Nature's carbon sinks start to fail

Firefighters battling the Tsah Creek wildfire in British Columbia. Last year’s wildfires in Canada released as much carbon as six months of US fossil-fuel emissions. Photograph: J Winter/Guardian

From The Guardian

It begins each day at nightfall. As the light disappears, billions of zooplankton, crustaceans and other marine organisms rise to the ocean surface to feed on microscopic algae, returning to the depths at sunrise. The waste from this frenzy – Earth’s largest migration of creatures – sinks to the ocean floor, removing millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year.

This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions.

But as the Earth heats up, scientists are increasingly concerned that those crucial processes are breaking down.

In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.

There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor.

“We’re seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems. We’re seeing massive cracks on land – terrestrial ecosystems are losing their carbon store and carbon uptake capacity, but the oceans are also showing signs of instability,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told an event at New York Climate Week in September.

“Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end,” he said.

The 2023 breakdown of the land carbon sink could be temporary: without the pressures of drought or wildfires, land would return to absorbing carbon again. But it demonstrates the fragility of these ecosystems, with massive implications for the climate crisis.

Reaching net zero is impossible without nature. In the absence of technology that can remove atmospheric carbon on a large scale, the Earth’s vast forests, grasslands, peat bogs and oceans are the only option for absorbing human carbon pollution, which reached a record 37.4bn tonnes in 2023.

At least 118 countries are relying on the land to meet national climate targets. But rising temperatures, increased extreme weather and droughts are pushing the ecosystems into uncharted territory.

The kind of rapid land sink collapse seen in 2023 has not been factored into most climate models. If it continues, it raises the prospect of rapid global heating beyond what those models have predicted.

For the past 12,000 years, the Earth’s climate has existed in a fragile equilibrium. Its stable weather patterns allowed the development of modern agriculture, which now supports a population of more than 8 billion people.

As human emissions rose, the amount absorbed by nature increased too: higher carbon dioxide can mean plants grow faster, storing more carbon. But this balance is beginning to shift, driven by rising heat.

“This stressed planet has been silently helping us and allowing us to shove our debt under the carpet thanks to biodiversity,” says Rockström. “We are lulled into a comfort zone – we cannot really see the crisis.”

Only one major tropical rainforest – the Congo basin – remains a strong carbon sink that removes more than it releases into the atmosphere. Exacerbated by El Niño weather patterns, deforestation and global heating, the Amazon basin is experiencing a record-breaking drought, with rivers at an all-time low. Expansion of agriculture has turned tropical rainforests in south-east Asia into a net source of emissions in recent years.

Emissions from soil – which is the second-largest active carbon store after the oceans – are expected to increase by as much as 40% by the end of the century if they continue at the current rate, as soils become drier and microbes break them down faster.

Tim Lenton, professor of climate change and Earth system science at Exeter University, says: “We are seeing in the biosphere some surprising responses that are not what got predicted, just as we are in the climate.

“You have to question: to what degree can we rely on them as carbon sinks or carbon stores?” he says.

A paper published in July found that while the total amount of carbon absorbed by forests between 1990 and 2019 was steady, it varied substantially by region. The boreal forests – home to about a third of all carbon found on land, which stretch across Russia, Scandinavia, Canada and Alaska – have seen a sharp fall in the amount of carbon they absorb, down more than a third due to climate crisis-related beetle outbreaks, fire and clearing for timber.

Combined with the declining resilience of the Amazon and drought conditions in parts of the tropics, the hot conditions in the northern forests helped drive the collapse of the land sink in 2023 – causing a spike in the rate of atmospheric carbon.

“In 2023 the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere is very high and this translates into a very, very low absorption by the terrestrial biosphere,” says Philippe Ciais, a researcher at the French Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, who was an author of the most recent paper.

“In the northern hemisphere, where you have more than half of CO2 uptake, we have seen a decline trend in absorption for eight years,” he says. “There is no good reason to believe it will bounce back.”

The oceans – nature’s largest absorber of CO2 – have soaked up 90% of the warming from fossil fuels in recent decades, driving a rise in sea temperatures. Studies have also found signs that this is weakening the ocean carbon sink.

“Overall, models agreed that both the land sink and the ocean sink are going to decrease in the future as a result of climate change. But there’s a question of how quickly that will happen. The models tend to show this happening rather slowly over the next 100 years or so,” says Prof Andrew Watson, head of Exeter University’s marine and atmospheric science group.

“This might happen a lot quicker,” he says. “Climate scientists [are] worried about climate change not because of the things that are in the models but the knowledge that the models are missing certain things.”

Many of the latest Earth systems models used by scientists include some of the effects of global heating on nature, factoring in impacts such as the dieback of the Amazon or slowing ocean currents. But events that have become major sources of emissions in recent years have not been incorporated, say scientists.

“None of these models have factored in losses like extreme factors which have been observed, such as the wildfires in Canada last year that amounted to six months of US fossil emissions. Two years before, we wrote a paper that found that Siberia also lost the same amount of carbon,” says Ciais.

Mankind has been spewing CO2 into the atmosphere for more than a century, confident that Nature would deal with it.  But this is no longer happening.  We need to accelerate our efforts to slash carbon emissions.  Meanwhile at the COP29, the latest climate gabfest, lobbyists from oil and gas companies continue to try to stop moves away from carbon fuels, and governements pretend to care.

They made 1000 times more plastic than they cleaned up

Companies such as ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell, TotalEnergies and ChevronPhillips have only diverted 0.1% of the plastic they produced since 2019 away from the environment, according to data. Photograph: Larina Marina/Shutterstock

From The Guardian

Oil and chemical companies who created a high-profile alliance to end plastic pollution have produced 1,000 times more new plastic in five years than the waste they diverted from the environment, according to new data obtained by Greenpeace.

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) was set up in 2019 by a group of companies which include ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell, TotalEnergies and ChevronPhillips, some of the world’s biggest producers of plastic. They promised to divert 15m tonnes of plastic waste from the environment in five years to the end of 2023, by improving collection and recycling, and creating a circular economy.

Documents from a PR company that have been seen by the Guardian suggest that a key aim of the AEPW was to “change the conversation” away from “simplistic bans of plastic” which were being proposed across the world in 2019 amid an outcry over the scale of plastic pollution leaching into rivers and harming public health.

Early last year the alliance target of clearing 15m tonnes of waste plastic was quietly scrapped as “just too ambitious”.

New analysis by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie, obtained by Greenpeace’s Unearthed team and shared with the Guardian, looked at the plastics output of the five alliance companies; chemical company Dow, which holds the AEPW’s chairmanship, the oil companies ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies, and ChevronPhillips, a joint venture of the US oil giants Chevron and Phillips 66.


The data reveals the five companies alone produced 132m tonnes of two types of plastic; polyethylene (PE) and PP (polypropylene) in five years – more than 1,000 times the weight of the 118,500 tonnes of waste plastic the alliance has removed from the environment in the same period. The waste plastic was diverted mostly by mechanical or chemical recycling, the use of landfill, or waste to fuel, AEPW documents state.

The amount of plastic produced is likely to be an underestimate as it only covers two of the most widely used polymers; polyethylene which is used for plastic bottles and bags, and polypropylene, used for food packaging. It does not include other major plastics such as polystyrene.

The new data were revealed as delegates prepared to meet in Busan, South Korea, to hammer out the world’s first treaty to cut plastic pollution. The treaty has a mandate to agree on a legally binding global agreement to tackle plastic pollution across the entire plastics life cycle.

But the talks, which have been subject to heavy lobbying by the alliance and fossil fuel companies, are on a knife-edge in a row over whether caps to global plastic production will be included in the final treaty.

Will McCallum, a co-executive director at Greenpeace UK, said the revelations had stripped off the thin layer of greenwash hiding the growing mountain of plastic waste oil companies were producing.

“The recycling schemes they’re promoting can barely make a dent in all the plastic these companies are pumping out,” he said. “They’re letting the running tap flood the house while trying to scoop up the water with a teaspoon. The only solution is to cut the amount of plastic produced in the first place.”

Bill McKibben, a US environmentalist, said: “It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world. The oil and gas industry – which is pretty much the same thing as the plastics industry – has been at this for decades.”

ProfSteve Fletcher, from the Revolution Plastics Institute at the University of Portsmouth, said recently there was now compelling evidence that only a reduction in primary plastic polymer production, or virgin plastic, would deliver a substantive cut in plastic pollution.

Documents from the PR company Weber Shandwick outline how the AEPW was created in 2019 after they were approached by the American Chemical Council seeking ways to counter the “demonisation” of plastic and the growing calls for bans on plastic items.

The alliance paid Weber Shandwick $5.6m for its work in 2019, according to US tax returns.

The documents state the alliance was intended to change the conversation away from “short-term simplistic bans of plastic” and create “real, long-term solutions” for managing waste, like recycling.

But documents filed in California in September, where the attorney general, Rob Bonta, is suing ExxonMobil, argue the company has deceived the public for 50 years, with misleading public statements and slick marketing, about the recyclability of plastic.

The UN treaty talks start as plastic production continues to soar. Between 2000 and 2019 the global annual production of plastics doubled, reaching 460m tonnes. Plastic waste has more than doubled, from 156m tonnes in 2000 to 353m tonnes in 2019, only 9% of which was ultimately recycled, according to an OECD report.

Mass production of first solid-state EV battery

 From The Electric Viking

Solid-state batteries have no liquid electrolyte.   They have a much greater energy density than conventional lithium-ion batteries, and even greater than sodium-ion.  This particular battery has a lower energy density than other solid-state batteries which are still in developmental mode.  But the company developing these batteries (Chery) expects to double their energy density by 2027.  They can also be charged 6 times faster than conventional batteries (fully charged in 5 minutes), and will likely end up being much cheaper too.

The energy density of these batteries will be high enough to power heavy duty "diesel" trucks.

The commercialisation of solid-state batteries appeared to be half a decade away, or more.  And here they are.  

Step by step, we move closer to the point where ICE vehicles will just be unsellable, and all cars will be EVs.

Our ancestors were lovers not fighters

The reconstructed face of Krijn, the oldest Neanderthal found in the Netherlands, displayed at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden on September 6, 2021.

 

Bart Maat/ANP/AFP via Getty Images

I've always wondered about the grim history of our species: how we eliminated our competitors at the dawn of history and emerged as the only human species left. But that depressing view of our origins may be quite wrong.  We're like the bonobos, who when different groups meet in the forest immediately make love instead of killing each other.

From Scientific American

At the heart of scientific questions about the origins of humanity lie questions of human nature. Are Homo sapiens intrinsically lovers or fighters, predators or prey, lucky survivors or inevitable conquerors?

The friendlier answers to those queries keep coming, seen in a spate of genetic findings and some recent fossil discoveries. They also underline how tough life was for our prehistoric ancestors. Despite the eight billion people on Earth today, and counting, just surviving was winning for most of humanity’s history.

Not everyone did. Only 200,000 years ago, our ancestors lived on a planet teeming with varied human relatives: Neandertals lived in Europe and the Middle East. Denisovans, known today only from bone fragments, teeth and DNA, dwelled across Asia and perhaps even in the Pacific. “Hobbits,” or Homo floresiensis, a diminutive species, lived in Indonesia, as another short-statured species, called Homo luzonensis, did in the Philippines. Even Homo erectus, the grandparent of early human species, was still running around as recently as 112,000 years ago.

Now they are all gone. Except in our genes. Denisovans interbred with Neandertals, and both mated with modern humans. Genes from “an unknown hominin in Africa” also mark modern humans’ genomes. The initial discovery of these admixtures, starting in 2010, shook up the once-conventional “Out of Africa” picture of human origins, which saw a small, singular group of human ancestors developing language and then replacing all others worldwide within the last 100,000 years.

Instead, the emerging picture of our origins is less of a family tree, and more of a tangled shrub, one whose winding branches wove distinct human groups together into today’s broader human population. People today largely derive from interbreeding between modern-looking humans in Africa and the disparate human populations littering the wider world. Those African expatriates themselves first arose from scattered, intermittently admixtured populations found across that continent.

Neandertals’ genes illuminate the extent of this intermingling. Rather than waging a war of extermination, modern humans and Neandertals co-existed for at least 10,000 years in Europe and Asia some 50,000 years ago. Or maybe even earlier, with evidence hinting that Homo sapiens lived in Greece 210,000 years ago, then ceded Europe to Neandertals. Genetic studies suggest this gene-swapping peaked twice, at about 200,000 years ago and again 50,000 years ago. Even some of the bacteria in our mouths, ponder that, appear to have a Neandertal origin. Because of that early mixing, Neandertals themselves averaged 2.5 to 3.7 percent Homo sapiens DNA, a contribution that confused the family tree later.

The demise of the Neandertals, who vanish from the fossil record after 40,000 years ago, instead appears more a matter of demographics. In a 2021 survey, the paleoanthropological field largely agreed that Neandertals’ small population size led to their disappearance. A Science report this summer backs this up. For that study, Princeton University researchers looked at recurrent gene flow between humans and Neandertals over the last 200,000 years. They found 20 percent fewer Neandertals were running about than expected. There just weren’t that many of them. They interbred and melted away into the larger populations of modern humans arriving from Africa.

Neandertal numbers also took a hit as their larger prey—woolly mammoths, bison and woolly rhinoceros—dwindled during the Ice Ages. A September report of a 100,000-year-old Neandertal from France nicknamed “Thorin” suggests our cousins were less likely to migrate than modern humans, leaving them vulnerable to climate and landscape changes. Thorin descended from a population genetically isolated for tens of thousands of years, despite living near other Neandertals, ones who appear to have later mated with modern humans.

A similar picture of shuffled genes and small populations is shaping up for Denisovans and other archaic human species. All this genetic shuffling leaves humanity itself looking like a bit of a mess. A July 2021 analysis for example found that “only 1.5 to 7 [percent] of the modern human genome is uniquely human.”

That’s not a lot. In a review of humanity’s scattered genetic history, scientists, including Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, once a champion of a strict Out of Africa view of human origins, looked over the patchwork of human and archaic fossils and genes. Stringer and colleagues concluded in Nature in 2021 that “no specific point in time can currently be identified at which modern human ancestry was confined to a limited birthplace.”

Our origin therefore does not appear to be a particularly tidy one, but a complex one that involved a lot of mating across time and space. We weren’t so much conquerors as wanderers, and potential in-laws, in our new neighborhoods. Something to consider the next time you hear someone going on about their family history, or how other people are unwanted outsiders.

Exposing Trump and Defeating the Authoritarian Loop

From Meidas Plus 

I’ve coined the term “authoritarian loop” to refer to how people will support authoritarians against their own self-interest because they (1) are conditioned by the authoritarian to feel worthless and expendable, and (2) are told that the suffering they feel, which is caused by the authoritarian, is actually caused by “the enemy” or the “other.” Let me describe this in more detail and then tell you how we combat it with Trump.

Take a look at this map from the 2024 election.

 

This may as well be the chasm between North Korea and South Korea. Oklahoma is the only state where every district voted for Trump, and Massachusetts is the only state where every district voted for Harris. Yet, Massachusetts leads the country in quality of life and in almost every category of wealth, health, and education, while Oklahoma, on the other hand, is last or almost last in those same categories.

So why do people in states like Oklahoma consistently vote against their own interests and keep electing people who are causing their suffering? Why do people in places like Texas elect those who can’t even keep the electricity on and who vacation during mass casualty events?

It’s the authoritarian loop.

The people in these states have been conditioned to believe that their pain and suffering are caused by an “enemy within” and not their actual subjugator: their corrupt MAGA leadership.

In red states, “governance” is actually shorthand for trolling or “owning the libs.” It’s not focused on improving lives.

The same way people in North Korea have been conditioned to be in a perpetual war against their neighbors in the South—who they are told live in subhuman conditions—the language used by Trump and MAGA about liberals, Democrats, and Democratic states is virtually identical.

Democrats are not just another political party. To the modern-day MAGA GOP, Democrats are actually “the enemy within.” They are “scum.” They are “vermin.” This audacious dehumanization is repeated on a loop—an authoritarian loop—every single day on Fox, on right-wing media, and now on X (formerly Twitter).

Dehumanizing the “other” while the dictator and oligarchy reap the riches from exploiting the uneducated is the toolbox of the authoritarian. Make people feel they are worthy of only breadcrumbs, and if by the grace of God you throw them half a loaf of bread, they will rejoice in you as their savior. Saddam Hussein built himself palaces while his people lived in slums. Trump has Mar-a-Lago, while Trump-appointed judges strike down overtime pay for millions of workers. It’s sad, but this is the paradigm through which we must view things now.

My friend David Pepper was prescient when, several years ago, he wrote about how red states were becoming laboratories of autocracy. He was exactly right. They were cooking up and stewing the formula for the “authoritarian loop” to be used on a national level. The final ingredient was billionaires fully embracing their role as authoritarian-style oligarchs.

So what do we do about it? How do we stop it? Is it too late?

First, as of the writing of this post, it is not too late. Yes, we’ve crossed the Rubicon, and America has elected an overtly authoritarian regime that has announced its main goal is inflicting hardship and retribution. But we are not so far past the Rubicon that these devastating, self-inflicted wounds cannot be healed and fixed. I fear that if we give up now and our resistance is non-existent or weak, then things may become unfixable. The good news is there is still time.

Until Trump shuts down the media—or tries to shut down us, which he will attempt—everything Trump and his oligarchs do must be reported on and amplified by citizen journalists every minute of every day.

Every promise Trump breaks must be amplified by citizen journalists. Relentlessly.

For example, I did a video today showing that the stock market was down because of Trump, and now economists say there is a 75% chance of a recession under Trump. Make this a major story.

Trump said he would stop wars as soon as he was elected, even before he stepped foot in office. He has failed to do so. Report it.

Every factory layoff, every anti-worker labor decision, and every time the deficit balloons—report on it. Trump will become defensive, erratic, and spiral. Stop over-intellectualizing things. Use basic, clear language, and repeat it over and over: Trump hates workers. Trump hates workers. Trump hates workers.

Trump’s entire life has been about scamming people. Now he’s captured America in perhaps the biggest scam in world history. For Trump’s other scams (albeit on a smaller scale), his victims eventually woke up and recognized they were played.

If we can be relentless advocates of truth and if we do not submit, there is an opportunity in two years and in four years to take America out of the authoritarian loop. That’s the crossroads we find ourselves at. We will either be forever defined as a Trump idiocracy, or we will be defined as a nation that persevered and reclaimed its soul and democracy.

It’s not too late.

Join us and consider subscribing now.

I've been pointing out for several years that all the culture wars fomented by the Right have little to do with genuine values and animosities.  They are distractions designed to draw attention away from the real goal, which is to siphon up wealth from the poor and the middle class into the coffers of the ultra rich.  Any Party which openly states that that's its policy will of course not be elected.  So they pretend to care about the "battlers", while distracting hoi polloi with baubles and fake "enemies".  We should not engage with this.

CATL's second-gen sodium-ion battery

Photo by: InsideEVs

From Inside EVs

China is reaching new heights in diversifying the battery chemistries used in electric vehicles. The country is already leading in subcategories of lithium-based chemistries, like nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC), nickel-aluminum-cobalt (NCA) and lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP). Earlier this year, state-run utility company China Southern Power Grid even deployed sodium-ion batteries for stationary energy storage. Now CATL, the world's largest battery maker, claims to have unlocked new levels of extreme weather performance with sodium-ion batteries.

The role of sodium ions is similar to lithium ions, where charge-carrying ions travel between the positive and negative electrodes during the charge and discharge cycles. Studies suggest that sodium-ion batteries could eliminate the pesky traits of lithium-ions: There’s less risk of thermal runaway, they can operate at varied temperatures and crucially, the cost of sodium hydroxide, a key raw material, is far lower than lithium-hydroxide. (Although battery companies have reached better economies of scale with lithium-ions.)

Sodium-ion batteries have already entered production in China. Cars that use them include the Yiwei EV produced by Volkswagen-backed JAC and the JMEV EV3. Speaking at the World Young Scientists Summit, CATL chief scientist Wu Kai said that its second-generation sodium-ion cells can discharge normally even at -40 degrees Celsius, as per several local Chinese media reports. That means EVs with such batteries won't lose range under frigid temperatures, which could help address some of the lingering concerns regarding the extreme weather performance of batteries.

They will launch in 2025 in China, with mass production expected to begin in 2027.

Tesla's 4680 NCM cells present in some newer Model Ys have an estimated energy density of up to 296 watt-hours per kilogram, as per some early teardowns. Sodium-ion batteries are less energy dense. While CATL has not disclosed the energy density of the new cells, it reportedly aims to reach a figure of 200 Wh/kg—a tough goal given that even LFP batteries have only recently hit that mark. That would only be appropriate for low-range EVs or entry-level trims. Some reports also claim that sodium-ion batteries are expected to replace 20-30% of LFP batteries in select applications.

A study published in the U.S. government’s National Library of Medicine calls sodium-ion batteries a “rising star.” Battery giants like CATL, BYD, and Sweden’s Northvolt are already investing in and developing these next-generation cells. So either way, one thing is clear: the future of battery chemistry isn’t headed in a single direction but will likely embrace a mix of chemistries tailored to specific use cases.

In principle, sodium-ion batteries should be cheaper than lithium-ion, because sodium is far more common and far cheaper than lithium (salt is sodium chloride, and the sea is full of it).  But production is still limited, so they are not cheaper yet.  As volumes expand, though, they will fall in cost just as fast as lithium-ion batteries have fallen, cutting battery pack costs to below $35/kWh.  At that price, the average EV battery pack will cost between $2000 and $3000, making EVs cheaper to buy as well as to run than petrol cars.   For reference, in 2010, lithium-ion batteries cost $1392/kWh.  Expect EVs to rapidly move to 100% of all sales, as costs continue to plunge--except of course in the US, where tariffs will stop this happening.  They already make up more than 50% of sales in China, the world's largest car market.  

Because of lower energy density, initially battery-packs will combine sodium-ion and lithium-ion cells.  But cheaper cars, with shorter ranges, will be the first to get 100% sodium-ion batteries.  

United we stand

 By Alfred Twu