The Breathing Goddess: What's Happening to Oxygen in our Atmosphere?

The Goddess herself has created the oxygen she breathes (image by Dezgo.com) 

There is a hugely interesting paper that appeared this year on "Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences." It deals with the evolution of oxygen during the Phanerozoic.  The story of the ecosphere is all in there. Unbelievably, some 300 million years ago, the Permian fauna and flora lived in a concentration of oxygen of about 35%, nearly double the current one (about 20%). Even the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous breathed air with about 25%-30% oxygen in it. Ever wondered why the diplodocus was so big? That's one possible reason. 

In comparison, we are oxygen-starved. And we are further reducing the oxygen concentration by burning fossil fuels (it can be observed experimentally). All this may have to do with the different breathing architecture of mammals and birds (aka dinosaurs).

But why these oscillations? They may be the result of geophysical factors. The oxygen concentration in the atmosphere is related to the interplay of carbon sedimentation and sedimented carbon oxidation. The former is mainly due to plate tectonics, the latter to large igneous provinces and similar volcanic events. The winding down of oxygen concentration might be explained by a slowdown of plate tectonics and hence of sedimentation at continental edges, but that's far from being certain. 

I tend to think that it is an indirect result of the sun becoming brighter over the Eons. This increase in irradiation forces the system to reduce the CO2 concentration to keep temperatures within the range needed for life. But that will also indirectly reduce the oxygen concentration because oxygen comes from a photochemical reaction that involves CO2 molecules. Less CO2, less oxygen. And that means we are winding down with the ecosystem complexity: it means, basically, that the biosphere doesn't produce as much oxygen as it used to in earlier times. 

If the oxygen concentration goes below certain limits, metazoa will not be able to survive. In a few tens of millions of years, Earth may have reverted to protozoa only (single-celled creatures), as it had been for more than 2 billion years.

Unless someone starts burning a fraction of the sedimented carbon to increase CO2 concentration AND simultaneously manages to reduce the solar irradiation. Maybe good old Gaia has exactly that in mind!!

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-earth-032320-095425

Plenty of Reasons why we Need More Whales!

 

From Cook et al. 2020

2.2.2.1. Enhanced biodiversity and evolutionary potential

The ES (Eecosystem Services) of enhanced biodiversity and evolutionary potential, and enhanced primary production, are interrelated. Via the supporting ecosystem service of nutrient cycling, through abundant releases of iron from whale faeces and nitrogen from urine and faecal plumes, enhanced primary production occurs, including extended phytoplankton blooms (Lavery et al., 2010; Lundsten et al., 2010; Roman and McCarthy, 2010; Roman et al., 2014). In addition to ocean currents meeting and upwelling, the physical movement of animals in the water column, especially larger animals such as whales, contributes to the wider distribution of nutrients and oxygen in the water, leading to greater primary production (James et al., 2017). Areas rich in primary production also tend to be associated with an abundance of prey, and are thus often more biodiverse. In contrast, marine areas which have suffered losses of great whales have been associated with trophic cascades, leading to the associated stock decline of many other species, such as sea otters, kelp forests and birds of prey (Wilmers et al., 2012; Roman et al., 2014). In addition, the sunken carcasses of great whales, of whale falls, provide an important deep-sea habitat for more than 100 species that may be considered whale-fall specialists (Smith et al., 2019). The loss of these habitats as a result of commercial whaling is likely to have had a big impact on the diversity of whale-fall specialists in areas where whales have been hunted for centuries.

2.2.2.2. Climate regulation (carbon sequestration)

Over their lifetime, whales contribute to the removal of carbon from the atmosphere through the accumulation of large amounts of carbon in their bodies (Smith and Baco, 2003; Roman et al., 2014; James et al., 2017). After death, whales sink to the ocean floor. So-called ‘whale falls’ result in the locking in of organic carbon content on the sea floor. Smith and Baco (2003) reported that the carcass of a 40-tonne grey whale can contribute a level of organic carbon content equivalent to around 2000 years of the background flux. In addition, a study by Pershing et al. (2010) reported that restoring baleen whale stocks to pre-whaling levels would remove 1.6 × 105 tons of carbon each year through whale falls.

Breathing Trouble: New research shows the risks from prolonged use of face masks

by Ugo Bardi and Harald Walach

reprinted by permission from "Tablet Magazine"

There’s an old story about a guy who jumped into a thorn bush: He wanted to collect berries, but he failed to consider the adverse effects of the plan. Something similar happened with face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic: Masks were promoted, and often mandated, as necessary safeguards for reducing the chance of infection, while their possible adverse effects were brushed aside. While the science on the benefits of masking is still inconclusive, the latest research now shows that the prolonged use of face masks—especially those with tighter fits like the N95s—could harm wearers by exposing them to dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide.

The risks appear to be especially pronounced for young people. As part of a team of scientists, one of the authors of this article conducted a randomized study of the effects of masking on healthy school aged children in Germany. The results of this research, published in September 2022 in the peer reviewed journal Environmental Research, concluded that wearing masks raised the carbon dioxide (CO₂) “content in inhaled air quickly to a very high level in healthy children in a seated resting position that might be hazardous to children’s health.”

These results should not have come as a surprise. It has long been suspected that mask-wearing poses risks. In Germany, for instance, workers required to wear an N95/FFP2 respirator must get a certificate verifying their ability to do so, and even with said certificate, those workers are mandated to take a 30-minute break every 90 minutes.

Only in the 19th century, with the development of germ theory, did masks begin being used as health devices. Then in the early 20th century, masks gained a foothold in hospitals, usually worn by doctors and nurses. The “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918-20 was perhaps the first case of masks being worn by the general public, but we only have scattered photographic pictures of masked people and don’t know how frequently they were worn.

During the 20th century, most scientists believed that masks could be useful only in hospitals for the prevention of surgical wound infections in high-risk cases. Still in 2010, a study overseen by Dr. Ben Cowling, a professor of public health at the University of Hong Kong, found weak evidence, if any, that masks could be a useful tool for stopping airborne infections.

There’s thus every reason to believe that, in March 2020, when Dr. Anthony Fauci discouraged Americans from wearing masks, he was simply stating a widely accepted medical orthodoxy. Population-level mandatory face masking had never been attempted before, and there was no reliable data proving its effectiveness, nor data detailing its adverse effects. It was reasonable to be cautious before recommending such a drastic and untested solution.

Yet this attitude rapidly changed, most likely because of political factors. It is not that politicians were directly meddling with medicine; more likely, they simply wanted to be seen as “doing something.” Masks offered visible evidence that the leaders were acting against the pandemic, and so masks appeared to be a good idea. The medical authorities rapidly sensed what was expected of them—back up the politicos—and they complied, even in the absence of data supporting the decision.

After more than two years of widespread masking, which remained mandatory for young school children long after it was abandoned by the politicians who imposed such measures, we are starting to see more data. But many studies are of poor quality, performed on small populations, based on questionable assumptions, using debatable statistical methods, and often using air that is unnaturally saturated with viral particles.

Some studies do indicate that, at least in some conditions, masks can slow down the diffusion of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Masks are not, however, a miracle device that can fully stop the virus. As doctors were saying in early 2020 before the public health establishment reversed its position on the issue, aerosol particles carrying the coronavirus are simply too small to be completely stopped by the filtering tissue of standard masks, and even less so because of how often masks are worn incorrectly.

It is our view, then, after considering the available scholarship, that we cannot establish any clear and conclusive benefits to widespread masking.

Can we establish the presence of any harmful effects? Here, we enter a complicated field of study, as it is difficult to determine the adverse effect of masks on wearers. Such a gap in knowledge is part of a pattern: In the history of medicine, there have been some glaring failures in detecting adverse effects. You may remember, for instance, the story of thalidomide, a drug marketed in the 1950s as a sedative, that was later found to cause birth defects. It had not been properly tested on pregnant women.

One problem with determining adverse effects is that you can’t knowingly expose people to something that you suspect causes serious harm, not even in the name of science. The Nuremberg Code, a set of international ethical principles created after the Doctors Trial for Nazi medical war crimes, prohibits experimentation on human subjects without their explicit consent. Another problem is that adverse effects are often delayed in time. Think of the health effects of cigarettes. Nobody ever died because they smoked one cigarette. After several decades of studies, however, it was possible to determine that if you are a smoker your life expectancy is reduced by a significant number of years.

Just like smoking a single cigarette never killed anyone, wearing a face mask for a few hours or a few days does not cause irreversible damage either. But the immediate short-term physiological effects are detectable: A recent study led by Pritam Sukul, senior medical scientist at the University Medicine Rostock in Germany, found masks to cause hypercarbia (high concentration of CO₂ in the blood), arterial oxygen decline, blood pressure fluctuations, and concomitant physiological and metabolic effects. On a time scale of weeks or months, these effects appear to be reversible. But how can we know what can happen to people who wear masks for several hours a day for several years? Will we have to wait for decades before concluding that masks are bad for people’s health, as was the case with cigarettes?

Not necessarily, for we are able to assess face masks in terms of the air quality breathed by the wearers. One important parameter for air quality is CO₂ concentration. Over the years, a lot of data has been accumulated in this field from miners, astronauts, submariners, and other people exposed to high concentrations of CO₂. Measurable negative effects on mental alertness already occur at CO₂ concentrations over 600 parts per million (ppm), which is only slightly higher than the average concentration in open air (a little more than 400 ppm). Values higher than 1,000-2,000 ppm are not recommended for living spaces, especially for children and pregnant women. 5,000 ppm is the commonly accepted limit in working environments or in submarines and spaceships. Concentrations in the range of 10,000-20,000 ppm are not immediately life-threatening but can only be withstood for short periods. Even higher concentrations may lead to loss of consciousness and death.

So what kind of CO₂ concentration are people exposed to when they wear a face mask? Measuring the concentration of CO₂ inside the small volume of a face mask while it is being used poses practical problems, and there are no standardised methods and procedures to evaluate this. Nevertheless, during the past few years, several papers dealing with this subject were published.

Some of these papers were criticised, but often baselessly. For instance, some fact checkers claimed that the same amount of CO₂ could be found without face masks in exhaled breath. This is true, but trivial. The studies mentioned above measured the amount of CO₂ in the inhaled air under face masks; the fact checkers measured the air exhaled. Other fact checkers provided a priori statements by “experts,” including a sports reporter.

Meanwhile, studies that rely on robust capnographic methods that calculate inhaled CO₂ levels from the end-tidal volume of CO₂ under strictly controlled conditions have corroborated our findings about elevated CO₂ levels in masks. In short, there is strong evidence that people wearing face masks, especially the FFP2/N95 type, breathe a concentration of carbon dioxide several times higher than the recommended concentration limits, in the range of over 5,000 ppm and often over 10,000 ppm. In other words, masks may multiply the external CO₂ concentration by a factor of 10, if not more.

Individuals wearing a tight, N95-style face mask are thus breathing air of comparable quality to the air in spacecrafts and submarines. Astronauts and submariners, though, are well trained and in peak physical condition; masks, meanwhile, are often worn by the elderly, the young, and people affected by chronic pathologies. A recent study of more than 20,000 German children who wore masks for an average of more than four hours per day showed that 68% of them reported these kinds of problems.

There are additional risks associated with face masks that should be considered, such as psychological effects and infections from pathogens accumulated in the mask tissue, but we believe that the increased concentrations of CO₂ breathed by mask-wearers is a clear and demonstrated adverse effect that should be known and considered when deciding policies. In short, face masks are not harmless.

Wearing a face mask is not a purely symbolic gesture like wearing a lapel pin or waving a flag, as some people have come to believe. It is not simply an expression of social solidarity, belief in science, or support for health care workers. It can have important adverse effects on health—especially in the case of N95s—and, at the very minimum, citizens should be alerted to the downsides of masking before they make up their minds on the issue. Face masks should be mandated only in special circumstances, and ordinary citizens should wear them only when there is a real and evident risk of infection.

_____________________________________________________

Note: the editorial policy of the "Tablet" magazine did not make it possible for us to mention all the references consulted for the preparation of this text. But you can find them at this link. 

How Gaia Saved the Earth from a Cold Death

 

The Goddess Gaia in the form of the winter deity Khione, daughter of Boreas, the North Wind, and the Athenian princess Oreithyia (image by "Nobody-Important"). 

Earth is a fragile planet and it might freeze to a snowball if not taken care of. So far, the Goddess has done a good job at that but, at least a couple of times during the past few billion years, the Earth actually froze. Might that happen again? It seems that we were close to that just a few tens of thousands of years ago. Now, the problem doesn't exist anymore, with humans pumping zillions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And, who knows? Humans could be the tool used by the Goddess to avoid another "snowball Earth." But now we may have too much of a good thing and the Earth risks boiling. Hopefully, Gaia can take care of that, too.   

It is always amazing to realize how complex is the system that we call the "Ecosphere". And how the system's complexity keeps its parameters within the limits needed for life to exist and prosper. It is the concept of "Gaia" as it was proposed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. The ecosystem is in homeostasis and tends to maintain relatively constant parameters by means of a tangle of internal feedbacks, as all complex adaptive systems ("CAS") do. 

But homeostasis doesn't mean perfect stability. The system's parameters may oscillate - even wildly - before the internal feedbacks can bring them back to the "good" values. Sometimes the system gets close to its limits and it may well be that, at times in its long history, the ecosystem risked going over the edge and then Gaia could "die." This seems to be a common destiny for extrasolar planets, as recently argued by Chopra and Linewaver.

A recent paper by Galbraith and Eggleston on Nature starts from these concepts, noting how the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere never went below ca. 190 ppm during the past 800,000 years. That happened in correspondence with the lowest temperatures ever observed during that period: the planet was going through a harsh ice age.

This figure from a recent paper by Galbraith and Eggleston on Nature shows an interesting fact: the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere never went below ca. 190 ppm over the past million years or so. Possibly, it touched the danger limit for the ecosystem to survive. For lower concentrations, plants wouldn't have been able to perform photosynthesis and the biosphere would have largely disappeared.

About these ice ages, there is an interesting point related to the system's feedback. The more ice there is, the more reflective the planet's surface becomes (more exactly, the planetary albedo increases). But, the more reflective the planet's surface is, the cooler the planet becomes. So, we have an enhancing feedback that may transform the whole planet into a single, frozen ball: "snowball earth". It has happened, although possibly not completely, at least twice in the history of Earth. It was during the period we call, appropriately "Cryogenian," from 720 to 635 million years ago. It was not a real "snowball" -- not all of Earth was covered in ice. But what was not under the ice was a frozen desert. To give you some idea of the fascination of this subject, here is an excerpt from the abstract of a paper by Hoffmann et al. on "Science"

"....the small thermal inertia of a globally frozensurface reverses the annual mean tropical atmospheric circulation, producing an equatorial desert and net snow and frost accumulation elsewhere. Oceanic ice thickens, forming a sea glacier that flows gravitationally toward the equator, sustained by the hydrologic cycle and by basal freezing and melting. Tropical ice sheets flow faster as CO2rises but lose mass and become sensitive to orbital changes. Equatorial dust accumulation engenders supraglacial oligotrophic meltwater ecosystems, favorable for cyanobacteria and certain eukaryotes. Meltwater flushing through cracks enables organic burial and submarine deposition of airborne volcanic ash. The sub-glacial ocean is turbulent and well mixed, in response to geothermal heating and heat loss through the icecover, increasing with latitude. Terminal carbonate deposits, unique to Cryogenian glaciations, are products of intense weathering and ocean stratification. "

Can you imagine the Earth in these conditions? A wasteland of dry deserts and ice sheets. At that time, there were no multicellular creatures and life may have survived in hot pockets, maybe volcanic lakes, where it was still possible to find liquid water. 

We may have been dangerously close to a new snowball Earth episode during the past million years or so. Not a trifling matter because today the ecosphere is much more complex than it was at the time of the Cryogenian. A new snowball Earth would likely cause all vertebrate lifeforms to go extinct. It is not just a question of being too cold: the limit of concentration of CO2 that permits plants to perform photosynthesis at a reasonable rate is considered to be around 150 ppm, at least for the most common kind of plants. Under that value, all multicellular plants die, and with them all animal life. Only single-celled creatures could eke out a precarious existence in those conditions. 

But something prevented the ice sheets to expand all the way to envelop the whole Earth and, at the same time, prevented the CO2 concentration to go below 190 ppm. What was that? Several hypotheses are possible. Galbraith and Eggleston favor a biological one, saying that:

In terrestrial ecosystems, carbon fixation by plants is limited by low ambient CO2 (ref. 31). On this basis, ref. 12 proposed that CO2-limitation had significantly reduced plant-mediated silicate weathering during low-CO2 intervals of the past 24 million years, thereby enforcing a lower bound on the ocean–atmosphere carbon inventory over >10^5 yr timescales. Subsequent experiments have been consistent with this ‘carbon starvation’ mechanism, showing reduced weathering by tree-root-associated fungi under low CO2 (ref. 32). Although the feedback on silicate weathering would appear too slow to play a role on the 104 yr timescale of glacial CO2 minima 30, it may be possible that strongly reduced weathering rates lowered ocean alkalinity (thereby decreasing CO2 solubility) on a millennial timescale. Alternatively, reduced photosynthesis rates during the LGM (last glacial maximum) would have slowed the accumulation of terrestrial biomass14, consistent with estimates for lower terrestrial primary production rates33. By slowing the accumulation of carbon in vegetation and soils, this would have provided a stabilizing feedback via an increase of the ocean–atmosphere carbon pool.

Complicated stuff, right? But, basically, the idea is that CO2 is slowly drawn down from the atmosphere by a reaction with rocks (silicates), forming carbonates. This reaction is called "weathering" and it is favored by plants, whose roots provide a good environment for it to take place. Fewer plants, less CO2 drawdown. At the same time, a smaller global biomass means that the quantity of CO2 stored in it becomes lower and this extra carbon most likely ends up in the atmosphere as CO2. So, there are two feedbacks embedded in the system that tend to stabilize its temperature. But, as you may understand from the text by Galbraith and Eggleston, it is even more complicated than this! In any case, these stabilizing geobiological feedbacks oppose the ice/albedo feedback and tend to slow down the glaciation before the two sides of the ice sheet touch each other at the equator. 

But suppose that the Earth really became the snowball that some studies claim to have observed: how did it recover? If it is frozen, it is frozen. Maybe not completely dead, but poor Gaia was reduced to a minor sprite inhabiting hot springs. How could Earth return to the lush ecosphere we are used to?

There is an explanation: it is because volcanoes do not care whether the Earth's surface is frozen or not. They continue pumping CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Again from Hofmann et al. 

“If a global glaciation were to occur, the rate of silicate weathering should fall very nearly to zero (due to the cessation of nor-mal processes of precipitation, erosion, and runoff), and carbon dioxideshould accumulate in the atmosphere at whatever rate it is releasedfrom volcanoes. Even the present rate of release would yield 1 bar ofcarbon dioxide in only 20 million years. The resultant large green houseeffect should melt the ice cover in a geologically short period of time”[(69), p. 9781]. Because Snowball Earth surface temperatures are below the freezing point of water everywhere, due to high planetary albedo,there is no rain to scrub CO2(insoluble in snow) from the atmosphere."

Note one subtle detail: if temperatures were to go below the freezing point of CO2 (-78 C) even in small regions at the poles, that would form a nearly infinite CO2 sink. And that would be "snowball forever" -- maybe it would have made the Goddess Khione happy, but it didn't happen. Possibly, that was too cold even for a Winter Goddess!

In any case, it seems that CO2 was pumped into the atmosphere by volcanoes, maybe it was the work of the volcanic form of Gaia, the goddess Pele, known for her habit of taking lava showers. 

When the CO2 concentration arrived at levels hundreds of times those of the present-day atmosphere, the result was a cataclysmic rapid collapse of the glaciers and a rise in temperatures. Not only the Earth's ecosystem was saved from a cold death, but it rebounded spectacularly: it was now the time of the "metazoa," the formal term indicate animals. There came the Cenozoic, in which we are still living, with its incredible variety of lifeforms when plants and animals colonized the continental lands. 

You see how the job of Gaia is not so simple. it involves a delicate balance of many factors. Some tend to stabilize the system, while others tend to destabilize it. During the past 15 million years or so, cooling factors took the lead and slowly pushed Earth to lower and lower CO2 concentrations and, with that, lower temperatures.

 Image from Wikipedia Commons. The x scale is in million years from the present. Note the rapid cooling of the past million years or so.

We do not know exactly what caused the cooling, there are several theories. But one thing is sure, Gaia started feeling that it was too cold for her, even in her form of Khiome, goddess of ice. She could die and, this time, perhaps for good. 

(Image source)

So, it became imperative for Gaia to mobilize some of the geosphere carbon and push it into the atmosphere in the form of a greenhouse gas that would warm the Earth back to comfortable temperatures. The Goddess Pele was too slow for that, maybe she is now a little tired after blowing CO2 into the atmosphere for four billion years. So, maybe Gaia thought of a more creative solution. 

Why not use those clever monkeys which had just evolved in Earth's savannas to dig carbon out of Earth's crust, combine it with oxygen, and then pump it back into the atmosphere?  It worked: in just a few hundred years, the monkeys managed to bring back the CO2 concentration to the levels that were typical of Earth as it was a few tens of millions of years ago. 

It may be that, now, Gaia faces the opposite problem: those monkeys have pumped so much CO2 into the atmosphere that now we risk pushing the planet on the opposite side of a climate collapse, to a "hothouse Earth" that might kill the biosphere. Something like that happened with the great extinctions at the end of the Permian and the Cretaceous. Alas, life is difficult, but Gaia can cope. Does that mean getting rid of those pesky carbon-burning monkeys? Maybe. After all, Gaia is a Goddess, she ought to know what she is doing and she has no qualms when it is time to do what's to be done. She can find ways. 

(Image Source)

Good Holobionts don't Wear Face Masks on Planes.

 

I always wondered about the quality of the air people breathe inside the cabin of a plane. Now I know. This month, for the first time I took a CO2 concentration detector with me on a plane trip. The cabin is a crowded space, so I expected rather high levels of CO2, and I wasn't surprised that, during boarding, it rose over 3,000 ppm (parts per million), 6 times higher than in the open. But the cabin is well-ventilated during the flight, and the CO2 concentration soon settled to the value you see in the image above, ca. 1300 ppm ( but note the effect of the reduced air pressure in the cabin, see note*). Still higher than in the open, but not so bad. You can compare this value with the chart below, which lists the dangers of exposure to high CO2 levels. 

A level of 1310 ppm of CO2 is not dangerous, but it is above the limits considered healthy in normal life. As you can see in the chart below, in the cabin of a plane we are in a region where "cognitive impairment" is already measurable for several hours of exposure. That may be the reason why some people (myself included) suffer from headaches during plane trips. But, for a 2-hour flight, nothing really bad can happen to you. at most you'll feel a little dizzy.

The problem is that face masks were mandatory on this flight (a Vueling flight from Florence to Madrid). So, most people wore FFP2 masks tight on their faces. But face masks are known to raise the concentration of the air you breathe by a factor that may be 5 or even more. (see this reference). 

 

This means that the mask-wearing passengers of the plane were breathing a CO2 concentration probably in the range of 5,000-10,000 ppm, Again, take a look at the chart, above, and you'll see that nothing horrible is expected to happen to you in a few hours. But it is not a healthy condition. Especially people who are not in perfect health surely don't benefit from several hours of exposure to these conditions.  

As always, in our world, we seem to be unable to see but one problem at a time, and that problem trumps all others. If the problem is Covid, then all the other problems are ignored, including conditions that are known to create health risks. But we have no studies examining the long-term effects of wearing face masks on people who are not trained submariners or astronauts. 

I survived my trip from Florence to Madrid without a trace of a headache. But I wore a simple surgical mask and the rules allow you to take it off while you are drinking or eating (strange rules, right?). You can be sure that the coffee I had on the plane lasted for a long, long time.  

For a more in-depth discussion of the health hazards of face masks, see this recent article by Harald Walach. 

(*) The detector measures the CO2 concentration using an IR spectrometer, so it measures the absolute concentration, not the ratio of CO2 to oxygen. In the cabin of a passenger plane, the air pressure is about 75% of the value at ground level. So, if you were to increase the pressure of the same mix to 100%, your reading would go up to about 1700 ppm instead of 1300 ppm. We are still below the 2000 ppm safety limit, but much closer to it. Note also that passengers compensate for the reduction in oxygen pressure by breathing faster, and that may affect how masks influence the composition of the breathed air. It is an effect observed on children -- who breathe faster than adults, and experience a higher concentration of CO2 when wearing masks. But there are no studies available on the effects of masking in reduced pressure environments. 

Reality is real no more. Whom to trust in science?

 

The "World Climate Declaration" returns. It is a document that has been around in various forms since 2009 that has all the appearance of "legitimate" science. It is not, but how to judge? We face an unsolvable epistemological problem.

Recently, one of the members of the Holobiont Group posted the link to a document titled "There is No Climate Emergency" on FB. He defined it as "bonkers" -- it was clearly irony. Yet, Facebook's Fact-Checkers don't know irony, and the post was promptly censored and branded "false information."

That highlights, I think, the problem we have with science. Place yourself in the shoes of a person who has no training in science, and knows only what can be read in the media about climate. What should she think about this story? 

We have a document that, at first sight, it looks legitimate. The signatories are bona fide scientists, although one may notice that some of them are a little old (actually, more than a little) (*). But being over 90 does not mean being automatically wrong. And what to say about the anonymous "fact checker" who so peremptorily deemed the document to be "false"? The link provides leads only to a post in Croatian, written by a young lady named Melita Vrsaljiko (https://www.linkedin.com/in/melita-vrsaljko/). She has a degree in journalism awarded by the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb. Probably she is the "fact checker" hired by Facebook who struck down the post. If this is the case, one could reasonably be a little vary of a fact check based on something written by the fact-checker alone. 

Machine-translated into English, the "fact check" is not much better than the documents it purports to check. Among other things, we are told the document is "false" because it was diffused also by a site that diffuses "anti-vaxxer" information. And also because only a few of the signatories are climatologists. The accusation of the authors not being climatologists is a little perplexing since it comes from someone who has no other qualifications than a degree in journalism. (**)

The problem, here, is that when we deal with climate change, most of us, even scientists competent in our fields, are unable to comprehend the immense complexity of the story. The only way that people can do that is based on the principle of authority. But are 1200 old scientists signing a document titled "There is no Climate Emergency" a sufficient authority? Or you'd rather trust the large number of scientists who adhere to the IPCC (I don't know how many, but surely many). But truth, as we all know, is not based on the majority of believers and from the time when Karl Rove said that "we create our own reality, reality has ceased to be real. So, why should trust FB's fact checkers? Or anyone else?  

This is just not possible. We cannot do science in this way. We need to rethink the whole idea. You may think that I am a little manic (probably I am), but I think we should apply the concept of holobiont to science, too. Maybe we could think of a "horizontal" science, where facts and ideas are shared among peers, that is all of us. That is they do not arrive from the sky, screaming, "trust me, I am Science!!!" They come from our peers, whom we trust. Science cannot come as a revealed trust. It must come from all of us. 

We keep at it. Onward, fellow holobionts!

(*) The Nobel prize at the top of the list is 93. The Italian member of the group (Prof. Zichichi) is 92. About this Italian member, I can tell you that he has made a fool of himself in public so many times that there is an entire popular literature dedicated to his mistakes (for those of you who can read Italian, there is a popular term "Zichicche," not literally translatable, but more or less meaning "Zichichi's gems" -- intended as howlers). On this, though, I can tell you that I have no respect for the people who have made money and a reputation for themselves by selling books that ridicule a scientist who, with all his idiosyncrasies and naivety, has some merits.

(**) I am not criticizing Ms. Vrsaljiko. She did her best, and her article is good in many respects. But the task she was charged with was basically impossible. 

Feathered Dinosaurs -- The Many Faces of Gaia

 

A feathered T-Rex? Why not? (Image from Safari Ltd.)

A recent paper by Olsen et al. appeared on "Science Advances". It discussed the fauna and the climate of the Earth of Late Triassic, just before and during one more of the great mass extinctions of its long history.

The authors claim that "The Late Triassic and earliest Jurassic are characterized as one of the very few times in Earth history in which there is no evidence of polar glacial ice sheets," which I am not so sure about. Anyway, this Late Triassic Iceless age is interesting for us because it is where we may end as the result of the current burst of fossil carbon combustion, deforestation, and marine desertification. It is another example of ice-free earth, probably similar to the Eocene epoch, some 30-50 million years ago.

It seems that the Late Triassic was not so hot, despite the high CO2 concentrations (maybe 1000-6000 ppm). In the high latitude regions, the temperature was cold enough that ice would form in winter, likely not perennial. Dinosaurs lived in the Northern and Southern areas of the Pangea, and they already had "filamentous integumentary cover" -- beautiful term! -- that is protofeathers, clearly used for thermal insulation. In the equatorial regions, instead, the heat made life easier for cold-blooded animals, the pseudosuchia -- which indicates crocodile-like creatures. Apparently, it was too hot for dinosaurs there.

Does this have some relevance to the current climate? Everything is correlated, although it must be said that the conditions of the earth some 200 million years ago were quite different. The fact that there was ice at the poles, despite a very high CO2 concentration, is no proof that CO2 is not the greenhouse gas we know it is. Among many other things, the solar insulation at that time probably around 2% lower than it is today.

Today, if we were to go back to those CO2 concentrations, crocodiles may still have a good time, but they will probably invade a much larger share of latitude. On this point, this is a paleontological study, so they don't mention modeling the climate of those times. They tend to attribute the low temperature to volcanic ashes. They seem to say that the mass extinction was caused by cooling, unlike the later K-Pg event. That despite the fact that the CO2 concentration was so high. Their main conclusion is that dinosaurs were adapted to cold temperatures, and they were mostly feathered. Which means that the creatures seen in "Jurassic Park" are all wrong!

They also report this interesting graph with the CO2 concentrations over 300 million years. It is stuffed with acronyms, apparently well known by paleontologists, but not so much by us, mortals. Anyway, "EPE" stands for "End Permian Extinction" (the huge one)   "ETE" stands for "End Triassic Extinction" (less well-known, but it was not a joke). "T-OAE" stands for "Torcian Oceanic Anoxic Event" (quite an event, it must have been). The "K-Pg-E" is an acronym of acronyms, but you know what it stands for: it is the end of the dinosaur age -- the big asteroid falling on Earth (maybe) or/and the Deccan giant igneous province (more likely). Finally, the PETM is the "Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum", quite a maximum in temperatures, but it didn't do as much damage as one would have expected. 

Do we focus too much on CO2 alone? An appeal for the conservation of natural ecosystems

 

Image from the University of Toronto. 

Have we exaggerated with the idea that CO2 -- carbon dioxide -- is the arch villain of the story? Aren't we overemphasizing solutions that imply CO2 removal? How about geoengineering, sometimes touted as "the" solution that will allow us to keep going on burning fossil fuels? 

There is no doubt that the emissions of carbon dioxide are returning the ecosystem to a condition that was never seen before at least one million years ago. There is no doubt that CO2 is warming the planet and that none of our Sapiens ancestors ever breathed in an atmosphere that contains a concentration of CO2 of 420 parts per million -- as we are doing. 

But by focussing so much on CO2 alone is easy to forget what humans have been doing to the ecosystems that keep the biosphere alive (and with it, humankind). The ecosystem is a giant holobiont that strives for stability: a fundamental element to stabilize Earth's climate. It is a dangerous illusion to think that we, humans, can replace the work of Gaia with our fancy carbon capture machinery, or whatever other tricks we may concoct. 

Here is a reminder by a group of people from Eastern Europe who managed to maintain a certain degree of mental sanity. They remind us of the damage we are doing. Will anyone listen to them? (UB)

Appeal to the international community, governments, scientific, public organizations and business

https://www.es-partnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Appeal_Protect-Ecosystems.pdf

RECOGNIZE THE VALUE AND ROLE OF NATURAL ECOSYSTEMS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE!

Terrestrial and marine natural ecosystems are the basis for preservation of biological life on Earth. They have existed almost unchanged for millions of years and all this time have supported climate stability, biochemical flows, global water circulation and many other processes, irreplaceable and essential for preservation of life on our planet. Undisturbed natural ecosystems maintain the Earth's temperature, suitable for human life.

The laws of nature are the basis of life on Earth, and all the laws of human society that regulate economic, political, social and cultural relations are secondary to them and must take into account the biosphere’s operating principles and man’s place in it.

However, over the past decades, human activities aimed at meeting the needs for food, energy and 
water have caused unprecedented changes in ecosystems, including land degradation and deforestation. These changes have helped improve the lives of billions of people, but at the same time, they have destroyed nature's ability to regulate the environment and maintain the climate.

According to current estimates, more than 75% of natural ecosystems are subject to degradation and loss of their functions, which undermines all efforts to preserve the climate and threatens the achievement of SDGs, including hunger, disease and poverty eradication. 

Humanity is standing on the edge of a precipice. Over-threshold disturbance of ecosystems leads to
irreversible loss of the gene pool, up to complete disappearance of ecosystems. In the face of growing efforts and understanding of the threat of climate change, it is now necessary to recognize and support the unique role of natural ecosystems in preserving the climate and a vital environment. International climate policy adjustments and fundamental changes in national development strategies are required.

We call to wake up and recognize the fundamental and irreplaceable value of natural ecosystems and for strong and urgent action, including:

1.  To recognize the goal of preserving natural ecosystems as humanity’s highest priority and stop their further destruction through adopting a global moratorium on any further development of territories still untouched by human activities, with international support mechanisms, including funding.
2.  Promotion of large-scale natural reforestation is an urgent task. Climate-regulating functions of forests, associated with the ability to retain soil moisture and maintain continental water transfer, are their main value, which are orders of magnitude higher than the cost of wood. Undisturbed forests should be completely removed from economic activity by law and allocated to a separate category with the maximum degree of protection. 
3. At all levels, from international to regional, national and local, it is necessary to review ongoing development strategies and take urgent measures to protect natural ecosystems and wildlife. It is necessary to adjust all sectoral policies, including agricultural practices, in order not only to meet the demand for food, but also to minimize the burden on natural ecosystems
4. A transition from conventional sectoral management to basin and ecosystem management is required, including raising the status of nature conservation goals. Water resources management should ensure that natural ecosystems are guaranteed priority in water supply that is necessary for their conservation, as well as protection and restoration of aquatic and other ecosystems - from mountains and glaciers to deltas and reservoirs.
5. Measures aimed at preserving natural ecosystems also require a review of existing incentives and tools and creation of new ones, so that ecosystem services are no longer perceived as free and unlimited, and their management takes into account the interests and roles of the populations and local communities which directly depend on them and are their custodians.

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International Socio-Ecological Union, Eco-Forum (of 54 public organizations) of Kazakhstan, 
Association (non-governmental organizations) «For Sustainable Human Development of Armenia»,
Eco-Forum (independent non-governmental organizations) of Uzbekistan, as well as professional and non-governmental organizations of Armenia, Moldova, Russia, USA and others