Hey readers,
It’s the last Friday of the month! How are you? In case you missed it, I recently wrote about the tricky meta-science around the mask study everyone seems to be talking about.
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Kelsey Piper, senior writer |
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Q&A: A glimpse into the future of forests |
Photo courtesy of Gene Likens. |
For the scientists conducting the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the lab is the forest. In one experiment, over two miles of cables were used to heat the forest floor. A year later in a different part of the forest, scientists sprayed water onto trees, creating an artificial ice storm using pumps and fire hoses connected to a nearby stream. The hope is to see what northern hardwood forests would look like 100 years into a warmer future.
With a career spanning more than 60 years, ecologist and limnologist Gene Likens, who co-founded the Hubbard study in 1963, takes a future-looking view. As one of the scientists responsible for discovering acid rain in the 1960s — which later led to the 1990 amendments of the Clean Air Act — Likens is a scientist who pushes for action based on evidence.
“My whole life has been dominated by serendipity,” Likens said. “And I define serendipity as keeping my eyes and ears open when something interesting happens. Jump on it and try to understand what's going on. We didn't set out to discover acid rain, it was just what happened when we collected that first sample. I think a lot of science is like that.”
I spoke to Likens about the process of discovery in nature, what it means to follow your curiosity, and crafting the science that will help us understand our impact and responsibility to ecosystems. —Julieta Cardenas
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. What do long-term ecological studies show us about the effects of climate change on forest ecosystems?
They provide insights that you really can't get any other way. You can model a system, but if you're going to answer a question about what happened, and is it different, is it unusual, you need that long-term perspective in order to do that.
In the Northeast, we have primarily deciduous forests but also some coniferous forests. The deciduous forests break bud and start to grow in the spring, and we find that they are doing that significantly earlier now with the climate warming. The long-term studies at Hubbard Brook are showing that things are happening that hadn't happened before in our experience. The forests are changing, the soils are changing, the temperatures in the soils are changing. That's particularly important because that's where the roots of the forest species are.
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"You need that long-term perspective" |
There’s an analogy that assessing the health of an ecosystem can be thought of as gathering diagnostic information the way a doctor would, but in the ecosystem case, it is taking hydrological samples. How fair is this analogy? What do the samples tell us?
So that was something that my colleague Herbert Bormann and I started with a long time ago. We wrote a paper back in 1967, and we used that metaphor. Can we use the chemistry of stream water flowing out of a small watershed in the same way a physician uses the chemistry of blood and urine to diagnose the health of a human patient? If that chemistry changes, then the doctor has to go inside and look at the kidneys or the pancreas, the lungs, or whatever. In our case, we have to look at the soils, look at the microbial response in the soils, look at the physiology of the trees that are growing there, and so forth.
That metaphor gave us a way of describing to the public how we're trying to assess the health of this very complicated forest ecosystem. The forest ecosystem is made up of a vast variety of species: plant species, animal species, microbial species, and chemical species. We need to try to make sense of all that and how they're interacting together. Your research led to the discovery of acid rain, which led to improved legislation with the Clean Air Act amendments. How can scientists continue to help guide policy in ways that can protect our future?
The fact is that the climate has already changed. We're now in a situation where we need climate action, and by that I mean how do we respond to the changes that have occurred, the warming that has occurred, the highly increased variability of the climate, which we have documented clearly at Hubbard Brook? It's much more variable than it was.
Normally, in February, we will have cold snowy conditions. Well, we don't. Today, it might be warm, tomorrow it may be cold. So the living species like trees, and the animals that live in those forests, have to respond to that variability or they don't survive. That is where we have to provide scientific information that says, yes, the climate has changed, it has these effects. And if those effects are seriously degrading the system, the ecological system where we live and where we study, then we have to do something different.
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Why is there so much secrecy in philanthropy? |
It’s surprisingly hard to say how the ultrarich donates. Last week, the Chronicle of Philanthropy published its annual ranking of the top 50 donors from 2022. But despite its best efforts, the publication can’t create a comprehensive list. Senior reporter Whizy Kim spoke with Benjamin Soskis — a historian and senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s Center for Nonprofits and Philanthropy — about the tensions over transparency in philanthropy and the role of lists in encouraging the very wealthy to give.
“What I found interesting was the birth of modern philanthropy rankings as a carrot-and-stick for the ultrawealthy, who didn't want to lose status by dropping down the Forbes richest list — so a new status symbol was created,” Kim said. “Since then, philanthropy lists have been a double-edged tool, used by rich philanthropists as a way to get publicity and applause, and by the public as a way to get some transparency. There's a never-ending push and pull between the two.”
More on this topic from Vox: |
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What Europe showed the world about renewable energy |
Jens Büttner/Getty Images |
The latest data on Europe’s renewable transition tells a remarkably upbeat story about the hard things countries with enough political will can accomplish on climate change. Two things happened in 2022 that made renewables outcompete coal and gas: Renewable technology is getting reliably cheaper, and its competitors are getting more expensive. By the end of last year, wind and solar combined overtook natural gas in electricity generation in Europe. Senior reporter Rebecca Leber untangles the stats and what this milestone means for Europe (and the US).
More on this topic from Vox: |
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One of the first pieces of advice I give to younger journalists who want to write about public policy is to read two features, both by Haley Sweetland Edwards, in the Washington Monthly, from 2013. I was reminded of them again recently, and they remain really, really, really good. The first is on the rule-making process for Dodd-Frank, the enormous financial regulation bill passed in 2010, but it doubles as the best description of federal rule-making I’ve seen on any topic. The second is about a panel of doctors that effectively determines what Medicare pays doctors. That is … the doctors are setting their own pay. It’s such a good example of finding a problem hidden in plain sight and explaining it well. —Dylan Matthews
Overpopulation concerns are a zombie meme: No matter how much the facts on the ground undercut it, it just keeps coming back. This week’s revival came in a Scientific American piece by historian Naomi Oreskes, with a title that says it all: “Eight billion people in the world is a crisis, not an achievement.” Unless you’re Thanos and you have a full set of the Infinity Stones, there’s not much you can do about how many people are on the planet now. And if you’re worried about more overpopulation, I’ve got good news — you’re winning, because we’re on track for less and less population growth in the future. That will present all kinds of unprecedented challenges, but on the plus side, maybe we’ll finally be done with these takes. —Bryan Walsh
Even if rapid AI development neither kills us all nor eliminates most jobs, there’s still the specter of a new technological boom driving the stake of inequality deeper into society. “It is not those earning a wage income from manually fabricating microchips,” writes the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine, Nathan Gardels, “who will reap the compounding value from productivity-enhancing and wealth-generating intelligent machines.” It will, as usual, be those who own them. AI progress alone will not reprogram the economy into an engine of equitable abundance. For that, we’ll have to devise new ways of creating and distributing wealth. —Oshan Jarow
So, I watched the new Ant-Man movie earlier this week. It’s bleak out here! If you love imagination and wonder, do not venture into the Quantum Realm. —Izzie Ramirez
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