Ranking the realness of "problems" and the goodness of "solutions"

I think we need to be more careful about how we evaluate the realness of "problems" and how we evaluate the goodness of "solutions." To facilitate that I came up with a "real, exaggerated, fake" ranking system for problems and a "good, poor, bogus" ranking system for solutions. I've applied it to four topics I care about, assigning percent values based on my own personal opinions of the problems' realness and solutions' goodness. I made the graphs in Excel. Probably no two people will ever agree on the exact rankings (I even went back and forth with my own rankings for a while), but I think the concept could be useful for framing discourse.

Unite against "Alligator Alcatraz" Everglades prison camp

This "Alligator Alcatraz" Everglades prison / deportation waystation thing that FL Governor Ron DeSantis and FL Attorney General James Uthmeier are trying to hustle into existence is a terrible idea, for obvious environmental and economic reasons as well as, you know, human rights and rule of law and basic decency reasons. I took this simple online action against it, but I think we need to do more- Calling DeSantis and the AG, protesting at the site, etc. https://www.everglades.org/no-alligator-alcatraz/ I applaud those who were out at the site this weekend protesting it.

This reminds me of the mobilization against DeSantis' previous attempts to sell out the state's natural resources for a quick buck or fame/favor with other powerful jerks. E.g., that time he tried to turn our state parks into golf courses and hotels, and Floridians of widely different political views united to tell him where he could stick his golf clubs. That's what we need to do again to take down this latest scam.

Say no to "recission" of funding for PBS, NPR, etc.

"Recission" means taking back something that has already been given, promised, or approved. There's a big recission on the table now that would affect public funding for PBS, NPR, etc. Public media in the US is sometimes accused of having a liberal bias. Really it's a "bias" towards factual and culturally/scientifically enlightening, non-commercialized, non-sensationalized content that you can't get on for-profit networks like MSNBC or FOX. My favorite public media product these days is the PBS Eons YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@eons , which makes science-heavy yet hip paleontology and geology videos. In my opinion, stuff like that is well worth the pennies it takes to produce, and it would be a huge shame for it to be lost. I contacted my reps to advocate against the recission, and I recommend that other folks do, too. Thank you.

This is the link where you can take action. You can send an email with your name on it, but calling your representatives would probably be more likely to make a difference: https://protectmypublicmedia.org/

Commentary on WFLA Tampa weather charts showing huge increase in hot days

Two, hard-hitting weather/climate graphs were recently shared on social media by WFLA News Channel 8 (Tampa) meteorologist Jeff Beradelli. They are impactful because they show how even a seemingly small change in average global temperature, like the +1.5 degree Celsius we've had since the pre-industrial era, can lead to big increases in the number of days of oppressively hot conditions. https://www.facebook.com/JeffBerardelli

I've put the images below, along with Beradelli's original text of the post:




Native Floridians often say... "it didn't used to be this hot!"
They are right. 90 degree days have doubled here in Tampa and heat index days above 100 have increased by 4X since around 1970.
It's not coincidence, it's climate change!
The extra heat is driven by the build up of heat-trapping greenhouse gases and also the increase in the urban environment (urban heat island). Warmer air also means the air now has a little more humidity and dewpoints have increased. The result is more oppressive and longer Florida summers.
As some commenters have mentioned this is not an exact apples to apples comparison... we have only been through 4 full summer in the 2020s... and of course it may temporarily cool some in the coming year/s. But truth be told, I don't think it will cool by much.

The post created quite a stir on social media. Commenter perspectives were largely polarized, as one would expect in today's hyper-partisan environment. There was agreement/concern on one side and defensiveness/denial on another side. It wasn't TOTALLY polarized, though. I think I saw more than usual agreement mixed in with the denial. It IS hot in Florida, and getting hotter year by year, and people are recognizing that. One of the mixed perspectives I saw was basically, "I agree that it's getting hotter, but I think it's just because of urban sprawl and the heat island effect, not because of CO2 pollution and global warming."

The urban heat island effect is obvious to anyone who has felt the drastic temperature difference between a sun-baked parking lot and a cool park/forest with lots of shade trees. (See picture below of a beautifully cool "tree tunnel" on Edisto Island, South Carolina that I took on a recent vacation there.) In addition to cooling via shade, trees cool the landscape by evapotranspiration. In Florida there is populist alarm about our meteoric population growth and urban/suburban sprawl - It's something both basic liberals and country conservatives seem opposed to - So we are very ready to recognize and rage against the urban heat island effect. That good! Hopefully it will get us to preserve and plant more trees, stop mowing and draining wetlands, and limit sprawl. (Only our rich leaders [who are almost all financially aligned with development interests] seem to welcome the sprawl - We need to vote them out.)


The global climate change thing is a tougher pill for some people to swallow than the urban heat island effect, even though it is also 100% real. Anthropogenic climate change is indicated by mountains of evidence including steadily increasing CO2 and methane concentrations in the atmosphere, increasing global temperatures (even when the urban heat island effect, natural cycles, and other influences are carefully factored out), and increasing rates of glacier retreat and sea level rise. Why is it tougher for people to accept global climate change than the urban heat island effect? Well, it doesn't help that well-funded fossil fuel industry propaganda has been trying to cast doubt on the science for several decades. And the other thing is that compared to the urban heat island effect, global climate change is harder to directly feel. You can't step in and out of a CO2 polluted earth like you can step in and out of a tree shadow to feel the temperature difference, so you have to understand the science or at least trust the data and analyses by many groups of independent scientists around the world that all converge on the reality of climate change and its causes.

Anyway, hopefully more people will wake up to global CO2 pollution being a real contributor to local warming. In the meantime, actions like planting trees and limiting urban sprawl should be a win for both skeptics and believers, because trees help through both the local shade and evapotranspiration effect and CO2 sequestration, which makes a small but meaningful contribution to reducing global warming.

Solar fields compatible with plants but remember conservation principles

At Florida Gulf Coast University there is a solar "field" but it's moonscaped to bare rock with herbicide, which is sad.



The study described in this article is a reminder that plants *can* grow well around solar panels if you let them. I still think the best spot for solar panels is rooftops and parking lots that are already impervious surface, and that we should never destroy wilderness to make solar fields, but it's nice to know that farm or ranch land with panels can still function as farm or ranch land.


PS- The least glamorous but most important part of energy sustainability is reducing energy consumption through conservation and efficiency. Trying to just produce more and more energy to meet endlessly increasing energy demand is not cool, not even with renewable energy sources. That's why we need to reject energy-ravenous bullshit tech like the city-sized server farms grinding for cryptocurrency and AI that our "broligarch" overlords are pushing for. https://www.techinasia.com/news/metas-10b-us-ai-data-center-plan-sparks-climate-concerns

Worst to best groundcover types for earth

I'm a marine ecologist, but most of the problems I investigate in the marine environment are actually caused by stuff humans have done on land. I.e., as the human population has grown from 1 billion around 1800 ad to 8 billion+ today, the landscape of the planet has been largely converted from natural habitats (forests, meadows, wetlands, etc.) to human-altered habitats (farms, cities, suburbs). Runoff from human-altered habitats is usually more dirty and polluted than runoff from natural habitats, thus the sprawl of human development across terrestrial landscapes is the main cause of water quality impairment in lakes, rivers, and the coastal ocean. Not all types of human-altered land surface are equally bad, though, and we could greatly reduce runoff impacts through a more deliberate accounting of the water quality impacts of different land cover types. The main part of our strategy should be leveling off population growth and preserving large amounts of unimpacted natural habitats. But we can also make a lot of gains by optimizing land cover within areas that have already been altered by humans. The image below is a rough ranking of worst to best land cover types from an environmental perspective. The more we can replace cover types on the left of the diagram with cover types on the right, the better off we'll be. There is also potential for improvements within a cover type. For example, farms and turfgrass have less impacts if they uses organic methods and follow science-based approaches for soil and water conservation.

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Visualizing the value of biological diversity

Biodiversity is the variety of life, typically quantified as the number of different species living together in an area. Biodiversity varies from place to place, but generally human-impacted environments like farms and cities have low biodiversity, while less disturbed natural environments like tropical reefs and rainforests have high biodiversity. Every bit of biodiversity is valuable, though, and preserving or restoring diversity in human-impacted environments is important for many reasons.

People who study or spend a lot of time in nature usually have a strong appreciation for biodiversity, but the general public and decision makers don't always "get" why biodiversity matters. Therefore, environmental advocates are constantly challenged with how to communicate the values of biodiversity. We may emphasize moral and aesthetic concerns, like the beauty of diverse environments and the moral wrong of causing extinctions. Or we may emphasize pragmatic values of biodiversity- the tangible benefits it provides to humanity. These benefits are called "ecosystem services" and are described well in this 2012 Nature paper by Cardinale et al.

I fiddled around in PowerPoint yesterday trying to create some visuals for the values of biodiversity. The first is a single image contrasting a very low diversity lawn to a high diversity meadow environment, and listing some of the benefits of the latter.



The second is a series of images trying to explain the "niche complementarity effect" - one of the mechanisms by which a biodiverse environment can outperform a low diversity environment. Feel free to use any of these images if you like.