.
"It quickly became apparent that air pollution destroys the aroma of flowers, by as much as 90 percent from periods before automobiles and heavy industry," Fuentes said. "And the more air pollution there is in a region, the greater the destruction of the flower scents."


link to the original story

When pine cones outnumber needles, that tree is in distress.

Here is a copper beech, it's deep leaves bleached to a sickly rust, because it cannot photosynthesize in the atmosphere we have sullied with our pollution.

Asters, and a young Japanese Andromeda, with damaged foliage.It seems most people have forgotten that pine trees are supposed to be green all the time.

This is native butterfly weed leaves and pods.This climbing hydrangea has a late, and stunted bloom, and leaves that range from chlorotic to fried.a Dahlia! The Dawn Redwood is fascinating. It has long dangling growths I have never seen before. On them are nascent cones, very tiny and curious.

Maidenhair fern is shriveled and brown.This home looks as though it has been foreclosed upon, and the occupant abandoned it!
I think this might be leaves of foxglove.The hollies are so bare. Only a few leaves remain, and they are thick with berries. This park used to be characterized by the most intense hedges of vibrant saturated green hollies, and other evergreens. and now it is reduced to stumps.This is a newly planted Japanese Andromeda, in no better condition that the old ones.These are dead flowers from the spring. When plants are poisoned, they can't properly develop and drop their seeds, fruits or nuts and leaves so sometimes they cling, brown and shriveled, and unable to reproduce.

The most painful part for me was to revisit this hydrangea. I still am not sure what variety it is, as it is not labeled, but for years I have paged through nursery catelogues and tried to figure it out and locate the same cultivar, to plant in my own garden. It has absolutely the most gigantic and splendid variegated panicals.

Now most of the flowers are brown.

This enormous example is almost 2 feet long, but still it doesn't have the rich variety of color I remember. The leaves spell doom.

Now this little sample, is what made my heart sing when I first saw it. The shadings of colors are so delicate, and rich.

Here, I just love this:

"Documents later showed that President George W. Bush had intervened personally on the level of smog protection for wildlife, farmlands, parks and open spaces."

from EPA Scraps Bush-era Smog Rule and mind you, the Rethugs, chief among them Murkowski and McInsane, are going to introduce amendments to prevent the EPA from doing its job, according to the NYT

Terrifyingly, the EPA is being pressured to allow HIGHER concentrations of ethanol in gasoline, which may or may not be largely responsible for the dying trees but is most definitely responsible for cancers, asthma, heart failure and emphysema, not to mention, in spite of its being marketed as "green energy," is dependent on petroleum for pesticides and fertilizers, production and transport! And of course it corrals land that could be used for food.

The Age of Stupid

"Some areas of the state have had 20 inches since Friday. In the northern section, areas have experienced "historic" amounts of rain well in excess of so-called 100-year predictions, which describe a storm with the likelihood of happening once every century, said Stooksbury. The downpours come just months after much of the region emerged from an epic two-year drought."

extreme weather anyone?

The spokespeople for The Age of Stupid at last night's world premiere had no scientific compunctions about linking disasters like Hurricane Katrina to climate change, from humans creating greenhouse gas emissions. It's about time!

And what of pumpkins? The squash family is known to be particularly vulnerable to ozone pollution.

I called the NJ Department of Agriculture yesterday, to ask them if they monitor in any way the effects of airborne pollution on crops and finally wound up with some cretin named Carol who repeated robotically, literally, the classic line "That's not our department, call the DEP."

Seriously, how funny is that? Wouldn't you think the faintest possibility that crop yields are down due to airborne pollution would interest the taxpayer funded Department of Agriculture?

But, nooooo....

"How to Address Climate and Air Quality Simultaneously"

For Paul Kelly and Anyone Else Who's Interested

The Parallel Universe

Yesterday I went to a football game at an exclusive parochial school, with an extensive, handsome campus. I found myself in a crowd of people with the distinctly unsettling conviction that I was most likely the only person there who realized that the venerable trees surrounding the field were staggeringly damaged by greenhouse gasses. One person said to me, as I surveyed the view, "Isn't it beautiful? It's all so pretty and green!!"

But this is what the leaves look like. These are typical of what is happening on a massive scale. They aren't shading to gorgeous hues of red, magenta, orange and gold. Instead, they are pockmarked, shriveled, scorched, and falling to the ground prematurely in vast quantities.
Have people forgotten that trees as recently as two years ago had crowns dense with foliage? Don't they notice that leaves are individually smaller than they should be? Don't they wonder why the sidewalks are covered with dead brown leaves? Does it not seem at all peculiar that leaves are limp, dry and wilted?



The conifer on the left should be lush and full - the tree on the right has a few stunted pears on it, and hardly any leaves at all.



Normally, the canopy of the woods would block out most of the sky. But then, things are no longer normal.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/aug/07/disasters Melting ice and rising seas leads to increased volcanic activity, earthquakes and tsunamis! Yay!

Methane:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es9026387

Gradual warming of a regional current has caused temperature-sensitive methane hydrate below the seabed to break down and discharge the gas, the researchers say.

Message from Bill McKibbon, founder of 350.org

People, Let's Get Our Carbon Down

By Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. & Bill McKibben

from
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090928/yearwood_mckibben


Here's a question whose answer might surprise you: what American songwriter penned the most-listened-to piece of environmental protest music of all time? Somebody with an acoustic guitar? John Denver?
The answer, almost certainly, is Marvin Gaye. "Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)" appeared on What's Going On, the album he released in May 1971, which went straight to the top of the charts, even though Motown boss Berry Gordy thought it was too political to sell. "I realized that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people. I wanted them to take a look at what was happening in the world," Gaye said later. The Vietnam War, protested in the album's title song, was part of that story, and so was drug abuse--and so was "oil wasted on the oceans and upon our seas," and "radiation in the ground and in the sky," and "fish full of mercury."
Where did all the blue sky go?
Poison is the wind that blows
From the north, east, south and sea
For a brief moment after the first Earth Day, it made perfect sense for the civil rights and environmental movements to be singing the same tune. Tragically, those movements soon diverged--diverged so far that some people still find it odd that activists like ourselves are working side by side again on issues like global warming and poverty. But it makes perfect sense--there is no threat to social justice greater than the breakdown of our earth's physical systems, and no way to ease that threat without rearranging power, both in America and around the world.
Think for a minute about Hurricane Katrina: those high winds blew in a lot of truths. For one, we've amped up nature in a dangerous way: scientists now expect ever stronger storms to rake our shores. For another, poverty puts some people at far more risk than others. No one will ever forget those pictures of the Lower Ninth Ward when the levee broke, but in almost every city on earth the poorest people live in the equivalent of the Lower Ninth. It's not that everyone won't eventually be affected by climate change--plenty of middle-class white people lost their homes when the storm rampaged across Louisiana and Mississippi. But almost everywhere, rich people occupy higher ground, and the places that flood belong to those who can't afford better. As the oceans rise throughout this century, those are the places that will turn wet and swampy first--substandard housing in the twenty-first century still means lead paint and asthma, but now it means you better cut a hole in the attic so you can get on the roof and wait for the helicopter.
And of course there are whole nations built on low ground--places like Bangladesh, which may see a fifth of its land under water. In this decade we've watched diseases like dengue fever spread through the poorest parts of the poor world, driven by the mosquitoes that like the warm, wet world we're building. We've watched blocs of nations--low-lying islands, for instance--turn to the UN to demand action to ensure their very survival. Almost without exception, these endangered places are filled with people of color, and with poor people.
That's why the fight against climate change is a very basic fight for people in New Orleans, or in Oakland, or in DC--or in Dhaka, and Calcutta, and Lagos. These are the places that will drive the demographic future, here and abroad; the centuries to come belong to black and brown and yellow humans. But 200 years of burning coal and gas and oil, mostly by Americans and Europeans, threaten to make that future impossible. That's why, right now, we've got to take a united stand to slow it down--why 350.org will be holding demonstrations around the planet on October 24 to demand that our leaders pay attention to science and limit carbon concentrations to 350 parts per million. That's the most important number on the planet, though no one knew it eighteen months ago. NASA's Jim Hansen and his team reported recently that concentrations higher than 350 are not compatible with "the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." Since we're at 387 and rising right now, that's very bad news. It explains why the Arctic is melting, why Australia is drying up and why we watch the hurricane season with more trepidation with each passing year.
It also explains why more than a thousand actions are already planned for October 24, in every corner of the planet. The earth's immune system is finally kicking in, people are signing up to march in China and India, and churches across America are pledging to ring their bells 350 times that day. It may turn out to be the largest global environmental action of all time, and beyond any doubt the most beautiful and diverse. Some of those protests will be atop lofty mountains, or undersea off the Great Barrier Reef, or on the lovely organic farms of Vermont. And some will be in grittier places, where the battle is even more crucial.
That battle--which began when the Hip Hop Caucus and Green for All announced the Green the Block campaign on August 4 from the West Wing of the White House--is for many things. One of those is a stronger deal at the Copenhagen climate conference in December than the weak agreement currently under consideration. Yvo de Boer, the international diplomat who is chairing those talks, recently pointed out as diplomatically as possible that the numbers on the table are nowhere near what the science demands. "This is not enough to address climate change," he said. Later he told activists that it would help the process enormously if they would mobilize: "If you could get your members out on the street before Copenhagen, that would be incredibly valuable." So we will--and if Copenhagen is to succeed, we must move American policy too. The Waxman-Markey legislation on Capitol Hill goes further than any climate legislation in the past, but it's still riddled with loopholes and giveaways, because members of Congress still fear the coal industry more than they fear the effects of climate change (or climate-minded voters).
But this environmentalism can't just be about the dangers we'll face if we don't take action--Green the Block means embracing the changes we must make as a way to build inclusive, thriving local economies. We need to put people to work swinging hammers--not building luxury condos for people with easy credit but installing insulation in old homes and solar hot-water heaters on roofs. We need urban farming and strong local businesses standing up to the big boxes that suck the life and money from communities.
We believe we will be able to affect the decisions in Copenhagen and in Congress, because some of the leaders of this new movement are different from the environmental lobbyists of the past. The old school are still important, but their constituencies are also graying, their work too often confined to making cozy arrangements with the powers that be. The new environmentalism draws everyone from church people to business people. The world's greatest mountain climbers are busy recruiting their brethren for October 24, urging them to get up high with banners. Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver are rallying small farmers and food activists; people will rally at many a farmers' market that day. And b-boys and graffiti artists are busy recruiting their friends to create images of 350.
But most of all, the constituency is young people, who understand that they will bear the results of inaction for their whole lives--and who understand in a visceral way the hopeful possibilities that come from a newly connected world. Marvin Gaye and the soul era gave voice to the oppressed during the struggle for civil rights. Now young people are singing new freedom songs and identifying with one another under an umbrella known as hip-hop. The swagger and style that young people and their urban-influenced culture bring to the green movement bear little resemblance to the old tree-hugging brand of environmentalism. But as the conscious caretakers of a "block" on the brink of climate catastrophe, they are powerful partners in the green movement.
That's why the soul of modern environmentalism is right where Marvin Gaye left it in 1971, the spot we never should have walked away from:
Oh, things ain't what they used to be
What about this overcrowded land?
How much more abuse from man can she stand?


About Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr.

The Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. is president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus.
About Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books, most recently The Bill McKibben Reader, an essay collection. A scholar in residence at Middlebury College, he is co-founder of 350.org, the largest global grassroots organizing campaign on climate change.

A Lovely Video

I think, if you click on it twice, you'll go to better quality at youtube:


Shared with me by RPauli, thank you Richard!

THE Explanation for Just About Everything

Glen, a commenter at climateprogress.org, wrote that climate change does not have the impact of a terrorist attack because it:

1. doesn’t have a human face
2. doesn’t violate our moral sensibilities
3. seems to be a threat to the unseen future but NOT to the present
4. human sensitivity to relative rather than absolute changes of the environment

And this was my response to it:

I think it does have at least three, which just may not be apparent to everyone - but soon will be. The human face of climate change, which already exists, is all those people who are enduring famine, resource wars, loss of their home, drought and extreme weather, and the millions and billions more who will. The injustice of leaving an uninhabitable planet to future generations - as well as the unfairness of the poorest on the globe, those with the lowest contribution to carbon emissions, suffering first and most - violate moral sensibilities. The present is most certainly already displaying negative impacts, from rivers going dry and glaciers melting, to trees dying, to wildfires and bigger more powerful hurricanes, and buckling tundra in the far north, not to mention, all the biodiversity under the threat (certainty?) of mass extinction.

I think this is a significant debate because I believe that blaming human nature, and proposing that it has evolved to not recognize distant threats, is a diversion from the fierce fury that should be felt by all towards the professional deniers out there, and those industries who bankroll their well-coordinated campaigns to confuse the public. I question whether it is so much indelible human nature leading the average person to ignore climate change and our role in it, and how much is due to deliberate and criminal lies. If it was innately ordained that people could not recognize and react with the necessary urgency, what of those scientists and lay people who DO recognize and feel the urgency? Are they genetic aberrations? Or are they just smart enough, or pragmatic enough, or well-educated enough, to see through the propaganda - or maybe, they live on a drowning island in the Pacific.

That's probably enough to focus the mind.

I should have added that the other factor in explaining why people refuse to recognize 1, 2 and 3, even though they are quite evident, is that certain implications inexorably follow, and these implications are uncomfortable, to say the least.

One is, that free markets will not and cannot solve this problem of the commons. This makes ideologically rigid Ayn Rand acolytes apoplectic. Another is, that we average Americans with huge carbon footprints are going to HAVE TO change our self-indulgent profligate ways. We cannot continue to squander and consume everything in sight. OUCH!!

Furthermore, there is an unfortunate tendency for people to climb on the prostrate rubble of the less fortunate, to blame them and vilify them and even exterminate them. So it's easier to shriek about immigrants and fetishize fears of terrorists than confront the real problems we create for ourselves. Like greenhouse gas emissions.

Oh, dear. I'm getting to sound more and more like the phantom Admin at survivalacres. He closed the blog in disgust at human recalcitrance, but you can subscribe to the newsletter at http://survivalacres.com/wordpress/ and conveniently buy a 10 year supply of freeze dried food for the coming apocalypse!

In response to a friend who is frustrated by denialism, I share this reply:

Ah! We are in the parallel universe, you and I.

How familiar your experience is, to me.

We sound the alarm and no one listens. I have had people just stare at me and then change the topic of conversation from mass extinction and an unlivable planet to french fries and baby formula.

People do not want to confront the unfathomable challenge we have created in the last 200 years of burning fossil fuels at a reckless rate, heedless of the consequences that were warned of from the very beginning! It was too much fun! Such salaciously instant gratification!

Americans spurned Jimmy Carter - accused of "malaise" (a word he never actually used, when warning us of our profligacy and squandering, but what has truthiness to do with it?) in favor of Reagan's message (Mourning in America) which was rampant growing and polluting and consuming, with delirious abandon, until the entire biosphere is depleted, and like Easter Island, is going to be fucking DEAD!

Thanks, Reagan Rethugs, and Paultards, and everybody who ever ignored science, and reality, and the fact that rearranging the deck chairs on the ONE Titanic we have, PLANET EARTH, isn't going to save anybody!