The Great Polar Bear Debate

By: | January 17, 2018

Last month, biologist and National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen shot a video of an ailing polar bear. He shared it online to bring attention to seasonal starvation that is aggravated by climate change. The story got my attention: More than a decade ago, in my first real job as a journalist for a magazine about Northern Canada, I had written a profile of Nicklen. He was raised in Kimmirut–a tiny, remote community of Inuit on Baffin Island. Since then his speciality as a photographer has been polar wildlife. The man knows his polar bears.

Nevertheless, the moment the video went viral, everybody had an opinion about how dumb the videographers must have been. They all had a better explanation for this bear’s predicament. You would think they had talked to the bear themselves. A monitor in Arviat, Nunavut, insisted the bears he saw were healthy and thriving. He didn’t lose an opportunity to scoff at the stupidity of the southerners he assumed took the video. “Since I’m from the North, I wouldn’t really fall for the video,” he said.

I’m no bear expert, but my money is on Nicklen when it comes to how screwed the Arctic is right now. And the issue around whether the polar bear population is thriving or tanking is more negotiable than one might think. Over millions of square kilometres, counting is not a simple matter. Here is a post of mine from 2012 when the same issue was already being debated, along with sightings of “grolar pizzlies” — hybrids between polar bears and grizzlies. If we’ve learned anything from the last couple of decades of climate change, it’s that people will keep on denying that anything is wrong until the problem is too far gone to solve. We need to stop waiting for a consensus, and move.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Poetry

By: | January 16, 2018

Last week Michelle wrote that, given the speed of change in the reality under the science, climatology needed some new words, and she proposed a beauty: “antevernal,” meaning “daffodils blooming in February.”  To back her word-making, she quoted a naturalist:  “If the language we use to speak of the natural world is not innovative and engaging, then is it any wonder that few young people get excited about nature?” I agree with Michelle’s argument, I think the naturalist’s sentence is delightful, and I’ll add that astronomers have been doing this all along.

With significant exceptions.  Continue reading →

It Turns Out There Are Some Downsides to the Magical Box

By: | January 15, 2018

A good proportion of science fiction can be summed up like this: scientists invent a black box that does a magical thing. Hooray! Oh no… wait… that magical thing has some kinks. Oh dear, oh my, look what has happened, it turns out that there are some downsides to the magical box.

The thing is, that it’s not just science fiction that works this way, it’s also how a lot of today’s technologies and and startups go. Look you can share links with your friends and families instantly via Twitter or Facebook! Hooray! Oh no… wait… the Nazis have taken over.

I recently wrote a piece for TOPIC about another one of these magical black boxes: virtual reality. In particular, virtual reality as the “ultimate empathy machine.” The conceit here is this: the best way to understand someone else is to step into their shoes and experience their lives. Virtual reality allows that, whether by way of computer generated graphics or through 360 degree documentary films. And because virtual reality can allow this kind of digital body swapping, it therefore must be the very best possible way to foster empathy. The piece I wrote for TOPIC detailed a few of the ways that these experiences can backfire, based on the available psychological research.

But there was one thing that I didn’t have space to talk about in that story, so I’m going to expand on the piece here.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 13, 2018

Desert-landscape-cactusJanuary 8-12, 2018

Michelle reduxes a post about a word she made up to describe daffodils that bloom during false springs—and wonders what other words the world needs these days. Honestly, all the Snowpocalypses and Snowzillas of recent years are starting to run together. If we’re going to keep naming nature in the Anthropocene, we need to branch out.

Erik snorkels on a beautiful reef in Cozumel and worries about sponges. With something as vast as the ocean, it’s hard to overstate just how little we know. So little that we can’t tell how many of its most iconic fish are left in it. So little that we don’t even know what lives in much of it. So little that we can’t say for certain if sponges are disappearing or taking over.

Cassie reports on a cellular immunologist who contemplates unusual measures to help her ailing dog. How dumb is it,” she asked her Facebook friends, “to consider giving her a brief helminth infection?” In other words, should she deliberately infect her dog with parasitic worms?

Becky writes from the desert, where she listens to ghost stories. Don Emilio was hanged, four times, on May 7, 1904. The bandits who came for his gold were apparently unskilled with the noose and he didn’t die, at least not that night. Instead he died four years later, of complications from the hanging(s). His ghost might come to visit sometimes.

Craig would be a good person to sit next to on a bumpy plane ride. Maybe. I’m not insensitive to the needs of fellow passengers. I just love the world and its storms. The sky is a cabinet of swirling, perilous curiosities. You think you have all your variables nailed down, then you step outside. . . These forces have us at their mercy, and make for the easiest small talk to share with strangers. We all have to face the weather head on.

We’ll face the weather head on with you next week.

*

Photo by Rebecca Boyle

The Philosophy of Weather

By: | January 12, 2018

Last Friday night the Boston runway looked like an Arctic landing, bits of tarmac barely visible through sheets of blowing snow. I had a good view of the runway with the plane tipping like a seesaw, coming in on the tail of an explosive cyclogenesis, or bombogenesis, media-shortened to a bomb cyclone. This unusual storm had just devoured the East Coast and was starting to clear out, the airport only recently re-opened while still experiencing severe winds, the bay casting bergs of ice into city streets. One of the highest tides on record had flooded a Boston subway station.

I’d rather have taken the storm in its teeth and arrived a day earlier because I do enjoy turbulence. Assuming we could have landed. The horrible bouncing and shudders, stomach acids in your throat, then in your feet. I like it when people around me scream, bonus if the passenger next to me grabs my arm, not wanting to die alone. Planes don’t tend to crash in storms. Weather is a factor in about a quarter of all air crashes, often only one component in a cascade of other predicaments. Planes tend to stay together, they tend to land, and most people go on happily with their lives. The roller coaster ride comes with no additional charge.

The woman next to me on the flight was pale with impending mortality. She told me she’d finally met the partner of her dreams, they were getting a house together. After a lifetime of relationship calamity, it was all finally working out, and she has a book to write. She said it helped to talk as we bucked and rolled for our landing.

I’d rather die on impact, I told her. I didn’t want to drown in an aluminum tube with 200 other people just shy of the runway. She said she didn’t care, keep talking. Continue reading →

A Ghost Story From the Desert

By: | January 11, 2018

Desert-landscape-cactus

There are certain places in our country that are known for storytelling, the cowboy poet said to us. From New Orleans Cajun country to Lake Wobegon, a few small, distinctive regions — not New York, and definitely not Washington — have become known for their storytelling styles, and for their stories.

“Western stories are the most intimate stories I can think of,” he said.

Western stories are the most spiritual stories I can think of, I thought.

Spirituality is different from religiosity, at least the Western European forms of religion I grew up with and know. Western spirituality is nature spirituality, maybe some elements of Native American spirituality. It’s deeper meaning derived from the place itself, and not dictated by some imported ancient rules or scriptural strictures. It’s spirituality that is simultaneously rooted in the real.

I am on a dude ranch in Arizona for a week. The first night we were here, our waiter told us a ghost story after dinner. It was not a stereotypical Western ghost story, in that it was not told around a campfire with smoke and s’mores and dirt on your pants. It did feature all of those things, but this was not the setting in which the story was told. Instead, our server Todd told the story while standing in the well-lit ranch dining room, holding a silver pitcher of water, and gesticulating. He talked like a busy waiter in a city restaurant, his words clipped and emphatic. “There are so many spirits here,” he said. Continue reading →

DIY Dog Doctor

By: | January 10, 2018

Donut the dog has always been a bit of a lemon. “She hates kids. She hates other dogs. She hates physical activity,” says Julia Gilden. Gilden adopted the 80-pound Bearded Collie seven years ago. All the things people love about dogs? Donut didn’t really have many of those attributes. But she was sweet and goofy and, for the most part, pretty healthy.

All that changed in 2015. Donut developed a series of health problems so perplexing and expensive that Gilden, a cellular immunologist, began pondering a radical DIY solution. “How dumb is it,” she asked her Facebook friends, “to consider giving her a brief helminth infection?” In other words, should she deliberately infect her dog with parasitic worms? Continue reading →

It All Depends Where You Look

By: | January 9, 2018

Last month, while on assignment in Cozumel for a story on sponges, I went diving on a beautiful reef. It was stunning – a world of color, dreamlike shapes, and life everywhere I looked. Normally, I would have just swam about, marveled at the pretty nature, and come back to my hotel with a fat grin on my face.

But I just couldn’t stop fretting over all the sponges. You see, my story was on a theory among sponge experts that sponges are secretly, quietly taking over the world. It is … wait for it … The Rise of the Planet of the Sponge. Scary, right? Except just on coral reefs, not the world. And only in the Caribbean Sea. So, I guess it’s The Rise of the Caribbean Reef of the Sponge. Wow, that really doesn’t work as well.

Anyway, the theory goes that huge coral and urchin die-offs have led to a lot of spare real estate and algae on Caribbean reefs. The sponges have stepped in, sucked up the excess sugar pumped out by the algae and filled the now-empty reefs.

And diving in Cozumel, I noticed for the first time just how much of the color on a reef is actually sponge. We all know the big barrel sponges – those giant cannon-looking things hanging off the reef – but I’d never really noticed the encrusting sponges before. These are the colorful flat sponges that sort of drizzle around the reef like splotches on a Jackson Pollack.

Continue reading →