Haunting Sounds Made by World’s Largest Living Thing Recorded

We can now hear one of the largest and most ancient living organisms on Earth whisper with the tremble of a million leaves echoing through its roots.

The forest made of a single tree known as Pando ("I spread" in Latin) has 47,000 stems (all with the same DNA) sprouting from a shared root system over 100 acres (40 hectares) of Utah. Here, this lone male quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) gradually grew into a massive 6,000 metric tons of life.

After possibly 12,000 years of life on Earth, this massive plant, whose tree-like stems tower up to 24 meters (80 feet), surely has plenty to say. And recordings released this year let us 'hear' it like never before.

"The findings are tantalizing," Lance Oditt, founder of Friends of Pando, said when the project was unveiled in May.

We can now hear one of the largest and most ancient living organisms on Earth whisper with the tremble of a million leaves echoing through its roots.

The forest made of a single tree known as Pando (“I spread” in Latin) has 47,000 stems (all with the same DNA) sprouting from a shared root system over 100 acres (40 hectares) of Utah. Here, this lone male quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) gradually grew into a massive 6,000 metric tons of life.

After possibly 12,000 years of life on Earth, this massive plant, whose tree-like stems tower up to 24 meters (80 feet), surely has plenty to say. And recordings released this year let us ‘hear’ it like never before.

“The findings are tantalizing,” Lance Oditt, founder of Friends of Pandosaid when the project was unveiled in May.

LINK: https://www.sciencealert.com/haunting-sounds-made-by-worlds-largest-living-thing-recorded

Living in the Time of Dying – Watch Full Documentary

Living in The Time of Dying is an unflinching look at what it means to be living in the midst of climate catastrophe and finding purpose and meaning within it. Recognising the magnitude of the climate crisis we are facing, independent filmmaker Michael Shaw, sells his house to travel around the world looking for answers. Pretty soon we begin to see how deep the predicament goes along with the systems and ways of thinking that brought us here.

Think this summer was bad? It might be the best one you and I will ever see

The calamitous summer of 2023 was an oasis of tranquility, compared to what’s coming

A Greek flag flutters in the wind during a wildfire in Chasia in the outskirts of Athens on August 22, 2023. (ANGELOS TZORTZINIS/AFP via Getty Images)
A Greek flag flutters in the wind during a wildfire in Chasia in the outskirts of Athens on August 22, 2023. (ANGELOS TZORTZINIS/AFP via Getty Images)

This year we saw the hottest July ever recorded, and the same was true again in August. In fact, 2023 is on track to be the hottest year so far recorded, breaking the record set by 2020 and 2016. Over the past few months, more than 6,500 daily heat records have been broken in the U.S. alone, and in some places the roads became so hot that people suffered serious burns from falling on them. Terrible floods have ripped through China, Spain, Greece and elsewhere. Wildfires raged in Canada, the Canary Islands, Maui and parts of Europe. A tropical storm hit Los Angeles, the first in living memory. Wind speeds of Hurricane Lee, in the Atlantic Ocean, increased from 80 mph to 165 mph in roughly 24 hours.

The climate catastrophe is already here. We’ve been watching it unfold in real time on the news and over social media. Some have witnessed it first-hand, losing their homes, being forced to evacuate under emergency conditions and even losing their lives or the lives of friends and family. For those sensitive to human suffering and the grave injustices driving the climate crisis, this summer has been difficult to deal with. It’s been one extreme weather event, one shattered record, one shocking tragedy after another — and though the summer is now officially over, there’s more to come.

LINK: https://www.salon.com/2023/09/23/think-this-summer-was-bad-it-might-be-the-best-one-you-and-i-will-ever-see/

The summer from hell was just a warning

Wildfires, hurricanes, floods, extreme heat and other climate disasters rocked the globe this summer as climate change worsens record-breaking extreme weather events. | Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty Images (man); Matthew Thayer/Maui News via AP (fire); Julio Cortez/AP Photo (D.C. smoke)
Wildfires, hurricanes, floods, extreme heat and other climate disasters rocked the globe this summer as climate change worsens record-breaking extreme weather events. | Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty Images (man); Matthew Thayer/Maui News via AP (fire); Julio Cortez/AP Photo (D.C. smoke)

It’s been a summer of norm-shattering extremes — with temperatures beyond human memory, catastrophic floods from Beijing to Vermont, choking wildfires and climate records tumbling on every continent.

Welcome to the rest of our lives.

LINK:
https://www.inkl.com/news/the-summer-from-hell-was-just-a-warning/MalJNgHRPXn

‘Off-the-charts records’: has humanity finally broken the climate?

Extreme weather is ‘smacking us in the face’ with worse to come, but a ‘tiny window’ of hope remains, say leading climate scientists

LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/28/crazy-off-the-charts-records-has-humanity-finally-broken-the-climate

Major ‘Population Correction’ Coming For Humanity, Scientist Predicts

Major 'Population Correction' Coming For Humanity, Scientist Predicts
Abandoned city
© Provided by ScienceAlert

A little over two centuries ago, in the year 1800, roughly a billion people called Earth home.

Just a century later, it had grown by another 600 million.

Today, there are around 8 billion people on the planet.

That sort of growth is unsustainable for our ecosphere, risking a ‘population correction’ that according to a new study could occur before the century is out.

The prediction is the work of population ecologist William Rees from the University of British Columbia in Canada. He argues that we’re using up Earth’s resources at an unsustainable rate, and that our natural tendencies as humans make it difficult for us to correct this “advanced ecological overshoot”.

The result could be some kind of civilizational collapse that ‘corrects’ the world’s population, Rees says – one that could happen before the end of the century in a worst case scenario. Only the richest and most resilient societies would be left.

“Homo sapiens has evolved to reproduce exponentially, expand geographically, and consume all available resources,” Rees writes in his published paper.

LINK: https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/major-population-correction-coming-for-humanity-scientist-predicts/ar-AA1fqbMu

No one wants to be right about this’: climate scientists’ horror and exasperation as global predictions play out Climate experts

As the northern hemisphere burns, experts feel deep sadness – and resentment – while dreading what lies ahead this Australian summer

LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/25/northern-hemisphere-heatwaves-europe-greece-italy-wildfires-extreme-weather-climate-experts

 

World’s oceans changing colour due to climate breakdown, study suggests

The sea is becoming greener due to changes in plankton populations, analysis of Nasa images finds

Bright swirls caused by phytoplankton in the deep blue waters off Canada in early July 2023. Photograph: Nasa
Bright swirls caused by phytoplankton in the deep blue waters off Canada in early July 2023. Photograph: Nasa

Earth’s oceans are changing colour and climate breakdown is probably to blame, according to research.

The deep blue sea is actually becoming steadily greener over time, according to the study, with areas in the low latitudes near the equator especially affected.

LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/12/worlds-oceans-changing-colour-due-to-climate-breakdown-study-suggests

Needed: Either Degrowth or Two Earths

Needed: Either Degrowth or Two Earths

In a May 30 essay for the New York Times titled “The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring,” one of the architects of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Brian Deese, wrote, “Nine months since that law was passed in Congress, the private sector has mobilized well beyond our initial expectations to generate clean energy, build battery factories and develop other technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

There’s just one problem. Those technologies aren’t going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The only way to reduce emissions fast enough to prevent climate catastrophe is to phase out the burning of oil, gas, and coal by law, directly and deliberately. If, against all odds, the United States does that, we certainly will need wind- and solar-power installations, batteries, and new technologies to compensate for the decline of energy from fossil fuels. There is no reason, however, to expect that the process would work in reverse; a “clean-energy” mobilization alone won’t cause a steep reduction in use of fossil fuels.

I think top leaders in Washington are using green-energy pipe dreams to distract us from the reality that they have given up altogether on reducing US fossil fuel use. They’ve caved. This month’s bipartisan deal on the debt limit included a provision that would ease the permitting of energy infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines like the ecologically destructive Mountain Valley fossil-gas pipeline so dear to the heart of West Virginia’s Democratic senator Joe Manchin. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has issued new rules allowing old coal and fossil gas power plants to continue operating if they capture their carbon dioxide emissions and inject them into old oil wells. And under the IRA, those plants that capture emissions will receive federal climate subsidies, even if they use the carbon dioxide that’s pumped into the old wells to push out residual oil that has evaded conventional methods of extraction. And the IRA did not even end federal subsidies to fossil-fuel companies, which could have saved somewhere between $10 and $50 billion annually. Taken together, these policies could extend the operation of existing coal and gas power plants much further into the future.

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