Guest “you couldn’t make this sort of schist up if you tried” by David Middleton
From the American Association of Science of America [1]…
Hungry elephants fight climate change one mouthful at a time
By Eva Frederick Jul. 15, 2019[…]
As African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis, above) graze, they munch trees and plants with stems smaller than 30 centimeters in diameter—a little wider than a basketball—often damaging or killing them. Researchers used a model to predict what a forest might look like after years of elephants eating down these smaller plants. The bottom line: Slow-growing, shade-tolerant trees thrive with less competition for water and sunlight. The resulting forest has fewer, taller trees with denser wood, and the overall mass of vegetation above the ground is higher, meaning more carbon is stored, the team reports on today in Nature Geoscience.
The model’s predictions checked out in the real world, too. Trees in forests where elephants live had denser wood by about 75 grams per cubic meter than those in forests without elephants. Even just one elephant per square kilometer could increase the amount of plant mass in the forest by up to 60 tons per hectare, enough to suck up more than 10 billion tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide…
[…]
Science! As in, “she blinded me with…”[2]
So… if elephants cool the planet… This means that the megafauna extinction ended the Ice Age!
If I have to tell you when I’m being sarcastic, it takes all of the fun out of being sarcastic.
[1] American Association of Science of America
[2] Science! As in, “she blinded me with…”
Thomas Dolby – She Blinded Me With Science from Mad Hatter on Vimeo.
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what would be nice would be to genetically engineer trees that grow fast and have massive, massive trucks and massive, massive deep roots, whose leaves, when mature are shiny on top so they increase the albedo
Sounds too much a solution. Wait a second while I’ll come up with a few anti-gmo argments to make sure we stick to plastic straws, switching off toilet light, and virtue signalling with expensive yet kewl electric vehicles.
Pity that a failed model in 1968 literally wiped out 40000 African elephants: google those two words for the mea culpa
Sorry, can’t do elephants, will goats do? They seem to eat anything.
“An elephant in every garage, a chicken in every pot!”
Oddly enough Caesar describes in a book how to slay elephants – cut almost through a tree stem, and when they like to lean or snooze against one they are impaled on the tree shards.
Does that work for modern elephants, or was it for much heavier Mammoths? If so where did he hear about it?
Not sure if he ever tried elephant steaks, though.
No question, Mammoth grills were a big hit in CA 40,000BP.
On the subject of proboscidians, megafauna, Ice Ages etc, this morning I just started a book on the archaeology of the Northern Plains, and came across this, emphasis mine:
“Middle Prehistoric Period (7500 to 1350 B.P.). The climate grew gradually warmer and drier…reaching its peak about 7000 years ago, WITH SUMMER MEAN TEMPERATURES AS MUCH AS 3°C WARMER THAN TODAY.”
Well, golly! So archaeologists, and (obviously) paleoclimatologists know this, and they also know that this was well after the megafauna extinction, and that there was no resulting “catastrophe,” and they’re saying exactly NOTHING to the purveyors of climate disaster theory. Shame!
Am I surprised? Hell no – the more I learn about science, the more I see how desperately important it is to many scientists to be noticed, to be accepted by the mainstream, and to be published and granted or to suffer career disintegration, no matter how flaky their assertions might get; in fact it may be safe to say that the flakier, the better. I’m into archaeology and paleontology in a big way, and the level of flakery can get VERY serious. Archaeology is certainly the second-most politicized science after climatology, with arkys falling all over themselves to exonerate paleo-Indians for the megafauna extinction, blaming it instead on a whole spectrum of things including comet strike. Aboriginal groups are in court trying to “repatriate” Kennewick Man with support from sympathetic archaeologists, and on and on.
An arky friend of a zoologist friend said last week in conversation that archaeology is “a science in decline” due to political correctness. I think it’s safe to say that in the current cultural shift we’re suffering under, many more sciences will suffer exactly the same fate, and scientific ground truth will be suppressed or subverted for the sake of the “greater good.”
And creeps like Bill Nye wonder why people don’t trust scientists? WAKE UP, you willfully blind poser.
Might as well add that where I live, summer temperatures in the 1940s appear to have been ~5 – 6° warmer (and often higher) on average than they are now. My source: Environment Canada.
What the hell people, get off your lazy asses and go do some research of your own, and stop believing every bit of apelike jabber spewing from the pieholes of scientifically illiterate useful-idiot news anchors!
No offence meant to journalists of course. 🙂
Didn’t ecologists organise the extermination of about 40,000 african elephants because they were eating too much grass? Maybe that was the cause of the late 20th c. warming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory (emphasis mine):
“Clifford Allan Redin Savory (born 15 September 1935) is a Zimbabwean ecologist, livestock farmer, and president and co-founder of the Savory Institute. He originated Holistic management (agriculture), a systems thinking approach to managing resources…
“In June 1973, Savory publicly stated, ‘If I had been born a black Rhodesian, instead of a white Rhodesian, I would be your greatest terrorist’…
“The few scientific experiments that Savory supporters cite as vindication of his methods (out of hundreds that refute his assertions), often fail to actually test his theories…
“His research, which he claims was validated by a committee of scientists, led to the government culling 10,000s of elephants in following years. However, this did not reverse the degradation of the land…
“This unnecessary massacre, brought about by INTERPRETING SUPPOSED RESEARCH DATA TO FIT THE PREVAILING WORLD-VIEW that too many animals causes overgrazing…”
Another ideologue posing as an expert and being believed by cretins. Sound familiar?
I should clarify that last statement; he really is a biologist, trained at the University of Natal. Not that any sensible person here needs further evidence, but it is a rather nice example of how easy it is for even “experts” to screw up on an epic scale because basing their “research” on predetermined biases has real-world consequences. Happens every day in fact. The question is, why do so few people seem to know this?
“Researchers used a model to predict what a forest might look like after years of elephants eating down these smaller plants.”
Model idiocy of the highest order. If they want to see what a forest looks after being heavily “grazed” by african elephants, why not go to Africa and have a look. Answer: It isn’t a forest any longer, it is a savanna. If an elephant wants to browse a tree and can’t reach the foliage he just knocks it over.
Incidentally this explains how temperate plants needing open areas to thrive managed to survive earlier interglacials. As long as there was megafauna (elephants, rhinoceros, hippopotami) there were no dense, unbroken forests.
It gets even more interesting back in the Mesozoic. Climate was much warmer than now, so you would expect that there were vast areas of tropical/paratropical rainforest. But no, nobody has ever found any unequivocal mesozoic rainforest. The oldest one known shows up in the Denver Basin a couple of hundred thousand years after the Chicxulub impact. When there were no longer any large (and I mean LARGE) plant-eating animals. Coincidence?
Regarding the elephant “family tree”, where’s Rosie?
That family tree is wrong in any case. The Forest Elephant is a separate species and more closely related to the extinct eurasian Straight-Tusked Elephant than it is to the “ordinary” African Elephant.
If CO2 was the main driver of climate, then this paper would be slightly amusing. As it stands it, this paper isn’t worthy of lining bird cages. The assumptions made on faith by these religious zealots is just stupefying.
Simply more grasping at straws from both sides to prove who’s right… Such a waste of time from keyboard warriors like myself.
CBC’s Emily Blake is happy to relay the latest PNAS finding : “New research is revealing how plagues, wars and the climate affected the economy of Medieval Europe. But researchers didn’t find this information in the pages of an ancient book — it came from deep in Arctic ice.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/arctic-ice-medieval-europe-1.5215903
The paper is here:
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/02/1904515116
Got your attention readers… This is serious business!
“”It’s pretty amazing to think that pollution got there that early,” said lead author Joe McConnell, a research professor with the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. “It really drives home how interconnected the whole planet is, what we do in the mid-latitudes affects the Arctic and you really can’t get away from the pollution in the mid-latitudes.””
Lead author McConnell discovers atmospheric circulation… illuminating!
OMG. ROTFL!
What is the abbreviation for rolling on the floor laughing?
ROFL
Shorthand for rolling on the floor laughing, ROFL or ROTFL, is commonly used to express that you are laughing so hard that you are rolling on the floor. ROFL is often used in a text conversation.