changes at the top

High mountain lakes, streams and glaciers are often seen as the ultimate natural environments untouched by human devastation, but climate change and tourism are already changing that situation. The remoteness of those mountain sites means that we don't see the change when it happens, but there are multiple knock-on effects such as the spread of pathogens and the disruption of freshwater supplies that will fall back on us eventually.

Starting from a hint to a paper about problems with mountain lakes I extended my scope to include mountain streams an glaciers as well and found the overall picture rather worrying.

The resulting feature is out now:

Anthropocene at altitude

Current Biology Volume 32, Issue 10, 23 May 2022, Pages R441-R444

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.

Mountain lakes such as this one in the Pyrenees, although remote from cities and industries, are also exposed to chemical pollution. (Photo: Witizia/Pixabay.)

antarctic under threat

Both Antarctic and Arctic temperatures were breaking records last week, and an Antarctic ice shelf collapsed - plenty of worrying news to underscore the point of my feature (prepared before these events), which is that Antarctica's frozen splendour is under threat from both climate change and invasive species.

Oh, and the discovery of the Endurance was reported the day before my copy deadline, I just about managaged to squeeze that in. Lots going on down there.

My feature is out now:

Pristine Antarctica exposed to change

Current Biology Volume 32, Issue 6, 28 March 2022, Pages R247-R249

FREE access to full text and PDF download

The arrival of ships from around the world raises the risk of non-native invasive species establishing populations in Antarctica. (Photo: Jason Auch/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).)

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

climate impacts and adaptations

The IPCC partial report on impact and adaptations came out on Monday 28th of February, but due to things happening in Ukraine, it only made a very short blip on the news cycle and disappeared again. Right now, several countries are discussing further fossil fuel subsidies and measures to support fossil fuel industries to buffer the effects of the ongoing war and resulting sanctions. Clearly not connecting the dots.

I had been preparing a feature on impacts and adaptations around the world independently of the report which was announced for the end of February, and was kind of expecting the report to be delayed to ensure that it can get some attention, but in the end it wasn't and I had to fit in a last minute paragraph to acknowledge its existence, which I'm sure by now everybody has forgotten about. My focus was on the impacts on Indigenous populations around the world, people who did nothing to cause climate change but are now suffering its most severe consequences.

The resulting feature is out now:

Climate adaptation around the world

Current Biology Volume 32, Issue 5, 14 March 2022, Pages R197-R200

FREE access to full text and PDF download

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? - The lands of the Navajo Nation have suffered severe drought for several decades, caused by reduced rain and snow. (Photo: Chris English/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).)

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

post-truth is pre-fascism

Four years ago, ahead of the inauguration of a certain US president, I warned of the dangers of a post-truth world. After the November 2020 election that voted him out I wondered what we have to do to get some sense of truth back, after the world has become used to being flooded with toxic lies. Conspiracy theories not only disturb political process, they may also jeopardise the response to the Covid crisis.

I wrote a feature about this in the first week of December, writing about the strange beliefs of Republicans in the past tense, half hoping they might get bored of crazy conspiracies by the time the article comes out. Unfortunately, the opposite has happened and they decided it might be a good idea to storm the Capitol and try to prevent the completion of the official election process. A very good analysis of what happened, with just the right amount of references to Weimar Germany, is in this essay by Yale historian Timothy Snyder - from which I borrowed the title of this blogpost. Snyder makes the point that, on top of all the small and medium sized lies, the big lie that Trump won the 2020 election and had the presidency stolen from him could continue to bind his fanbase in their perceived victimhood and serve a future fascist coup like the Dolchstoss-Legende about the end of worldwar I served the Nazis. Trump might be too incompetent to lead that coup himself, but somebody else now patiently waiting in the wings could take over his devoted fanbase and use it for a successful putsch.

Now I'm somewhat less optimistic that the problem can still be fixed in the US, and if it can't the fallout will be catastrophic for the rest of the world as well, if only because raving lunatics around the world will feel encouraged to try the same. But to feed the small hopes we still have here are some thoughts on how to bring back a bit of reason.

Recovering a sense of reality

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 1, 11 January 2021, Pages R1-R3

FREE access to full text and PDF download

The denialists in the photos we had available in December looked comparatively sane compared to the photos from last week! Demonstration of denialists protesting against Covid restrictions in Leipzig, Germany. (Photo: Roy Zuo/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).)

service announcement: starting a new twitter thread with the features of 2021, adding them as they convert to open access.

nitrogen issues

Open Archive Day

The Haber process is the place where textbook chemistry meets global food security and lots of environmental concerns, so it's a very satisfying topic for me to write about, as I can expand from molecules to global issues, and even recycle some of the things I learned during my studies. I've recently done a C&I feature on modern attempts to improve on Haber and dreams of an ammonia economy, and also reviewed more Haber biographies than I care to remember (eg this one), but the big nitrogen feature taking the whole environmental and food security problems was this one in 2012, which is in the open archives:

We need to talk about nitrogen



Until the advent of the Haber–Bosch synthesis 100 years ago, guano was the main source of nitrogen fertiliser, ensuring that reactive nitrogen ran in closed natural cycles. (Photo: Joan Thirlaway.)

insect declines

Open Archive Day



Dramatic declines in flying insect populations have been in the news recently, which reminded me of last year's feature on butterfly declines. Butterflies may not be the most important insects ecologically, but their visibility and aesthetic appeal means that they are better studied than many.

My butterflies feature is on open access now:

Butterflies take a well-studied tumble




(own photo)

open archives 2015

my features in Current Biology become freely accessible one year after publication. So, by now, all features published in 2015 or earlier are in the open archives. Here are some of the highlights of 2015:

Listen out for life (astrobiology and SETI)

Can we change our predatory ways? (Homo sapiens as a weird kind of apex predator)

How life shaped Earth (my contribution to a special issue on the history of life on Earth)

How to protect the last free-living humans (on uncontacted tribes)

Can we avert marine mass extinctions? (given our track record wiping out terrestrial megafauna?)

Assessing humanity's global impact (and the case for the Anthropocene).

PS: New Year's resolution - from January onwards, I will highlight one of the old articles from the open archives on the Mondays between those when a new feature appears.