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      A new book shows how animals are already coping with climate change

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      Hurricane Lizards and Plastic SquidThor HansonBasic Books, $28

      As a conservation biologist, Thor Hanson has seen firsthand the effects of climate change on plants and animals in the wild: the green macaws of Central America migrating along with their food sources, the brown bears of Alaska fattening up on early-ripening berry crops, the conifers of New England seeking refuge from vanishing habitats. And as an engaging author who has celebrated the wonders of nature in books about feathers, seeds, forests and bees (SN: 7/21/18, p. 28), he’s an ideal guide to a topic that might otherwise send readers down a well of despair.

      Hanson does not despair in his latest book, Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid. Though he outlines the many ways that global warming is changing life on our planet, his tone is not one of hand-wringing. Instead, Hanson invites the reader into the stories of particular people, places and creatures of all sorts. He draws these tales from his own experiences and those of other scientists, combining reporting with narrative tales of species that serve as examples of broader trends in the natural world.

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      A trip to La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica, for example, has Hanson reliving the experience of tropical ecologist and climatologist Leslie Holdridge, who founded the research station in the 1950s and described, among other things, how climate creates different habitats, or life zones, as elevation increases. As Hanson sweats his way up a tropical mountainside so he can witness a shift in life zones, he notes, “I had to earn every foot of elevation gain the hard way.” I could almost feel the heat that he describes as “a steaming towel draped over my head.” His vivid descriptions bring home the reason why so many species have now been documented moving upslope to cooler climes.

      Hanson doesn’t waste much breath trying to convince doubters of the reality of climate change, instead showing by example after example how it is already playing out. The book moves quickly from the basic science of climate change to the challenges and opportunities that species face — from shifts in seasonal timing to ocean acidification — and the ways that species are responding.

      As Hanson notes, the acronym MAD, for “move, adapt or die,” is often used to describe species’ options for responding. But that pithy phrase doesn’t capture the complexity of the situation. For instance, one of his titular characters, a lizard slammed by back-to-back Caribbean hurricanes in 2017, illustrates a different response. Instead of individual lizards adjusting, or adapting, to increasingly stormy conditions, the species evolved through natural selection. Biologists monitoring the lizards on two islands noticed that after the hurricanes, the lizard populations had longer front legs, shorter back legs and grippier toe pads on average than they had before. An experiment with a leaf blower showed that these traits help the lizards cling to branches better — survival of the fittest in action.

      In the end, the outcomes for species will probably be as varied as their circumstances. Some organisms have already moved, adapted or died as a result of the warming, and many more will face challenges from changes that are yet to come. But Hanson hasn’t given up hope. When it comes to preventing the worst-case scenarios, he quotes ecologist Gordon Orians, who is in the seventh decade of a career witnessing environmental change. When asked what a concerned citizen should do to combat climate change, he responded succinctly: “Everything you can.” And as Hanson points out, this is exactly how plants and animals are responding to climate change: by doing everything they can. The challenge feels overwhelming, and as a single concerned citizen, much feels out of my hands. Yet Hanson’s words did inspire me to take a cue from the rest of the species on this warming world to do what I can.

      Buy Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid from Bookshop.org. Science News is a Bookshop.org affiliate and will earn a commission on purchases made from links in this article. More

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      Corals may store a surprising amount of microplastics in their skeletons

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      A surprising amount of plastic pollution in the ocean may wind up in a previously overlooked spot: the skeletons of living corals. 

      Up to about 20,000 metric tons of tiny fragments called microplastics may be stored in coral skeletons worldwide every year, says ecologist Jessica Reichert of Justus Liebig University Giessen in Germany. That corresponds to nearly 3 percent of the microplastics estimated to be in the shallow, tropical waters where corals thrive.

      Corals have been observed eating or otherwise incorporating microplastics into their bodies (SNS: 3/18/15). But scientists don’t know how much of the debris reefs take up globally. So Reichert and colleagues exposed corals in the lab to microplastics to find out where the particles are stored inside corals and estimate how much is tucked away.

      Corals consumed some of the trash, or grew their skeletons over particles. After 18 months, most of the debris inside corals was in their skeletons rather than tissues, the researchers report October 28 in Global Change Biology. After counting the number of trapped particles, the researchers estimate that between nearly 6 billion and 7 quadrillion microplastic particles may be permanently stored in corals worldwide annually.

      Tiny plastic particles (black spots in this image of coral that has had its tissue removed) end up trapped in coral skeletons when corals grow over the fragments or ingest them.J. Reichert

      It’s the first time that a living microplastic “sink,” or long-term storage site, has been quantified, Reichert says.

      Scientists are learning how much microplastic is being introduced to the oceans. But researchers don’t know where it all ends up (SN: 6/6/19). Other known microplastic sinks, such as sea ice and seafloor sediments, need better quantification, and other sinks may not yet be known.

      Reefs are typically found near coasts where polluted waterways can drain to the sea, placing corals in potential microplastic hot spots.

      “We don’t know what consequences this [storage] might have for the coral organisms, [or for] reef stability and integrity,” Reichert says. It “might pose an additional threat to coral reefs worldwide.”  

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      50 years ago, corporate greenwashing was well under way

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      Environmental advertising: A question of integrity— Science News, November 27, 1971

      A new report published by the Council on Economic Priorities clearly outlines facts showing that much corporate advertising on environmental themes is irrelevant or even deceptive.… A large percentage of the environmental advertising comes from companies that are the worst polluters.

      Update

      Concerns about “greenwashing,” a term coined in the 1980s to describe the practice of organizations marketing their products as environmentally friendly when they are not, have persisted into the current climate crisis. As more consumers have become environmentally conscious, corporations’ greenwashing tactics have evolved. For instance, some energy companies in the United States have claimed that natural gas is a “clean” energy source because the power plants emit less carbon dioxide than coal plants. But natural gas plants can emit large amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In 2022, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission plans to review its “Green Guides,” rules for companies that make environmental claims. More

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      Albatrosses divorce more often when ocean waters warm

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      When it comes to fidelity, birds fit the bill: Over 90 percent of all bird species are monogamous and — mostly — stay faithful, perhaps none more famously than the majestic albatross. Albatross couples rarely separate, sticking with the same breeding partner year after year. But when ocean waters are warmer than average, more of the birds split up, a new study finds.

      In years when the water was warmer than usual, the divorce rate — typically less than 4 percent on average — rose to nearly 8 percent among albatrosses in part of the Falkland Islands, researchers report November 24 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It’s the first evidence that the environment, not just breeding failure, affects divorce in wild birds. In fact, the team found that during warmer years, even some females that had bred successfully ditched their partners.

      The result suggests that as the climate changes as a result of human activity, higher instances of divorce in albatrosses and perhaps other socially monogamous animals may be “an overlooked consequence,” the researchers write.

      Albatrosses can live for decades, sometimes spending years out on the ocean searching for food and returning to land only to breed. Pairs that stay together have the benefits of familiarity and improved coordination, which help when raising young. This stability is particularly important in dynamic, marine environments, says Francesco Ventura, a conservation biologist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal.

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      But if breeding doesn’t work out, many birds — mostly females — leave their partner and try to find better luck elsewhere (SN: 3/7/98). Breeding is more likely to fail in years with more difficult conditions, with knock-on effects on divorce rates the following years. Ventura wanted to find out whether the environment also has a direct impact: changing the rate of divorce regardless of whether the breeding had gone well.

      Ventura and his team analyzed data collected from 2004 to 2019 on a large colony of black-browed albatrosses (Thalassarche melanophris) living on New Island in the Falkland Islands. The team recorded nearly 2,900 breeding attempts in 424 females, and tracked bird breakups. Then, accounting for previous breeding success in individual pairs, the researchers checked to see if environmental conditions had any noticeable further impact on pairings.

      Breeding failure, especially early on, was still the main factor behind a divorce: Each female lays just a single egg, and those birds whose eggs didn’t hatch were over five times as likely to separate from their partners as those who succeeded, or those whose hatched chicks didn’t survive. In some years, the divorce rate was lower than 1 percent.

      Yet this rate increased in line with average water temperatures, reaching a maximum of 7.7 percent in 2017 when waters were the warmest. The team’s calculations revealed that the probability of divorce was correlated with rising temperatures. And surprisingly, females in successful breeding pairs were more likely to be affected by the harsher environment than males or females that either didn’t breed, or failed. When ocean temperatures dropped again in 2018 and 2019, so did divorce rates.

      Warmer water means fewer nutrients, so some birds may be fueling up out at sea for longer, delaying their return to the colony or turning up bedraggled and unappealing. If members of pairs return at different times, this can lead to breakups (SN: 10/6/04).

      What’s more, worse conditions one year might raise stress-related hormones in the birds too, which can affect mate choice. A bird may incorrectly attribute its stress to its partner, rather than the harsher environment, and separate even if hatching was successful, the researchers speculate.

      Such misreading between cues and reality could make separation a less-effective behavior, suggests Antica Culina, an evolutionary ecologist at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in Wageningen who was not involved in the study. If animals divorce for the wrong reason and do worse the following season, that can lead to lower breeding success overall and possibly population decline.

      Similar patterns could be found in other socially monogamous animals, including mammals, the researchers suggest. “If you imagine a population with a very low number of breeding pairs … this might have much more serious repercussions,” Ventura says. More

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      How climate change may shape the world in the centuries to come

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      It’s hard to imagine what Earth might look like in 2500. But a collaboration between science and art is offering an unsettling window into how ongoing climate change might transform now-familiar terrain into alien landscapes over the next few centuries.

      These visualizations — of U.S. Midwestern farms overtaken by subtropical plants, of a dried-up Amazon rainforest, of extreme heat baking the Indian subcontinent — emphasize why researchers need to push climate projections long past the customary benchmark of 2100, environmental social scientist Christopher Lyon and colleagues contend September 24 in Global Change Biology.

      Fifty years have passed since the first climate projections, which set that distant target at 2100, says Lyon, of McGill University in Montreal. But that date isn’t so far off anymore, and the effects of greenhouse gas emissions emitted in the past and present will linger for centuries (SN: 8/9/21).

      To visualize what that future world might look like, the researchers considered three possible climate trajectories — low, moderate and high emissions as used in past reports by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — and projected changes all the way out to 2500 (SN: 1/7/20). The team focused particularly on impacts on civilization: heat stress, failing crops and changes in land use and vegetation (SN: 3/13/17).

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      For all but the lowest-emission scenario, which is roughly in line with limiting global warming to “well under” 2 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial times as approved by the 2015 Paris Agreement, the average global temperature continues to increase until 2500, the team found (SN: 12/12/15). For the highest-emissions scenario, temperatures increase by about 2.2 degrees C by 2100 and by about 4.6 degrees C by 2500. That results in “major restructuring of the world’s biomes,” the researchers say: loss of most of the Amazon rainforest, poleward shifts in crops and unlivable temperatures in the tropics.

      The team then collaborated with James McKay, an artist and science communicator at the University of Leeds in England, to bring the data to life. Based on the study’s projections, McKay created a series of detailed paintings representing different global landscapes now and in 2500.

      The team stopped short of trying to speculate on future technologies or cities to keep the paintings based more in realism than science fiction, Lyon says. “But we did want to showcase things people would recognize: drones, robotics, hybrid plants.” In one painting of India in 2500, a person is wearing a sealed suit and helmet, a type of garment that people in some high-heat environments might wear today, he says.

      The goal of these images is to help people visualize the future in such a way that it feels more urgent, real and close — and, perhaps, to offer a bit of hope that humans can still adapt. “If we’re changing on a planetary scale, we need to think about this problem as a planetary civilization,” Lyon says. “We wanted to show that, despite the climate people have moved into, people have figured out ways to exist in the climate.”

      2000 vs. 2500

      High greenhouse gas emissions could increase average global temperatures by about 4.6 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial times. As a result, extreme heat in India could dramatically alter how humans live in the environment. Farmers and herders, shown in 2000 the painting at left, may require protective clothing such as a cooling suit and helmet to work outdoors by 2500, as shown in the painting at right.

      If greenhouse gas emissions remain high, the U.S. Midwest’s “breadbasket” farms, as seen below in 2000 in the painting at left, could be transformed into subtropical agroforestry regions by 2500, researchers say. The region might be dotted with some versions of oil palms and succulents, as envisioned in the painting at right, and rely on water capture and irrigation devices to offset extreme summer heat.

      All: James McKay (CC-BY-ND) More

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      A new map shows where carbon needs to stay in nature to avoid climate disaster

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      Over decades, centuries and millennia, the steady skyward climb of redwoods, the tangled march of mangroves along tropical coasts and the slow submersion of carbon-rich soil in peatlands has locked away billions of tons of carbon. 

      If these natural vaults get busted open, through deforestation or dredging of swamplands, it would take centuries before those redwoods or mangroves could grow back to their former fullness and reclaim all that carbon. Such carbon is “irrecoverable” on the timescale — decades, not centuries — needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and keeping it locked away is crucial.

      Now, through a new mapping project, scientists have estimated how much irrecoverable carbon resides in peatlands, mangroves, forests and elsewhere around the globe — and which areas need protection.

      The new estimate puts the total amount of irrecoverable carbon at 139 gigatons, researchers report November 18 in Nature Sustainability. That’s equivalent to about 15 years of human carbon dioxide emissions at current levels. And if all that carbon were released, it’s almost certainly enough to push the planet past 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above preindustrial levels.

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      “This is the carbon we must protect to avert climate catastrophe,” says Monica Noon, an environmental data scientist at Conservation International in Arlington, Va. Current efforts to keep global warming below the ambitious target of 1.5 degrees C require that we reach net-zero emissions by 2050, and that carbon stored in nature stays put (SN:12/17/18). But agriculture and other development pressures threaten some of these carbon stores.

      To map this at-risk carbon, Noon and her colleagues combined satellite data with estimates of how much total carbon is stored in ecosystems vulnerable to human incursion. The researchers excluded areas like permafrost, which stores lots of carbon but isn’t likely to be developed (although it’s thawing due to warming), as well as tree plantations, which have already been altered (SN: 9/25/19). The researchers then calculated how much carbon would get released from land conversions, such as clearing a forest for farmland. 

      That land might store varying amounts of carbon, depending on whether it becomes a palm oil plantation or a parking lot. To simplify, the researchers assumed cleared land was left alone, with saplings free to grow where giants once stood. That allowed the researchers to estimate how long it might take for the released carbon to be reintegrated into the land. Much of that carbon would remain in the air by 2050, the team reports, as many of these ecosystems take centuries to return to their former glory, rendering it irrecoverable on a timescale that matters for addressing climate change.

      Releasing that 139 gigatons of irrecoverable carbon could have irrevocable consequences. For comparison, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that humans can emit only 109 more gigatons of carbon to have a two-thirds chance of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees C. “These are the places we absolutely have to protect,” Noon says.

      Approximately half of this irrecoverable carbon sits on just 3.3 percent of Earth’s total land area, equivalent to roughly the area of India and Mexico combined. Key areas are in the Amazon, the Pacific Northwest, and the tropical forests and mangroves of Borneo. “The fact that it’s so concentrated means we can protect it,” Noon says.

      Roughly half of irrecoverable carbon already falls within existing protected areas or lands managed by Indigenous peoples. Adding an additional 8 million square kilometers of protected area, which is only about 5.4 percent of the planet’s land surface, would bring 75 percent of this carbon under some form of protection, Noon says.

      “It’s really important to have spatially explicit maps of where these irrecoverable carbon stocks are,” says Kate Dooley, a geographer at the University of Melbourne in Australia who wasn’t involved in the study. “It’s a small percentage globally, but it’s still a lot of land.” Many of these dense stores are in places at high risk of development, she says. 

      “It’s so hard to stop this drive of deforestation,” she says, but these maps will help focus the efforts of governments, civil society groups and academics on the places that matter most for the climate. More

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      This eco-friendly glitter gets its color from plants, not plastic

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      All that glitters is not green. Glitter and shimmery pigments are often made using toxic compounds or pollutive microplastics (SN: 4/15/19). That makes the sparkly stuff, notoriously difficult to clean up in the house, a scourge on the environment too.

      A new, nontoxic, biodegradable alternative could change that. In the material, cellulose — the main building block of plant cell walls — creates nanoscale patterns that give rise to vibrant structural colors (SN: 9/28/21). Such a material could be used to make eco-friendly glitter and shiny pigments for paints, cosmetics or packaging, researchers report November 11 in Nature Materials.

      The inspiration to harness cellulose came from the African plant Pollia condensata, which produces bright, iridescent blue fruits called marble berries. Tiny patterns of cellulose fibers in the berries’ cell walls reflect specific wavelengths of light to create the signature hue. “I thought, if the plants can make it, we should be able to make it,” says chemist Silvia Vignolini of the University of Cambridge. 

      Vignolini and colleagues whipped up a watery mixture containing cellulose fibers and poured it onto plastic. As the liquid dried into a film, the rodlike fibers settled into helical structures resembling spiral staircases. Tweaking factors such as the steepness of those staircases changed which wavelengths of light the cellulose arrangements reflected, and therefore the color of the film.

      That allowed the researchers, like fairy-tale characters spinning straw into gold, to transform their clear, plant-based slurry into meter-long shimmery ribbons in a rainbow of colors. These swaths could then be peeled off their plastic platform and ground up to make glitter.

      This gleaming ribbon contains tiny arrangements of eco-friendly cellulose that reflect light in specific ways to give the material its color.Benjamin Drouguet

      “You can use any type of cellulose,” Vignolini says. Her team used cellulose from wood pulp, but could have used fruit peels or cotton fibers left over from textile production.

      The researchers need to test the environmental impacts of their newfangled glitter. But Vignolini is optimistic that materials using such natural ingredients have a bright future. More

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      Scientists are racing to save the Last Ice Area, an Arctic Noah’s Ark

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      It started with polar bears.

      In 2012, polar bear DNA revealed that the iconic species had faced extinction before, likely during a warm period 130,000 years ago, but had rebounded. For researchers, the discovery led to one burning question: Could polar bears make a comeback again?

      Studies like this one have emboldened an ambitious plan to create a refuge where Arctic, ice-dependent species, from polar bears down to microbes, could hunker down and wait out climate change. For this, conservationists are pinning their hopes on a region in the Arctic dubbed the Last Ice Area — where ice that persists all summer long will survive the longest in a warming world.

      Here, the Arctic will take its last stand. But how long the Last Ice Area will hold on to its summer sea ice remains unclear. A computer simulation released in September predicts that the Last Ice Area could retain its summer sea ice indefinitely if emissions from fossil fuels don’t warm the planet more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, which is the goal set by the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement (SN: 12/12/15). But a recent report by the United Nations found that the climate is set to warm 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100 under current pledges to reduce emissions, spelling the end of the Arctic’s summer sea ice (SN: 10/26/21).

      Nevertheless, some scientists are hoping that humankind will rally to curb emissions and implement technology to capture carbon and other greenhouse gases, which could reduce, or even reverse, the effects of climate change on sea ice. In the meantime, the Last Ice Area could buy ice-dependent species time in the race against extinction, acting as a sanctuary where they can survive climate change, and maybe one day, make their comeback.

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      Ecosystem of the frozen sea

      The Last Ice Area is a vast floating landscape of solid ice extending from the northern coast of Greenland to Canada’s Banks Island in the west. This region, roughly the length of the West Coast of the United States, is home to the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic, thanks to an archipelago of islands in Canada’s far north that prevents sea ice from drifting south and melting in the Atlantic.

      As sea ice from others part of the Arctic rams into this natural barrier, it piles up, forming long towering ice ridges that run for kilometers across the frozen landscape. From above, the area appears desolate. “It’s a pretty quiet place,” says Robert Newton, an oceanographer at Columbia University and coauthor of the recent sea ice model, published September 2 in Science. “A lot of the life is on the bottom of the ice.”

      The muddy underbelly of icebergs is home to plankton and single-celled algae that evolved to grow directly on ice. These species form the backbone of an ecosystem that feeds everything from tiny crustaceans all the way up to beluga whales, ringed seals and polar bears.

      These plankton and algae species can’t survive without ice. So as summer sea ice disappears across the Arctic, the foundation of this ecosystem is literally melting away. “Much of the habitat Arctic species depend on will become uninhabitable,” says Brandon Laforest, an Arctic expert at World Wildlife Fund Canada in Montreal. “There is nowhere else for these species to go. They’re literally being squeezed into the Last Ice Area.”

      The Last Ice Area extends across national borders, making it especially challenging to protect the last summer sea ice in the Arctic. The extent of the ice is predicted to shrink considerably by 2039.WWF CanadaThe Last Ice Area extends across national borders, making it especially challenging to protect the last summer sea ice in the Arctic. The extent of the ice is predicted to shrink considerably by 2039.WWF Canada

      The last stronghold of summer ice provides an opportunity to create a floating sanctuary —an Arctic ark if you will — for the polar bears and many other species that depend on summer ice to survive. For over a decade, WWF Canada and a coalition of researchers and Indigenous communities have lobbied for the area to be protected from another threat: development by industries that may be interested in the region’s oil and mineral resources.

      “The tragedy would be if we had an area where these animals could survive this bottleneck, but they don’t because it’s been developed commercially,” Newton says.

      But for Laforest, protecting the Last Ice Area is not only a question of safeguarding arctic creatures. Sea ice is also an important tool in climate regulation, as the white surface reflects sunlight back into space, helping to cool the planet. In a vicious cycle, losing sea ice helps speed up warming, which in turn melts more ice.

      And for the people who call the Arctic home, sea ice is crucial for food security, transportation and cultural survival, wrote Inuit Circumpolar Council Chair Okalik Eegeesiak in a 2017 article for the United Nations. “Our entire cultures and identity are based on free movement on land, sea ice and the Arctic Ocean,” Eegeesiak wrote. “Our highway is sea ice.” 

      The efforts of these groups have borne some fruit. In 2019, the Canadian government moved to set aside nearly a third of the Last Ice Area as protected spaces called marine preserves. Until 2024, all commercial activity within the boundaries of the preserves is forbidden, with provisions for Indigenous peoples. Conservationists are now asking these marine preserves to be put under permanent protection.

      Rifts in the ice

      However, there are some troubling signs that the sea ice in the region is already precarious. Most worrisome was the appearance in May 2020 of a Rhode Island—sized rift in the ice at the heart of the Last Ice Area. Kent Moore, a geophysicist at the University of Toronto, says that these unusual events may become more frequent as the ice thins. This suggests that the Last Ice Area may not be as resilient as we thought, he says.  

      This is something that worries Laforest. He and others are skeptical that reversing climate change and repopulating the Arctic with ice-dependent species will be possible. “I would love to live in a world where we eventually reverse warming and promote sea ice regeneration,” he says. “But stabilization seems like a daunting task on its own.”

      Still, hope remains. “All the models show that if you were to bring temperatures back down, sea ice will revert to its historical pattern within several years,” says Newton.

      To save the last sea ice — and the creatures that depend on it — removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere will be essential, says oceanographer Stephanie Pfirman of Arizona State University in Tempe, who coauthored the study on sea ice with Newton. Technology to capture carbon, and prevent more carbon from entering the atmosphere, already exists. The largest carbon capture plant is in Iceland, but projects like that one have yet to be implemented on a major scale.

      Without such intervention, the Arctic is set to lose the last of its summer ice before the end of the century. It would mean the end of life on the ice. But Pfirman, who suggested making the Last Ice Area a World Heritage Site in 2008, says that humankind has undergone big economic and social changes — like the kind needed to reduce emissions and prevent warming — in the past. “I was in Germany when the [Berlin] wall came down, and people hadn’t expected that to happen,” she says.

      Protecting the Last Ice Area is about buying time to protect sea ice and species, says Pfirman. The longer we can hold on to summer sea ice, she says, the better chance we have at bringing arctic species —from plankton to polar bears — back from the brink.    More