Environmental News

If PriusChat has heroes, I nominate @eaglesight333 for consistently providing weekly media summaries of environmental stories. Something like 500 views per week for a very long time.

 

A story of bananas

Peel and eat, but notice while eating the absence of seeds. For the botanically oriented this is actually weird because what are fruits for?

Bananas and plantains previously produced seedy fruits, but humans long ago found a way around that. Since then, after plants produce fruit, their tops are removed, roots are divided, and put into new holes. Then we have new bananas that are clones (genetically identical) to mother plants. There are no separate father plants.

There are hundreds of distinct varieties of bananas, but genetically speaking they do not interact. It's all just clone cars driving into the future. The previously commercial banana (Gros Michael) clone got wiped out by a fungus. The presently commercial banana (Cavendish) clone is susceptible to a different fungus.

All the other varieties of bananas are doing well (AFAIK), have very distinct flavors, but are not suitable for international shipping. A cure appears to be at hand:

Hope for global banana farming in genetic discovery | EurekAlert!

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Male and female flowers on same plants are called monoecious. Which spell checks as 'monotonous' and I guess that fits. So bananas still have sex (flowers, nectar, pollen, pollenators) but stop short of the 1-yard line and do not develop seeds. It is this sexuality that allows researchers to attempt to insert fungal resistance into Cavendish.

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Cavendish clone being so widely and densely planted offers itself up to any pathogen that achieves access. That;s a real problem. After this round gets fixed, there will be others.

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Intrepid biologists hiking through pristine appearing tropical forests may wonder if the land had actually been used by humans before. They may wonder a lot of things, including "where are the bad snakes and ants?" Tree species may appear to represent untouched forests, but seeing a banana is a clear indicator of earlier human activity.

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That was more than one banana story Good that I stopped.

 

For those interested in increasing mortality of birds:

North American bird declines are widespread and accelerating in agricultural hotspots | EurekAlert!

 

Our sun may have formed much closer to galactic center:

Our Sun Was Born in a Hellish Part of the Milky Way. New Research Explains How It Escaped

 

World Meteorological Organization publishes State of the Global Climate 2025:

https://wmo.int/publication-series/state-of-global-climate/state-of-global-climate-2025

In which readers will see many unsurprising results. I will write about ocean pH as it is a bit subtle.



Water can have pH in range of 0 to 14, so a focus on 8.11 having decreased to 8.04 may strike some as trivial. pH is on a logarithmic scale; that decrease over time means hydrogen ion concentration has increased 17.5%.

Still unimpressed? Then please see another:

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-55039-4

Scientific Reports (2019) 9: 18624, or rely on my summary of it.

Marine water is very well buffered when pH is 8 or higher. That means adding (acidifying) CO2 to water will cause small increases in hydrogen ion concentrations. If that water gets sent below pH 8, adding CO2 would become much more effective at lowering pH.



RCP8.5 refers to futures with very high CO2 emissions, RCP2.6 would have CO2 emission reductions, and others are between. I expect a future between RCP6.0 and RCP4.5, doubling hydrogen ion concentrations in (surface) marine water by year 2100.

What of that? Coral reefs (home of many baby fish) would be much less capable of building carbonate structures. Clams and similar would be much less capable of building carbonate shells. A pH 7.8 ocean in year 2100 would be very different from now.

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If that leads to too much gloom and doom, consider the following. There is evidence that oceans were more acidic (and warmer) earlier in biological history. And yet there persist coral reefs, fish whose babies grew up there, and clams and molluscs more generally. I do not see a way for humans to destroy ocean biology even at RCP8.5. Change yes, suppress yes, reduce marine protein harvest yes, but only on 100 to 1000 year timescales.

Because all the above refers to marine surface waters that mix promptly (only the top 100 meters or so). 90 ish % of total marine water does not yet ‘know’ that the Industrial (+CO2) Revolution has happened. All that water will mix more slowly later.

Other Figures from Scientific Reports 2019 show notable variations in surface water pH. Refuges do exist.

Under (gloomy) RCP8.5, terrestrial earth would erode more rapidly and export more silica and pH-increasing ions to oceans. Yay rivers! More silica increases growth of marine algae ‘living in glass houses’ that could supplant (carbonate-shelled) coccolithophores’ role as carbon trappers. As they probably did during earlier +CO2 episodes. This is what biogeochemists ought to consider, but not all do.

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Back to WMO 2026, many things important to The Human Enterprise are changing and not all are described there. It would seem wise to slow +CO2 as possible, while also increasing energy availability where it remains low.