Family of spermwhales underwater near water surface, shot from below photo credit italy sokol-dbw8sol
Generally, only spending time with their clan (numbering around 20,000), it seems that decisions about where to go, are made cooperatively in a democratic way.
Taking up to an hour to make the decision about the direction of travel, they can often travel in large groups making communal decisions about destination, route and speed, as well as when to feed and what to do about predators.
Some of these clans live over large areas, split by as much as thousands of kilometres, and it is thought to be akin to language forming in humans. Interestingly, these clans can share areas of the sea, but will only spend time with other members of their clan. Social units within clans, are based around the females, with each unit consisting of around 10 females with their offspring. These become very close, with other females babysitting young while their mothers make deep dives to feed – even suckling is done as a group.
The sperm whale has a brain which is thought to be larger than any other animal to ever live.
Over a million were killed for their very pure oil, between 1712 and 1982. There are thought to be around 300,000 in the worlds oceans, however, before whaling it is thought that there were 1.1 million.
I wrote a month ago, about Rishi Sunak and the foolish plans of the UK government to try to max out oil production from the North Sea. The governments argument was that it would help bring down costs for UK people.
This is an image from a youtube video suggesting that Rishi Sunak has investments that will benefit from this move. Whether this is true or not, he will be remembered as a prime minister who locked the UK into oil and gas at a time where the best financial move, as well as climate move is to divest fast. Should you wish to see this video yourself,Click here I would argue a fascinating subject, but beyond the scope of this site.
Unfortunately, this argument bares no water, as the extracted fossil fuels would be sold on the open market, and there would be no discount at all in the UK. As such, this will do nothing to help the UK people save money, merely give some fossil fuel companies some money, and potentially some tax revenue for the UK government, though whether this is worth the costs that will have to be paid is the future is being questioned increasingly loudly.
What is unfortunately clear, is that the things that are going to be best for the UK public is additional insulation in houses, and renewable energy. Unfortunately these are two projects which the government is increasingly eager to turn its back on.
The green housing grants, during Covid, were aimed at improving the housing stock of the UK, and it did, but only for around 1% of the houses that need to be dealt with. Furthermore, this was really a boost for the building firms, rather than the green housing grants in particular – they charged as much as possible, and the work did not really continue after the end of the period in question.
Why politicians keep spouting information that is so easily destroyed is hard to understand. It seems hard to believe that a man with the amount of money that Rishi Sunak and his wife has, would be influenced by the performance of his investment, however, given where we are going, I would argue that investing in fossil fuel extraction is a foolish move – whether in the next decade or further ahead, the fossil fuel industry must die, and it is likely to happen fast when it truly starts. Rishi Sunak has been accused of dodging scrutiny on this subject by failing to appoint a climate change committee chair (for over 18 months since Lord Deben retired) – and now the independent watchdogs chief executive has resigned in frustration. Given this position was there to keep the government to account on climate change and changes that will limit its effect
What is Rishi Sunak afraid of? Either he is attempting to avoid scrutiny, or he is incompetent – which is it?
Known as the Wollemi pine, the species evolved 91 million years ago, and was thought to have gone extinct 2 million years ago. However, in the blue mountains, west of Sydney a stand of 90 of these trees have been found. They were found in 1994, but their discovery has been kept quiet till now, while the national parks service of Australia has been planting small clumps of this tree in many other locations, in order to avoid this tree being lost in an accident.
This is a rare positive bit of news in a world where literally millions of species are considered endangered, from species of plant that you might never have heard of, to animals like the lion. We do not have time to celebrate for long, we must make sure as many others as possible will survive into the future.
It is sad to think that it is far harder to find animals or birds that are in a similar situation. This would be the equivalent of some dinosaur being found somewhere. What else is waiting to be found?
So Hertz is downsizing its electric car fleet, just a few years after buying them. Should this put off electric car buyers? Well, I would argue no, and I suspect that Hertz will live to regret this day.
So have Hertz abandoned electric cars? Nope, it is true that in the current climate, they have scaled back their electric buying car program from 100,000 cars to just 50,000 cars, but this is still a significant number.
Given that in the USA they own around 500,000 cars (elsewhere it is mostly franchise so they do not own the cars) suggesting that at the current time, Hertz will have around 10% of its fleet as electric.
What has prompted this? Well, largely a higher cost of repair cost.
The problem for Hertz is simple. They get paid a rate, to rent the car, they save nothing by it being electric, on the other hand, the renter, might save plenty of money, as refueling can be far cheaper (though admittedly, with currently high electric prices on this side of the Atlantic, public chargers are often just as expensive as petrol.
So, no, this does not (as business insider suggests) mean the end of the electric car. In fact, given that they are selling around 20,000 electric cars, it is quite likely that it will boost the number of electric cars in public hands.
It is true, that some fixes are far more than they should be (we have found that) but it is also clear that overall, electric car owners save money. Whether this will accelerate the change or slow it down, time will tell. It is often the case that once experienced few want to go back to a fossil fuel car, so renting them is useful. Unfortunately, given the price, Hertz treated them as premium, which meant this had less affect than might otherwise have been the case.
I think they will come to regret this, the world is going electric, and the transition is accelerating around the world. It seems likely that they will have to reverse this change within a decade.
Do Americans really want to go back to this for 4 more years?
In 2021, the year after Donald Trump left the white house, the USA emitted roughly 13.49% of the world emissions. To put that in context, it is over twice the emissions from the 27 members of the EU and the UK combined (this is despite the USA having a population of 330 million vs almost 500 million across these 28 countries). So, how could Donald Trump make that worse?
Well, in the first Trump term, he was largely finding his way, and by shunning anyone with experience, it took quite some time. This will not be the case during a second time.
So what has happened since he left the white house, and what can he do.
During the last 4 years, major climate legislation did a number of things. These include reversing a move to end a crackdown on governmental climate scientists (because you dont want expert advisors working for the government?) a frenzy of oil and gas drilling permets, and making sure that the Paris climate accords were not only dead, but buried.
So what is expected of Donald Trumps second term if he gets in?
Just to start:
Driving forwards on fossil fuel production (as electric cars and heat pumps make these cheaper and far more efficient)
Side-lining mainstream climate scientists
Undoing and eliminating any rules about reducing planet-heating gases including carbon-dioxide and methane among others.
He is also likely to undo all the good moves that have occurred under president Biden (perhaps of highest priority, getting rid of the Inflation reduction act, which cost 370 billion dollars and was there to support clean energy and electric cars – without a single republican vote, and looked on as the biggest defeat republicans have had.
The American first Policy Institute (pro trump) critisized Bidens “apocalyptic green fantasies” and said “Our nation needs a level regulatory playing field for all forms of energy to compete, Achieving this level playing field will require the repeal of the energy and environment provisions withint the Inflation Reduction Act”. The act has already been gutted by the house, which is currently controlled by the Republicans (this as republicans continue to turn up for ribbon cutting occasions paid for by the act in question). Thankfully, though, these projects are so popular, it would appear impossible to fully get rid of them.
The stupidity of this move – aiming to undo what little progress has been made, should mean Trump being elected would be impossible, though whether it will is another matter. Global warming will hit America hard, furthermore, Americans could each save thousands through taking on these new ideas.
It is also not true that there is a war on oil and gas production, with record levels reached under Biden last year.
It would be a clear shot in the foot, and would likely lead to the USA returning to being a Pariah on the world stage. Whether the American population will be able to hear and understand this is a different question.
One of the ways in which warming oceans are accelerating the worries of sea-level rise, is through warmer sea water lapping at the underside of glaciers, helping this to melt faster. Furthermore, the glacier moves faster when its base is wetter.
It appears that blue whales have been mating with fin whales far more frequently than previously thought. One of the things that is both exciting and alarming, is that it suggests that whales can interbreed more easily.
While they are currently listed as endangered, and are starting to recover, of the 4 subspecies, the one found in the north Atlantic and the north Pacific is the most at risk. In otherwards, this subspecies could become extinct as a result of hybridisation.
On average around 3.5% of the blue whale DNA, comes from the fin whale.
It is perhaps odd that these species would interbreed, as blue whales weigh around 85 tonnes more than fin whales.
It had been assumed that these occasional hybrids could not go on to produce fertile offspring, but this has been shown to not be the case. What appears interesting though, is that there does not appear to be any blue whale DNA in the fin whale population, suggesting that they offspring will only ever be able to breed with blue whales.
There is much work around the world, which is going into measuring temperatures as accurately as possible and watching for change. While the British empire routinely took temperature readings on certain trips, and there are various other long records, there is no human record which goes back more than a few centuries. While this is irrelevant for human caused climate change, as we only started releasing large quantities of warmth trapping carbon dioxide in the last few centuries (largely started by the industrial revolution in the UK), we want to be able to both have more records from the last few centuries, and records that go far further back.
At just 10-15cm this sponge is likely to be close to full size on a laptop or computer
A variety of natural methods have been found, but this new ancient sea sponge method is interesting. This is because, lying 30-90m below the surface of the Mediterranean. In the Mediterranean even in the shallows with the water only changing by around 10 degrees, however, below 12-40 feet (depending on churn etc) the temperature is incredibly constant year round. That is not to say that there is no change in temperature, but it is very small.
So in this instance, these sponges have been recording changing temperature over the years, and according to their tempearture records, the planet has alread warmed by 1.7° C, which is half a degree more than the United Nations climate panel has seen elsewhere.
A number of climate scientists have questioned how wide-ranging a conclusion, you can draw from readings taken from one sponge species in just one location in the world. However, the lead researcher stated “Taking a precautionary principle, our findings show taht global warming is more advanced than we thought and therefore it’s a wake-up call that we have to get on with reducing CO2. He went on to add “We will experience more serious impacts from global warming sooner than we had anticipated”.
6 different speciamins of this sponge species were collected. The sponge can take hundreds of years to grow (to a size only 10cm-15cm). As it grows, it stores strontium and calcium in a ratio which relates directly to the temperature of the water around them. The team reconstructed global water temperatures going back 300 years through this method, and then combined them with land-based temperatures, in order to arrive at global temperatures. Because of the depth, the water temperature changes little from winter to summer, which means that the water tends to match the global average with surprising accuracy.
Incidence like the volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1815 show up clearly in the record. However, unfortunately, it also confirms that manmade warming started in 1860, and given that global temperature changes are benchmarked against averages of the temperature between 1850 and 1900, it shows that this cannot be considered pre impact by humans.
However, responses are rather more encouraging. Essentially, the point is, that regardless of the sense in taking readings from a moving point, given that both our current position and the warming that we have targeted are against the same wrong number, it is irrelevant – if the start temperature was higher, but all our readings are out by the same quantity, it does not mean we will hit dangerous levels any sooner – these were worked out using the same incorrect measurements.
However, whatever is true, what is clear is that we still need to cut emissions alarmingly fast if we want to escape changes that are likely to kill many people, and displace hundreds of millions more – if not billions.
These kelp forests have an essential little helper for its survival. It has become clear that sea otters are essential members of communities of the kelp forests off the coast of California. Sea weed, which includes Kelp, locks away around 200 million tonnes of carbon each year and so are an essential part of the fight against global warming.
Climate stripes – a clear way to see global warming over time
This image is a fantastic way to be able to see climate change. Created by Professor Ed Hawkins in 2018, it shows the changing in temperature over the last 2 centuries.
Blue lines show years where the yearly average temperature is lower than the overall average (and the darker the further below the average). The red is the opposite.
While it does not need pointing out, can you see how dark it has got in the last few years.
Below is a short video about the stripes with their creator explaining them.
