This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.

Wildfires in western and central Canada spread rapidly this week, forcing thousands of people to evacuate, with smoke sweeping into the Midwest and triggering air quality alerts in several states, a reminder of last year’s smoky conditions.

“You looked outside and buildings more than a couple blocks away were starting to look smoky,” said Matt Taraldsen, the supervisory meteorologist at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency based in St. Paul. “You could definitely see the smoke outside, you could smell it, you could even taste it in the morning. It was really gross.” 

Climate change is a major contributor to longer and more frequent wildfire seasons and worsening air pollution due to smoke. 

Dry conditions and high winds are driving these fires, following Canada’s warmest winter on record. Some are “zombie fires” that began last season and smoldered underground during the winter, reigniting this spring.

“It is so crispy out there,” said Jennifer Smith, the national warning preparedness meteorologist for the Meteorological Service of Canada.  

Last year, Canada saw its worst wildfire season on record; around 45 million acres burned and over 235,000 people were forced to evacuate. This month, Canada rolled out a new marker on its air quality index specifically for wildfires — until now, the scale has been one through 10, but now, there’s a 10-plus, indicating extremely poor air quality. 

“We issue this particular advisory when it’s at a 10-plus, and it is due to wildfire smoke,” Smith said. “So it’s really just to emphasize how hazardous the situation is.”

In 2023, parts of the Midwest and Northeast United States saw some of the worst air quality in the world. Taraldsen said checking the air quality index became part of many people’s daily routines.

“They would basically use our forecasts to kind of structure their day, which was unusual,” he said. “There seemed to be a paradigm shift where people were acutely aware that air quality is important, and it can impact your life, and that you can get forecasts for it just like you can for any other weather.”

Improving indoor air quality through purifiers, filtration, and more basic techniques is an important way to address exposure to wildfire smoke — something that’s gaining steam on the federal level as well. 

Forecasting air quality can be tricky; it deals with weather, atmospheric chemistry, and human activity. And while the movement of wildfire smoke is difficult to predict, the location of the fires is an important factor.  

“Basically all of the air quality impacts we’ve had the past couple of years have been due to remote fires,” Taraldsen said. “Once you pull people out in the fields, it’s hard for them to get back.”

Generally, agencies prioritize responding to fires that threaten human life and infrastructure. Because there are limited resources, those in more remote areas are sometimes left to burn out. 

“It’s probably not going to get as many resources as quickly as a city that’s being evacuated, for example,” said Alexandria Jones, the communications manager at the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, a government agency that coordinates resources like aircraft and firefighters. 

Last summer, some of the wildfire smoke that blanketed much of the Midwest and Northeast U.S. came from areas that were hard to reach, according to Alec Kownacki, a meteorologist with Michigan’s Air Quality Division.

“A lot of wildfires that were causing the smoke were in very remote areas to where they couldn’t get any access to,” he said. “So they literally just said, ‘We just have to let it burn out because it’s in the middle of woods. There’s no access roads.’” 

In Canada, fires are initially managed by local governments in partnership with provinces and territories. As the intensity ramps up, the interagency center works to manage resources across the country, and sometimes internationally. Last year, Canada brought in 5,500 firefighters from other countries and also sent its own firefighters to Australia — a kind of firefighter exchange. 

Indigenous communities disproportionately bear the brunt of wildfires and the smoke they produce. Of the nearly 300 evacuation orders issued in Canada by September 2023, more than 95 were for Indigenous communities — a drastic increase from previous years. 

The Assembly of First Nations worked with Indigenous Services Canada to update its fire protection strategy last May, focusing on both wildfires and building fires.

Cindy Woodhouse, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations said in a 2023 statement that the strategy is a critical step in ensuring the safety and well-being of their communities.

“Every year, First Nations communities experience fires that could have been prevented or mitigated with adequate infrastructure, resources, and support,” Woodhouse said. “Fire services in First Nations communities are frequently faced with insufficient resources and inadequate funding to meet the needs of our populations.” 

Last week, the prime minister’s office emphasized millions of dollars in additional funding for wildfire response in its budget.  

Jones, with the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, said most wildfire response is currently going to the provinces of Manitoba, Alberta, and British Columbia.

The government also gave up to $1.2 million Canadian dollars ($881,200) in funding for the center to help with wildfire prevention and mitigation and bolster the FireSmart Canada program, which aims to help people prepare for and prevent wildfires through efforts like removing flammable vegetation around homes. 

“Wildfire season likely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but there are things people can do to protect their properties and their communities,” she said. “Focusing on the prevention piece is imperative to preparing people and making them more resilient to wildfire.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Canadian wildfire smoke just blanketed the Midwest — again on May 16, 2024.

Industrial processes like smelting metals or manufacturing cement can be carbon-intensive, as they typically rely on fossil fuels to generate enough energy to produce high temperatures. But researchers have found a way to use solar thermal trapping, rather than fossil fuels, to reduce the emissions of some industrial processes.

“To tackle climate change, we need to decarbonize energy in general,” said corresponding author Emiliano Casati, of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, as reported by Science Daily. “People tend to only think about electricity as energy, but in fact, about half of the energy is used in the form of heat.”

Scientists used semitransparent materials, including synthetic quartz, to capture sunlight with a thermal trapping effect. The team connected a synthetic quartz rod, partially lined with platinum, to an opaque silicon carbide disk, which would absorb the sunlight, and exposed one end of the quartz rod to concentrated solar radiation.

After exposing one end of the rod to the concentrated solar radiation, the silicon carbide disk reached 1,050 degrees Celsius (1,922 degrees Fahrenheit), hot enough for smelting metal or cooking cement, among other industrial processes. While that end reached over 1,000 degrees Celsius, the other end of the quartz rod stayed at a temperature of 600 degrees Celsius (1,112 degrees Fahrenheit). The researchers published their findings in the journal Device.

Thermal trapping is not a new concept, but it is typically considered only viable at lower temperatures, Clean Technica reported. The new study’s findings reveal the potential for solar-trapping devices to generate enough heat to power even some of the most carbon-intensive industry processes.

“Previous research has only managed to demonstrate the thermal-trap effect up to 170°C (338°F),” Casati said in a statement. “Our research showed that solar thermal trapping works not just at low temperatures, but well above 1,000°C. This is crucial to show its potential for real-world industrial applications.”

As reported in the study, heat generation makes up about half of final energy consumption, with 25% of total energy consumption used for industrial processes. Most of this energy consumption for industrial processes relies on power from fossil fuels. By using solar thermal trapping instead to generate high temperatures, industries could reduce their emissions.

“Energy issue is a cornerstone to the survival of our society,” Casati said. “Solar energy is readily available, and the technology is already here. To really motivate industry adoption, we need to demonstrate the economic viability and advantages of this technology at scale.”

The solar-trapping device is currently just a proof-of-concept and is not yet ready to scale. The team will continue their research to make their device more efficient and effective, including through testing different materials that can absorb the solar radiation and generate higher temperatures. They also noted that further testing is needed for different coatings or applied surface patterns to reduce reflections.

The post Scientists Use Solar Power to Generate Enough Heat to Smelt Metal appeared first on EcoWatch.

Companies will be required to report their emissions and climate-related risks to their business.

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Pretty much all life on Earth – plants, animals, humans – in large part, owe their entire existence to one microscopic protein. It’s called ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase, better known as RuBisCO, and it’s an enzyme: a biological machine that helps turn CO2 into energy.

Of the millions of enzymes on earth, RuBisCO might be the most important. It’s essential to photosynthesis, and without it, plants would be unable to grow. Without RuBisCO, nearly all life on Earth would starve.

But even though it’s everywhere, and has been around for billions of years, RuBisCO kind of sucks at its job. And it’s getting worse as the world gets hotter.

Today, a global team of scientists is trying to accomplish something that evolution has previously failed to do: building a better RuBisCO.

RuBisCO was discovered kind of by accident. It was the 1940s, and an aimless grad student named Sam Wildman stumbled on a newly-released book about plant science in his university library. The book described a simple way to get protein from leaves, using common lab ingredients. Curious, and maybe a bit bored, Wildman started messing around in the lab.

When he added a certain chemical to the spinach juice, a giant cloud of protein would appear. He didn’t know it at the time, but that cloud was RuBisCO. He had just discovered the enzyme directly responsible for taking CO2 from the air and kickstarting photosynthesis. He also had no idea that that cloudy test tube contained a clue that would haunt scientists for the next eight decades.

You can think of photosynthesis kind of like a big assembly line that takes in CO2 and, step by step, turns it into food. Each stop on the assembly line is an enzyme: little biological machines that each perform a step. And if they all work together, the plants can suck up a lot of carbon, make a lot of food, and the whole operation runs like clockwork.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happens, because of one incompetent enzyme: RuBisCO. The first problem is that it’s really slow, hundreds of times slower than many other enzymes. And it ends up slowing down the entire factory, resulting in a lot less food.

Second, it makes a lot of mistakes. Instead of grabbing CO2, RuBisCO will often grab an oxygen molecule. This wreaks havoc on the assembly line, and the entire operation has to go into cleanup mode. This happens so often that plants waste nearly a third of their energy fixing this sloppy mistake. 

Finally, this enzyme performs even worse during hot weather. This means that as climate change warms our planet, our farms may produce less food, and our plants could get worse at sequestering carbon.

In the face of all of these problems, plants have developed an incredibly makeshift workaround: 

They just make tons and tons of RuBisCO. This is why there was so much of that cloudy protein in Sam Wildman’s test tube. RuBisCO alone makes up nearly half of the protein in leaves of spinach and many other plants. 

Soon after its discovery, scientists started to wonder if a better RuBisCO was possible. They envisioned futuristic plants that could produce higher yields and suck up more carbon. They saw it as a way to feed the world’s growing population, and the billions more to come — not through bigger farms or more fertilizer, but by improving the fundamental nature of plants.

On the other hand, neither billions of years of evolution nor decades of scientific research had fixed RuBisCO’s problems. To some, this is a sign that a better RuBisCO isn’t possible. The lack of progress seems so hopeless that one source told me that scientists are sometimes hesitant to even admit they’re working on this challenge.

But not everyone sees it that way. Robbie Wilson is a research scientist and a self-described “rubiscologist” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s one of the scientists who see this evolutionary paradox as more of a challenge. Wilson is part of an international collaboration aimed at evolving a better RuBisCO — not in a field, or even a greenhouse, but in a petri dish of bacteria.

Evolution usually takes place over millions of years. But with bacteria, scientists are able to speed this process up. Bacteria are pretty simple to modify genetically, meaning scientists can actually design their own sequences instead of waiting for random mutations. And their generations are only about 25 minutes long. “I’d say it makes it a million times better — maybe a billion times easier — to work with bacteria,” Wilson said.

This is what’s so special about Wilson’s technique: He’s found a way to engineer bacteria to create and test thousands of different versions of RuBisCO in the lab. Just like in the wild, where threats like predators and diseases push species to develop certain strengths, Wilson’s designed a special lab environment to push the bacteria to develop better forms of RuBisCO.

Once each bacteria colony has produced a slightly different version of RuBisCO, Wilson and his team essentially poison the bacteria. The poison comes from a second enzyme, called phosphoribulokinase, or PRK. 

Like RuBisCO, this enzyme is an important part of photosynthesis in plants. In nature, PRK produces a chemical that RuBisCO needs to do its job — capturing carbon and turning it into food. But in the petri dish, that same chemical can be deadly. The bacteria isn’t designed for photosynthesis, so unless RuBisCO acts quickly, that chemical will just build up until it eventually kills the entire colony of bacteria. 

RuBisCO is essentially an antidote to this poison. The better the RuBisCO, the healthier the bacteria.

On a recent visit to Wilson’s lab at MIT, I watched as he pulled out two petri dishes from the experiment. This first petri dish contained RuBisCO you’d find in nature — which wasn’t very good, so the petri dish was empty. The second petri dish was full of bacteria with new versions of RuBisCO. That dish was covered in little dots. Those bacteria colonies were surviving because their new RuBisCO enzymes worked really well. 

Wilson was seeing evolution — but happening in hours instead of millions of years.

Once the team has identified the best candidates in the petri dish, they need to see if the new versions of RuBisCO actually work in real plants. Using a syringe, they inject the new DNA into the plants. You can actually see the liquid spreading through the leaf. Those plants will go on to produce the brand new versions of RuBisCO, and Wilson’s team will see if they actually do grow better in the real world.

While it’s still a long process from the lab to the field, Wilson is hoping that this project might finally demonstrate that a better RuBisCO actually is possible. “I’m secretly pretty confident that we’re going to change the way that people think about RuBisCO’s engineering potential, which is going to have a huge knock-on effect for continuing research,” he said.

But as important as improving RuBisCO is, it’s just one part of the enormous effort to develop more productive and climate-resilient crops. Right now, other scientists are thinking up ways to make plants that can capture more colors of sunlight, or dreaming up projects that build on the natural workarounds that certain plants have developed to circumvent RuBisCO’s weaknesses.

“There have been very encouraging results from many other projects that have gotten me really excited,” Wilson said. “I think if all of these can be combined together, we’re gonna have something really special.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This enzyme is responsible for life on Earth. It’s a hot mess. on May 16, 2024.

In the depths of the Great Depression in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned Congress that millions of Americans were idly “walking the streets,” presenting a threat to the country’s stability, even though they “would infinitely prefer to work.” It’s part of the reason he proposed the Civilian Conservation Corps, a program that would hire men to preserve forests, prevent soil erosion, and control floods. “More important, however, than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work,” Roosevelt said.

President Joe Biden referenced that line last month when he announced the launch of the American Climate Corps, a government jobs program inspired by Roosevelt’s that tackles the environmental problems of the 21st century. Besides the obvious benefits of restoring wetlands and installing solar panels, the climate corps is intended to pave a path to green careers for those who sign up. Another advantage of joining, though less-discussed, is that it could help alleviate widespread climate anxiety, channeling young people’s concern into concrete, hands-on work. More than half of Americans are anxious, to some degree, about how climate change is affecting their mental health. There are only about 250 job openings in the climate corps right now, but the White House expects to employ 20,000 people over the program’s first year.

While the vast majority of 18- to 28-year-olds in the United States say they’re worried about climate change, two-thirds of them are unsure what they can do to make a difference, according to polling from the think tank Data for Progress in 2022. The combination is ripe for “climate anxiety,” a catch-all term for the feelings of grief, fear, and distress that’s not so much a clinical diagnosis as a logical response to living through the hottest period on Earth in 125,000 years. 

According to common wisdom, the best way to treat existential dread about global warming is to “take action.” But not all types of climate action are equal. Proponents of the American Climate Corps suggest that the program offers something more substantial than ditching meat or taking a bike ride — it’s a chance to work on climate change or environmental justice issues all day as part of a larger cause. “There’s something about, ‘Here is a clear job with a clear timeline and a clear local goal. I can, like, put my hands in the dirt,’” said Kidus Girma, campaign director of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate organization that fought to make the climate corps happen. 

In small doses, anxiety can prompt people to do something, but in large doses, it can be incapacitating. The structure of the American Climate Corps could be useful for young people who are overwhelmed by the enormity of a global problem and aren’t sure where to start, said McKenna Parnes, a clinical psychology researcher at the University of Washington. 

Taking action as part of a group, as opposed to going it alone, can significantly alleviate the distress associated with climate change, according to a study Parnes co-authored in 2022. Climate corps members wouldn’t necessarily need to be working with people all day to get those benefits. “Even if it’s folks that are doing individual jobs but part of the greater collective, just by nature of being part of the climate corps, there’s already that collective piece,” she said.

Jennifer Rasmussen, a registered nurse and an education fellow with the Planetary Health Alliance, a global network of organizations addressing the health effects of environmental changes, said that social support networks are key for improving mental health, especially with the rise of loneliness among young people. Being a member of the corps could also provide a sense of purpose and fulfillment, as well as help people build self-confidence by learning new skills — all of which tend to increase people’s psychological resilience and well-being, she said.

Roosevelt might have been ahead of his time when he wished the initial Civilian Conservation Corps members a “pleasant, wholesome, and constructively helpful stay in the woods.” Recent research suggests that feeling a connection to nature is associated with lower levels of depression and anxiety, another promising sign for American Climate Corps members who end up tending to forests, streams, or community gardens.

Climate anxiety comes in different forms: It can spring from a disaster, such as living through a flood, hurricane, or smoke-filled wildfire season. It can also take the shape of some existential dread about the future, even if you haven’t experienced a disaster yourself. A survey in 2021 found that climate anxiety was common in 10 countries across four continents, with 45 percent of young people saying that worrying about the environment was affecting their daily lives and ability to function. 

That report suggested that this emotional distress stemmed from governments’ failure to respond to the problem. That rings true for Matt Ellis-Ramirez, a coordinator at Sunrise Movement Miami who recently graduated from the University of Miami and is thinking about joining the American Climate Corps. In Florida, for instance, a bill that removes most mentions of climate change from the state’s laws was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday, and last month, DeSantis signed legislation that bans local rules to protect outdoor workers from extreme heat.

“I think that’s where my anxiety comes from — that if we’re not actually able to shift our political system, that we might actually just be watching Miami become unlivable,” Ellis-Ramirez said. 

Ellis-Ramirez is most excited about applying for hands-on positions in the American Climate Corps, like restoration efforts in the Everglades or planting trees in neighborhoods that lack them. Girma said that if he was looking for a job in the corps, he’d like to work on coastal restoration. “But I don’t think I would confidently say coastal restoration is the thing for people who have anxiety,” he said. “I think it’s broadly like, ‘Can I see a clear, measurable impact from my work day to day?’”

Saul Levin, the legislative and political director at the Green New Deal Network, says that there’s something empowering about knowing that people are working around you to address climate change and make communities safer. “It’s really not just the thousands and thousands of people who will be employed through the [American Climate Corps] who I think could have had their mental health improved, but also their acquaintances, families, neighbors, who similarly will benefit from knowing that folks are actually being hired to work on this.”

This story has been updated to reflect Governor DeSantis’ signing of a bill.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The American Climate Corps will get people into green jobs. Can it help their mental health too? on May 16, 2024.

The rising cost of homeowner’s insurance is now one of the most prominent symptoms of climate change in the United States. Major carriers like State Farm and Allstate have pulled back from offering fire insurance in California, dropping thousands of homeowners from their books, and dozens of small insurance companies have collapsed or fled from Florida and Louisiana following recent large hurricanes. 

The problem is fast becoming a crisis that stretches far beyond the nation’s coastal states. That’s owing to another, less-talked-about kind of disaster that has wreaked havoc on states in the Midwest and the Great Plains, causing billions of dollars in damage. In response, insurers have raised premiums higher than ever and dropped customers even in inland states such as Iowa.

These so-called “severe-convective storms” are large and powerful thunderstorms that form and disappear within a few hours or days, often spinning off hail storms and tornadoes as they shoot across the flat expanses of the central United States. The insurance industry refers to these storms as “secondary perils”—the other term of art is “kitty cats,” a reference to their being smaller than big natural catastrophes or “nat cats.”

But the damage from these secondary perils has begun to add up. Losses from severe convective storms increased by about 9 percent every year between 1989 and 2022, according to the insurance firm Aon. Last year these storms caused more than $50 billion in insured losses combined—about as much as 2022’s massive Hurricane Ian. No single storm event caused more than a few billion dollars of damage, but together they were more expensive than most big disasters. The scale of loss sent the insurance industry reeling.

“As insurers, our job is to predict risk,” said Matt Junge, who oversees property coverage in the United States for the global insurance giant Swiss Re. “What we’ve missed is that it wasn’t a big event that had a big impact, it was a bunch of small surprise events that just added up. There’s this kind of this reset where we’re saying, ‘Okay, we really have to get a handle on this.’”

Part of the reason for this steady accumulation is that more people are moving to areas that are vulnerable to convective storms, which raises the damage profile of each new tornado or hailstorm. The cost of rebuilding a home has increased due to inflation and supply-chain shortages, which drives up prices. But climate change may also be playing a role: Convective storms tend to form in hot, moist, and unstable weather conditions.

“We have such a dearth of observations about hailstorms and tornadoes, so the trend analysis is tricky,” said Kelly Mahoney, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who studies severe convective storms. “But you are taking storms that are fueled by heat and moisture, and you are watching them develop in a world that is hotter and moister than ever. It’s a tired analogy these days, but it’s still true here, of loaded dice or a stacked deck.”

Climate attribution is much harder for these ephemeral storms than it is for hurricanes and heat waves, Mahoney said, but it stands to reason that climate change will have some influence on how and where they develop. Warming has already caused the geographic range of “Tornado Alley” to extend farther south and east than it once did, delivering more twisters to states like Alabama and Mississippi.

Whatever the cause, this loss trend is making business much harder for many insurance companies. Most vulnerable are the small regional insurers with large clusters of customers in one state or metropolitan area. When a significant storm strikes, these companies have to pay claims to huge portions of their risk pool, which can drain their reserves and push them toward insolvency.

“The local mutuals, you have a couple storms, you have a bad year, and they’re in trouble, because all their business is here and that risk isn’t spread out,” said Glen Mulready, the insurance commissioner of Oklahoma. The state has some of the highest insurance premiums in the country, and Mulready said many insurers are now refusing to write new policies for homes with old roofs that are vulnerable to collapse during tornadoes and hailstorms.

Even large “reinsurers,” which sell insurance to insurance companies around the world, are feeling the sting from these storms. Global reinsurance firms such as Swiss Re take in premium revenue from all over the globe, insuring earthquakes in Japan as well as hurricanes in Florida, so they aren’t vulnerable to collapse during local disasters, even major ones. But the increasing trend of “attritional” losses from repeated convective storms does threaten to cut into their profit margins.

“We have less of a concern about the tail on these types of events,” said Junge of Swiss Re, using the industry term for the costliest disasters. “The concern for us is just the impact on earnings.”

Ed Bolt, the mayor of Shawnee, Oklahoma, has seen this impact up close. A tornado raged down his town’s main boulevard last year and destroyed more than 2,000 buildings, knocking the roof off Bolt’s own house. His insurance company paid to replace the roof, but it mailed him a letter a few months ago with a notice that his annual premium was going to increase by 50 percent, reaching around $3,600 a year.

“The cost used to tick up and tick up a little bit, but last year we knew we would get a big hit because of the tornado,” Bolt told Grist. “I’m sure that would be a pretty consistent experience across town.”

Most states require insurers to get permission from regulators before they raise rates, which presents governments with a tough dilemma. If they raise rates, they make it harder for homeowners to keep up with their insurance payments, and they also risk dampening property values. If they keep rates down, insurers might react by ceasing to write new policies or pulling out of the state. Mulready, the Oklahoma commissioner, says he had one national insurer leave his market earlier this year.

Still, the Midwest has yet to encounter a large-scale exodus, and industry representatives say it’s unlikely that they will pull out of the region the way they have from California. But it’s a safe bet that insurers will keep raising premiums as high as states will let them. Insurers may also raise deductibles, setting a higher minimum amount of damage before insurance kicks in. The upshot is a bigger financial burden for homeowners in fast-growing metro areas like Denver, where insurers’ storm exposure has skyrocketed in recent years.

Perhaps the worst part of the problem is that most states have made little progress in preparing for these storm events. Florida imposed a strict building code after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and most newer homes in the state can withstand high winds. The housing stock in the central United States is far less resilient to tornado winds and hail, and just a few cities have forced builders to fortify homes against those hazards.

Erin Collins, the lead state policy advocate at the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, the nation’s largest insurer trade group, said carriers might have to keep raising rates until the nation’s housing stock becomes more resilient to severe storms.

“It’s going to take community-scale hardening to bend that loss curve down,” she told Grist.

That won’t be easy. Insurers need to convince large home builders that they should build with more expensive, storm-resistant materials, and they also need to nudge millions of people in existing homes to upgrade their roofs and windows, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Because severe convective storms can strike such a wide geography, it will take a long time for this mitigation work to “bend the loss curve down.”

The good news is that we know how to build storm-resistant homes, and there’s proof that building better makes a big difference, says Ian Giacomelli, a senior meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for stronger building standards. 

Giacomelli points to the city of Moore, Oklahoma, which rolled out some of the strictest storm-resilience standards in the country after it suffered three devastating tornadoes in two decades. Now almost the city’s entire housing stock has roofs that can bounce off large hail storms and strong joints that prevent roofs from flying off during tornado events. Giacomelli says the nation’s current insurance crisis would likely ease up if more cities followed Moore’s lead.

“I think the solutions are coming into focus,” he told Grist. “It’s more about can we get the will to do them.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How ‘kitty cats’ are wrecking the home insurance industry on May 16, 2024.

Bumblebees are essential pollinators, but many species are in a downward spiral that is sometimes a mystery to scientists.

In a new study, researchers have found that the increasing temperatures of the human-caused climate crisis may be interfering with climate control in bumblebee nests, threatening future generations.

“The decline in populations and ranges of several species of bumblebees may be explained by issues of overheating of the nests and the brood,” said lead author of the study Dr. Peter Kevan of Canada’s University of Guelph, in a press release from Frontiers. “The constraints on the survival of the bumblebee brood indicate that heat is likely a major factor, with heating of the nest above about 35 degrees Celsius being lethal, despite the remarkable capacity of bumblebees to thermoregulate.”

There are more than 250 species of bumblebee on Earth, inhabiting a variety of environments. Many are in decline due to climate change, but the specific cause has been difficult to pinpoint.

Following a review of the scientific literature, the research team found that the optimal temperature window of bumblebee nests — roughly 28 to 32 degrees Celsius — was consistent between many species around the world.

“We can assume that the similarity reflects the evolutionary relatedness of the various species,” Kevan said in the press release.

The right temperature means minimal metabolic expenditure, while warmth in excess of that window can lead to dangerous heat stress. This means adaptation to higher temperatures could prove hard for bumblebees.

“Excessively high temperatures are more harmful to most animals and plants than cool temperatures. When conditions are cool, organisms that do not metabolically regulate their body temperatures simply slow down, but when temperatures get too high metabolic processes start to break down and cease,” Kevan explained. “Death ensues quickly.”

After a review of 180 years of literature, the team discovered that bumblebees seemed to survive at temperatures as high as 36 degrees Celsius, while 30 to 32 degrees was the optimal range for development, though that window could differ between biogeographical conditions and species.

“The similarity of the optimum temperature range in incubating nests is remarkable, about 28–32°C regardless of species from the cold High Arctic to tropical environments indicates that the optimal temperature for rearing of brood in Bombus spp. is a characteristic common to bumblebees (perhaps a synapomorphy) and with limited evolutionary plasticity,” the researchers wrote in the study.

The researchers said that, while bumblebees have a number of behavioral adaptations for thermoregulation, they may not be adequate to adapt to climate change. They called for more research on how the pollinators can survive the rising temperatures, as well as more studies into bumblebee ecology — temperature, thermoregulation, nest morphology and material properties.

A bumblebee colony acts as a “superorganism,” with reproductive fitness dependent on collective reproduction and survival rather than on individual bees, the press release said. Individual bees may be better able to cope with heat than others, but if the bees’ nest is too hot for raising healthy larvae, the entire colony will suffer.

“The effect of high nest temperatures has not been studied very much, which is surprising. We can surmise that nest temperatures above the mid-30s Celsius would likely be highly detrimental and that above about 35 Celsius death would occur, probably quite quickly,” Kevan said in the press release.

Honeybee studies have shown that hotter nest temperatures sap the strength of queen bees and weaken their ability to reproduce, leading to smaller worker bees and less optimum conditions. If heat affects bumblebees in a similar way, global heating could be a direct cause of their decline.

Some bumblebee colonies may be able to adapt the selection and form of nest site or their behavior to cool down their nests. Ground-penetrating radar might aid in the study of ground-nesting bee species and nest analysis using flow-through respirometry at varying temperatures could help researchers assess how much stress is being placed on bee colonies inside.

“We need both to understand how different colonies cope with the same conditions and how different species cope with different conditions, including whether some bumblebee species have broader thermal neutral zones, affording them more resilience,” the press release said.

“We hope that future scientists may take the ideas we present and apply them to their own research on bumblebee health and conversation,” Kevan concluded.

The study, “Thermodynamics, thermal performance and climate change: temperature regimes for bumblebee (Bombus spp.) colonies as examples of superorganisms,” was published in the journal Frontiers in Bee Science.

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Humans and other animals have the ability to teach important skills to their contemporaries that allow for knowledge building across generations.

According to two new studies, bumblebees and chimpanzees are two animals who have the capability of learning skills so complex they would never have been able to master them alone — an ability scientists previously believed was unique to humans.

“Culture refers to behaviours that are socially learned and persist within a population over time. Increasing evidence suggests that animal culture can, like human culture, be cumulative: characterized by sequential innovations that build on previous ones,” the bumblebee study said.

“Cumulative culture” is the human capacity to build knowledge, skills and technology over time while improving upon them as they are taught to successive generations, reported AFP. It is a technique that is viewed as an essential part of humans’ dominance over their environment.

“Imagine that you dropped some children on a deserted island,” said Lars Chittka, co-author of the study on bees and a behavioral ecologist at London’s Queen Mary University, in a video accompaniment to the study, as AFP reported. “They might — with a bit of luck — survive, but they would never know how to read or to write because this requires learning from previous generations.”

Earlier experiments had shown that some animals demonstrate “social learning,” where they figure out a skill through observation of individuals of their own species. But while some of the behaviors appeared to have been honed over time — such as the ability of chimpanzees to crack open nuts or the navigational skills of homing pigeons — it is hard for scientists to eliminate the possibility that these animals did not figure out how to accomplish the specific tasks on their own.

A research team from the United Kingdom looked at bumblebees to determine whether they had some of the characteristics of cumulative culture.

First they trained a group of “demonstrators” to perform a complicated skill that could be passed on to others.

They gave some of the bees a two-step puzzle box that involved pushing a blue tab followed by a red tab that released a sugary reward.

“This task is really difficult for bees because [during the first step] we are essentially asking them to learn to do something in exchange for nothing,” Alice Bridges, co-author of the study and a Ph.D. student at Queen Mary University, told AFP.

The bees initially attempted to only push the red tab without moving the blue tab first, then gave up.

In order to motivate them, the team placed the sugary prize at the end of the blue tab, then took the reward away gradually as they mastered the task.

The researchers then paired the demonstrator bees with “naive” bees unfamiliar with the process who watched their peers solve the puzzle.

Of the 15 new bees, five quickly solved the puzzle with no prize during the first step. Naive bees who were not taught how to obtain the treat were still not able to open the box after extended exposure for as long as 24 days.

Bridges said the team was “surprised” and thrilled when they saw the swift learning behavior.

They said the study was the first to observe an invertebrate species demonstrating cumulative culture.

“This finding challenges a common opinion in the field: that the capacity to socially learn behaviours that cannot be innovated through individual trial and error is unique to humans,” the study said.

The study, “Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone,” was published in the journal Nature.

The second study showed that humans’ closest living relatives — chimpanzees — also have the ability to learn from their contemporaries.

The Dutch-led research team set up a puzzle box to be solved by a semi-wild chimpanzee troupe at Zambia’s Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage.

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The task involved first retrieving a wooden ball, then holding a drawer open, putting the ball in and closing it to get a peanut at the end.

During the course of three months, 66 chimpanzees attempted but were not able to solve the puzzle.

The team then trained two demonstrator chimpanzees who showed their peers how to do it.

Within two months, 14 of the naive chimpanzees had mastered the puzzle. What’s more, the researchers discovered that the more often they observed the demonstrators, the faster they were able to solve it.

The study, “Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate,” was published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

Bridges said both studies “can’t help but fundamentally challenge the idea that cumulative culture is this extremely complex, rare ability that only the very ‘smartest’ species — e.g. humans — are capable of.”

The post Like Humans, Bumblebees and Chimpanzees Can Pass on Their Skills to Form ‘Cumulative Culture’ appeared first on EcoWatch.