30 years of climate failure

I get a bit of an anger management problem around the time of year when another COP climate summit confirms that humanity has spent another year not doing anything to stop the climate catastrophe. Even worse when it's a round number, like this year's COP30 marking three decades of failure to even stop emissions from rising, never mind reducing them. I think my first COP-related article was this one on the preparations for COP15 in Copenhagen (2009). We still had hope back then.

By way of therapy, I channel that anger into a vaguely climate-related feature. This year's climate-rage writeup is about the Lancet climate report on the health impacts of the climate catastrophe. Obviously depressing, but then again it is also refreshing that the Lancet authors name the acute dangers we're facing loud and clear whereas the normal media coverage has all but given up on this emergency.

So, well, I've calmed down and my feature is out now:

An unhealthy climate

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 23, 1 December 2025, Pages R1127-R1129

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(contact me if you would like a PDF)

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

The city of Belém, shown in this satellite view, is surrounded by Amazonian rainforest. (Photo: Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra/INPE (CC BY-SA 2.0).)

fire and water

The Pantanal, a major wetlands region in the south of Brazil is gradually diminished by the sum of many planning decisions, conservation experts have said, and it is also suffering devastating fires as rainfall produced by the Amazon water pump are decreasing.

I've used these developments as an excuse for a broader roundup of wetland issues ranging from conservation through to restoration.

The resulting feature is out now:

Wetland worries

Current Biology Volume 32, Issue 11, 6 June 2022, Pages R495-R497

FREE access to full text and PDF download

NB: as the 2022 features move into the open archives, I will add them to this thread on Mastodon.

In August 2020, wildfires devastated large parts of the Pantanal. This photo shows a Panthera Brazil team trying to save wooden bridges on the Transpantaneira road. (Photo: Fernando Tortato/Panthera.)

the world before Columbus

There have been apparently conflicting findings regarding the vegetation of Amazonia before the European conquest of the Americas. Some studies suggest a lot of the land was cultivated by the indigenous people and we're just looking at the regrowth that took hold after the population crash in the 16th century. Others find areas of land that have remained undisturbed for millennia.

As this has implications for the conservation and stewardship of the surviving rainforest, I had a closer look at these findings in the context of the multiple crises hitting the Amazon right now. The contradiction is resolved in my latest feature which is out now:

The Amazonian world before Columbus

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 13, 12 July 2021, Pages R821-R824

FREE access to full text and PDF download

Illegal slash-and-burn land clearing combined with drought conditions are threatening large parts of the Amazon rainforest, even in protected areas. (Photo: Felipe Werneck/Ibama (CC BY-SA 2.0).)

o perfume da memória

So now YouTube has started helping me with the slightly neglected films_not_shown tag. It recommended to me the Brazilian movie "O Perfume da Memória" (2016) by Oswaldo Montenegro, which was so good I now seriously need to watch more random videos to confuse the algorithm.

I had never heard of Oswaldo Montenegro before (and Wiki tells me he is mainly a musician), but the impression from this film is that he managed to create stylish movies on a negligible budget by doing everything himself (with two actors and two musicians and probably a small technical staff), in a flat, and it turns out amazing. Oh, and then he makes the film available on YouTube on his official channel. Clearly committed to bypass capitalism.

So, the movie. My theory is that Montenegro saw Julio Medem's Room in Rome (2010) and decided to do a fully clothed response to it. Which is hilarious in that Room in Rome itself is a response to an Argentinian film, En la cama (2005), so this subject of one night in a room is playing ping-pong across the Atlantic. Next stop Stockholm?

Art is important in Medem's movie, but Montenegro adds a bit of poetry, and the two musicians playing his score on cello and flute (Madalena Salles y Janaina Salles - are they mother and daughter?). And a fairly serious plot twist. So not a remake, but I stand by my theory that Medem's film inspired Montenegro's.

Oh, and Montenegro also does the voiceover. He literally tells the story and you can hear his voice. I watched the version with Spanish subtitles (YouTube seemed to know that I don't want to be dragged out of romance language heaven by English ones), but a version with English subtitles is also available on his channel.

megadams march on

Open Archive Day

A year ago, I reported how the inflationary spread of megadam projects in tropical countries may do the environment more harm than good. The thing is that submerged vegetation in large reservoirs in the tropics can release enough greenhouse gases to wipe out the climate benefits from the hydroelectric plant in comparison to a modern gas-fired power station.

However, the megadam mania has marched on regardless. Earlier this year, for instance, the Guardian asked:

Why is Latin America so obsessed with mega dams?

and concluded that other renewable energies may be preferable in many cases. Some projects have in fact been stopped by protests and environmental concerns, but in many places, the mania continues.

My feature is now on open access:

A global megadam mania

fragmented forests

Brazil hosts a pioneering experiment designed to study the ecological damage done by forest fragmentation. After making some real progress in slowing down deforestation, however, the country is now once again speeding up the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. The lessons learned in decades of research in the Amazon clearly haven't made much of an impact on the people now in power.

Read all about it in my latest feature, which is now out:

Brazil's fragmented forests

Current Biology volume 27, Issue 14, 24 July 2017, Pages R681–R684

FREE access to full text and PDF download

Oh, and I think this must be the 150th contribution in the series of features started in February 2011.



Research at the BDFFP has shown that forest fragmentation and edge effects significantly alter the abundance of bats. (Photo: Oriol Massana and Adrià López-Baucells.)

megadam mania

I used to think that dams and hydroelectric power plants are generally a good thing as they produce renewable energy which should more than offset any problems they may cause locally. I learned from my research for this latest feature, however, that large dams in tropical climates tend to release methane produced by fermentation of submerged vegetation and algae. In the worst-case scenario, this may mean that a large dam built in the wrong place may be no better for the climate than the equivalent gas-fired power stations. If we're very lucky, someone might find a way of collecting all that methane - by burning it one could both produce more energy and reduce its climate impact. But while this kind of solution is still in the dream stage, countries like Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo keep building ginormous dams.

Read all about it:

A global megadam mania

Current Biology Volume 26, Issue 17, pR779–R782, 12 September 2016

OPEN access to full text and PDF download

The Three Gorges Dam in China is currently the largest power plant of any kind, but maybe not for much longer ...

By Source file: Le Grand PortageDerivative work: Rehman - File:Three_Gorges_Dam,_Yangtze_River,_China.jpg, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11425004

the last free-living humans

Three years ago, I read Mario Vargas Llosa's fictionalised biography of Roger Casement, The dream of the Celt, both for fun and for reasons linked to family history. Now the book has come in very handy for the intro of my latest feature, which is on native tribes in the Amazon.

A memory that stayed with me years after reading the novel is that of the shocking abuses committed by rubber companies in the Amazon who captured Natives and exploited them as slaves to harvest rubber in the wild. Sanctions for missing the productivity targets ranged from whipping to murder. (Incidentally, I find it intriguing that the neoliberal politician Mario Vargas Llosa, who ran for Peru's presidency at one point, appeared to be unaware of the novels his alter ego writes!) This happened well within the 20th century and 50 years after Peru officially abolished slavery.

Considering this background, I find it understandable that some of the surviving indigenous tribes in the Amazon aren't all that keen on making contact with our civilisation. Some US academics have argued that if they had the "full information" about our civilisation, they would want to take part. My nagging suspicion is that the Natives have better memory than the academics, and even with full information they might still want to remain as they are, the last free-living humans.

My feature on all this is out now in Current Biology:

How to protect the last free-living humans

Volume 25, Issue 15, pR635–R638, 3 August 2015
Open access

Uncontacted MashcoPiro Indians on a riverbank near the Manú National Park, Peru. (Photo: © Diego Cortijo/Survival International.)

PS (7.8.2015) A comment obviously meant for this post was made under the next post, where it wouldn't make sense, so I didn't publish it. Essentially, one of the anthropologists in this story said they "could have set me straight" if I had contacted them beforehand (I didn't because they had their say in an editorial in Science magazine, no less). Seeing that our disagreement is not about the native tribes as such (ie their area of academic expertise), but over how benign or not our western civilisation really is, I really don't want to be set straight by them. I have enough life experience to judge our civilisation by myself, thank you very much.

reading the world

I was very impressed when I read that the author Ann Morgan had managed to read one book from each of the 196 countries represented at the 2012 Olympics in London. Her list of books read and others that were recommended to her is here, and the book she wrote about the experience is reviewed here.

Thinking about how embarrassingly far I would fall short of that figure I estimated I would be lucky to make it to 50 countries (in my life so far, not in a year) and started my own list to prove it. If and when I've reviewed a book on this list, I've included a link to the review. If I can't remember whether I've actually read it (even though it's on my shelf), I've marked it with CR. NFY means not finished yet. Still struggling to get to 50 though.

1. Algeria – Mehdi Charef: Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed (CR - saw the movie though)
2. Argentina – Federico Andahazi: El anatomista (The anatomist)
3. Austria – Daniel Kehlmann: Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the world)
4. Belgium – Amélie Nothomb – L’hygiène de l’assassin
5. Brazil – Paulo Coelho: Der Alchemist (The alchemist)
6. Canada - L. M. Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables
7. Chile – Isabel Allende: La casa de los espiritus (The house of the spirits)
8. China – Hong Ying: K – the art of love
9. Colombia – Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Cien años de soledad
10. Congo, Republic of the – Alain Mabanckou: Verre Cassé (Broken Glass)
11. Cote d'Ivoire – Fatou Keita: La rebelle
12. Cuba – Zoe Valdes: La nada cotidiana
13. Ecuador – Alicia Yanez Cossio: El cristo feo
14. Equatorial Guinea – Guillermina Mekuy: El llanto del perro
15. France – Anna Gavalda: Ensemble, c’est tout (Hunting and gathering)
16. Germany – Charlotte Roche: Feuchtgebiete (Wetlands)
17. Guatemala – Miguel Angel Asturias: Leyendas de Guatemala (CR)
18. India – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: Heat and dust
19. Iraq - Weam Namou: The feminine art
20. Israel – Ephraim Kishon: Oh, oh, Juliet
21. Italy – Umberto Eco: Der Name der Rose (The name of the rose)
22. Kyrgyzstan – Chinghiz Aitmatov: Jamila
23. Lebanon - Vénus Khoury-Ghata: Les fiancés du Cap-Ténès (CR)
24. Madagascar – Michele Rakotoson: Dadabé
25. Mexico – Laura Esquivel: Como agua para chocolate
26. Mongolia – Galsan Tschinag: Die Karawane (NFY)
27. Morocco – Tahar Ben Jelloun: Harrouda (CR)
28. Netherlands – Anne Frank: Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank (Diary of a young girl)
29. New Zealand - Katherine Mansfield: Stories
30. Nicaragua – Gioconda Belli: El pergamino de la seduccion (The scroll of seduction)
31. Nigeria – Sefi Atta: Swallow
32. Peru – Mario Vargas Llosa: El sueño del Celta (The dream of the Celt)
33. Poland – Stanislaw Lem: Stories
34. Russia – Mikhail Bulgakov: Master and Margerita
35. Senegal – Ousmane Sembene: Guelwaar
36. Sierra Leone - Aminatta Forna: The memory of love (NFY)
37. Spain – Almudena Grandes: Castillos de carton
38. Sweden – Astrid Lindgren: Pippi Longstocking
39. Switzerland – Max Frisch: Homo faber
40. Syria - Rafik Schami: Die dunkle Seite der Liebe (NFY)
41. United Kingdom – Esther Freud: Lucky break
42. United States – Megan Clark: Seduce me
43. Vietnam - Kim Thuy: ru (NFY)

Own photo of my reading pile some time in early 2014.

PS: I'll keep updating this with any further reading adventures, hoping that one day I can travel around the world in 80 books ... So this post will also serve as a directory to my reviews of world fiction.

science in south america

Back in 1999 I applied for a fairly amazing job at Nature and got through to the final, meaning I had the opportunity of a long chat with the editor, telling him what I would like the the magazine and website to add to its existing strengths. One of the main things I obsessed about was that they should do more to represent and support science in Latin America. Which obviously wasn't what they wanted to do at the time, so I didn't get the job. (Click the tag "LA_ciencia" for further attempts at supporting Latin American science).

It looks like it took 15 years and a world cup to make them change their mind - the special section Science Stars of South America in the current issue looks quite comprehensive at first glance (I may have more to say on it once I've actually read it). It seems to be on open access, start your reading here.

Cover of Nature, 12.6.2014.

brazilian relatives

Back in 1891, when my great-great-great-great-uncle Christian Gottlieb Weiß wrote up what he knew about his ancestors and relatives, he noted about his aunt:

„Maria Katharina Weiß, geb. 17.2.1786 verh. mit Pfarrer Ried aus Schauern (Hochwald) ist in Rio di jeneire (Südamerika)“

which for a long time was all we knew about that branch of the family. We have now found out, however, that this family emigrating to Brazil has left many dozens of descendants there. They didn’t in fact go to Rio but to São Leopoldo, like a lot of other emigrants from the Hunsrück area did, too. The spelling of the husband’s name is Rieth, and he wasn’t a vicar either.

Helpful fellow genealogists in Brazil sent us a big chunk of data of Rieth descendants, which I’ll summarise the important bits here:

Maria Katharina (or Maria Barbara according to other sources) and her husband Georg Philipp Rieth (1784-1843), together with their two sons Philipp Christian Gottlieb (*1811) and Johann Friedrich (*1814) emigrated in 1829, arriving in São Leopoldo on 25.5.1829.

Both sons married within the community of German migrants from the Hunsrück. Philipp Christian Gottlieb Rieth married Maria Elisabeth Schiehl (born 1820 in Hundsbach near Meisenheim) in São Leopoldo in 1838. Johann Friedrich Rieth, confusingly, married Maria Caroline Rieth (1824-1898), born in Schauren like he was, so more likely than not a cousin. This second Rieth family (the parents are Georg Heinrich Rieth and Johanna Dorothea Schlieper) arrived in São Leopoldo on 29.12.1825.

Each of the two had eleven children, many of whom went on to marry other people from the German community (we find the names Uebel and Purper from Oberstein, Hemb from Niederkumbd, Haag from Sensweiler near Trier), producing more than 40 great-grandchildren for Maria Weiß and Georg Philipp Rieth.

These descendants stayed mostly in the surroundings of São Leopoldo (i.e. in the state of Rio Grande do Sul), settling in places like Lomba Grande, Hamburgo Velho, Sapiranga. In this area, you’ll even find streets and a school named after people with the surname Rieth.

Image source and further info:
Wikipedia entry on German migration to Brazil (in German)

rio plus 20

In two weeks time, Rio de Janeiro will host another "Earth Summit" commemorating the 20th anniversary of the original one, where many of the environmental problems which we're still worried about were on the agenda. Mainly, the original Earth Summit led to a whole flood of further meetings and multilateral agreements, but there has been only very limited success in terms of making our use of natural resources more sustainable.

Rio+20 is a good point to take stock and check what has and what hasn't worked, and how to design and implement measures that will work and save our planet from our own activities.

I've written a feature about all this, which is out today in Current Biology and freely accessible to all (NB: my features remain on free access only until the next issue appears, i.e. normally 2 weeks, sometimes 3, and they return to free access a year after publication) ).

Will Rio+20 find a way to more sustainable development?
Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 11, R425-R428, 5 June 2012
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.05.028

HTML text

pdf file

Photo: Denise Mayumi via Wikipedia

PS come to think of it, isn't it scary how all those celebrations from jubilee beacons to the olympic torch tend to take the shape of pointlessly combusting additional fossil fuels on top of the already unsustainable level that we're burning for energy and transport?

emanuela de paula

I took this photo of a large NEXT ad ages ago in London (see reflected balconies for scale), but didn't know who the model was:




Following a chance encounter with a NEXT catalogue, I have now figured out she's called Emanuela de Paula, and she has a blogspot blog too, so go visit her.

stop flaring

One of the major unsung crimes against our planet is flaring -- i.e. the process of burning off unwanted natural gas in an open and entirely useless flame, technically known as a flare. According to World Bank figures, 5.25 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of associated gas – the equivalent of 25% of US gas consumption – was flared in 2004 (http://tinyurl.com/Flare-Gas-Stats). This happens all around the globe in remote oil fields where capturing and transporting the gas would be uneconomical.

The Oxford University spinout company Oxford Catalysts, together with the microchannel reactor specialists Velocys Inc. has developed a microchannel reactor involving Fischer-Tropsch catalysis (see my earlier feature in Oxford Today) offering an economically attractive way of converting stranded gas into liquid fuel in situ, thus cutting down the flaring.

Velocys has announced this week that a joint demonstration testing agreement (JDTA) has been settled between Velocys, Inc., offshore facility developers, MODEC, the global engineering firm Toyo Engineering, and the Brazilian State oil company Petrobras to build and operate a microchannel GTL (Gas To Liquid) demonstration facility. The companies hope that this agreement will bring the prospect of routine offshore production of liquid fuel from stranded gas a step closer to reality.

The 5-10 barrel/day (bbl/d) demonstration facility will include a microchannel steam methane reformer (SMR) along with a microchannel Fischer-Tropsch (FT) reactor. The demonstration plant, which is expected to be up and running by early 2011, will be constructed by Toyo Engineering with support from MODEC and installed at the Petrobas facility in Fortaleza, Brazil. The FT and SMR microchannel reactors will be fabricated by Kobe Steel Ltd.

Following successful demonstration, this technology is expected to be used by MODEC, Toyo and Velocys on the commercial floating production, storage and offloading vessels (FPSOs) used in the development of offshore oil and gas fields.

science in Latin America

Ten years ago, when I set out as a full-time freelancer, I was hoping to make science in Latin America a geographic focus of my work. I set up a web portal called "ciencia sin fronteras" (the domain name is now used by somebody else for a different project), and I did cover some science stories over the years, but it didn't really take off.

I'm now hoping to revitalise this side of my work a little bit (although on a modest scale) by introducing a new tag for this blog, indicating all science news that is related to Latin America, i.e. both research performed there environmental issues that affect Latin America, like rainforest conservation. The tag is LA_ciencia (though blog entries will also be tagged by country).

To start things off, I I'm compiling here a list of some of the relevant pieces I have published over the last 6 years, sorted by country (will add items to the list as and when I remember them!):


Bolivia

--2008--


1. Gross M:
   Chemistry World 11.08. (online only)
   Hot chillis evolved to kill fungi
   [free access]

Brazil

--2009--


1. Gross M:
   Current Biology 19, No 11 (09.06.), R427-28
   Embryonic development
   As the UK updates its pioneering Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, legal boundaries for research in the life sciences are redrawn in other countries as well.
   [restricted access]
   

Colombia

--2006--


1. Groß M:
   Biologie in unserer Zeit 36, Nr 4, 17
   Humanevolution: Kolumbien nach Kolumbus
   An English version of this piece appears in The birds,the bees and the platypuses, page 154: Colombia after Columbus
   

Costa Rica

--2009--


1. Gross M:
   Current Biology 19, No 21 (17.11.), R965
   Coffee growers feel the heat
   Coffee and tea farmers already appear to be suffering from the effects of climate change.
   [environment]
   
   [abstract and restricted access to PDF]

Cuba

--2004--


1. Groß M:
   Nachrichten aus der Chemie 52, Nr 7/8, 812-814
   Die zweite Revolution: Biotechnologie in Kuba
   
   [@][@]
   
   

2. Gross M:
   Current Biology 14, No 11, R401-R402
   Fighting isolation
   





3. Gross M:
   Darwin No 2, 22-26
   Biotecnologie -- l'altra rivolucione cubana
   





4. Gross M:
   Chemistry World 1, No 9, 19
   Cuba synthesises blockbuster vaccine





5. Groß M:
   Spektrum der Wissenschaft Nr 10, 23
   Kommentar: Der Fall Kuba. Der Inselstaat konnte sich mit Biotechnologie aus der Isolation befreien.





6. Groß M:
   Chemie in unserer Zeit 38, Nr 5, 306-307
   Biotechnologie in Kuba: Mangomittel gegen Altern und Aids





7. Gross M:
   Chemistry World 1, No 11, 38Biotechnology: the second Cuban revolution
   



--2005--



8. Groß M:
   Biologie in unserer Zeit 35, Nr 4, 227
   Arzneimittelforschung: Impfstoffe aus Kuba





9. Gross M:
   Chemistry & Industry No. 15 (01.08.), 16-17
   Fortress of success: Biotech companies in Cuba are making the best of what they have



--2006--



10. Gross M:
    Chemistry World 3 No. 1, 7
    Chemists queue up for Cuban collaboration





11. Groß M:
    
    Chemie
    in unserer Zeit 40, Nr 1, 68-71
    Kuba -- Improvisationstalent gefragt





12. Gross M:
    Current Biology 16, No 3 (7.2.), R66-R67
    Cuban efforts bolstered





13. Gross M:
    Oxford Today 18, No 3 (Trinity 2006),
    Chemistry in Cuba





14. Gross M:
    Chemistry World No 10, 23 (online: 4.9.)
    Antibodies in the greenhouse
    [@@]

legislating life sciences

It is always intriguing to compare and contrast how legislation and public debates on bioethics subjects like stem cells, cloning, etc. differ between countries, even between those that share similar outlooks on other policy issues. On the occasion of the ongoing revision of the groundbreaking Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (1990) in the UK, I've had a look at the state of play in the UK, US, Germany, and Brazil:

Embryonic developments
Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 11, R427-R428, 9 June 2009
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.05.036

abstract and restricted access to pdf file

PS I was about to use the phrase "debates on ethically sensitive issues" but then realised there are lots of things happening which I find unethical but which don't stir much debate in the Western world. Strange that.