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.

 

Paul Ehrlich (1932-2026) has died. One obit:

https://news.mongabay.com/2026/03/paul-ehrlich-population-bomb-ecologist-dies-at-93/

His well-known predictions of human over population did not occur. That is largely because the ‘Green Revolution’ (which he had no role in causing) increased agricultural production per area, and allowed its expansions into marginal lands. It is secondarily because birth control expanded, which he arguably had a role in.

His principal opponent on ‘limits to growth’ was Julian Simon who argued that human technology could overcome any resource barriers. His well-known predictions have already been disproved in part. With more on the way I suppose.

Prof. Ehrlich did many other things and inspired many ecologists.

 

Environmental news weird edition

Krill trawler rammed in Antarctic waters:
Activist ship rams Norwegian krill trawler in Antarctic

It is possible but unconfirmed that krill trawling makes an important reduction in food for whales etc. If the mentioned Regulatory body (CCAMLR) is doing its job, it would require trawlers to report their 'catch per unit effort" and locations to understand where overfishing (krilling) is occurring. Boat on boat violence is not a good way to resolve this. Even net-cutting would seem inappropriate, but better than putting any crew at risk.

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Psychedelic tobacco:
Scientists Engineered a Plant to Produce 5 Different Psychedelics at Once : ScienceAlert

The mental-health treatment angle is mentioned. Not harvesting the original producer organisms could be an important advance. But one could imagine others having interest seeds of magic tobacco plants for their own purposes.

 

Global energy review available from:

Global Energy Review 2026 – Analysis - IEA

TL;DR; solar is growing most rapidly of all.

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Another report, the US Global Change Research Program first National Nature Assessment is not available because President Trump blocked it completion and publication by Executive Order 2025 Jan. Authors of that report have indicated they will publish it themselves.

This is one of those things where inept censorship will probably lead to more attention being paid, when it does get published.

 

98% greenwashing?

98% of all recent environmental claims and commitments from the world’s largest meat and dairy companies can be categorized as “greenwashing”, or intentionally misleading | EurekAlert!

 

N=1233 claims (of environmental friendliness) were assessed.

Environmental claims, climate promises, and ‘greenwashing’ by meat and dairy companies | PLOS Climate

 

As much as anyone here and probably more than others, I would expect claims to be supported by appropriate statistical tests.

In this example 1213 of 1233 claims were found 'off'. That is counting, not statistics. One would want to go deeper into the test they used (it is fully described) to assess its reliability. Statistics reside therein.

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I would praise our Bob for knowing that 50 is an important 'N' in parametric statistics. Not all do, and this is sadly revealed in some publications.

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I am wrangling data for a manuscript; N>700 in one dataset and N>24000 in another. In this I begin to feel a need for a housekeeper. With particular skills

 

Jackie Robinson wore 42 for Brooklyn (later Los Angeles) Dodgers, and that is at least as important as D Adams pulling 42 out of his butt. I do not know that he ever said butt, but he did say it was an arbitrary choice.

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Comparing vapor pressure deficit (VPD; atmospheric dryness) responses among plant species, woody and non-woody species have surprisingly different responses, with more than adequate N. I also find that VPD in places where woody and non-woody species grow show same patterns, but with inadequate N for stats. Too few places have been examined. But we go with Ns we have; not those we wish we had.