Climate

Devastation in Brazil wetlands was made at least four times more likely by fossil fuel use and deforestation, scientists say

The devastating wildfires that tore through the world’s biggest tropical wetland, Brazil’s Pantanal, in June were made at least four times more likely and 40% more intense by human-caused climate disruption, a study has found.

Charred corpses of monkeys, caimans and snakes have been left in the aftermath of the blaze, which burned 440,000 hectares (1.1m acres) and is thought to have killed millions of animals and countless more plants, insects and fungi.

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Steve Kress’s smile lit up the dusk as research assistants at least 50 years younger than him regaled him with tales of their vigilance to save tern chicks on Stratton Island, Maine.

For an hour, all talk centered around a mortal enemy of tern chicks: the black-crowned night heron. The latter is a beautiful, stocky wetland bird with glowing red eyes and two delicate white plumes shooting out the back of its head. A nocturnal hunter, lucky photographers can catch it at dusk or dawn along rivers and ponds snapping fish out of the water in a split second.

The black-crowned night heron, which hunts tern chicks as well as fish, keeps Audubon Seabird Institute researchers on edge on Stratton Island, Maine. Photo by Derrick Z. Jackson.

Stratton Island is three miles out to sea from Orchard Beach, Maine. The Audubon Seabird Institute, formerly known as Project Puffin, began restoring terns here in the 1980s. Kress founded the project in 1973.

On this island, in the dead of the night, the heron has other prey on the menu. It includes a precious colony of least terns, the smallest tern in the world, with a striking black cap and bright yellow bill. The tern was nearly wiped out on the East Coast in the late 19th century for hat feathers.

Despite their recovery from that slaughter —a recovery aided by the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty—least terns are listed today as an endangered bird in Maine. It nests on sandy beaches, which often puts it in competition with human development and recreation. That fragility makes it critical to keep herons out of tern colonies as one heron can kill many chicks in hours. In 2022, just 14 chicks fledged out of 91 nests on Stratton. Last year, maybe four chicks survived to fledge off Stratton.

The team of Ben Becker, Kay Garlick-Ott, Tiffany Christian, Ellie Bretscher, Katelyn Shelton, and Joe Sweeney told Kress they are always “on edge” for the heron attacks and do everything possible to scare off herons. They use lights and lasers and make every kind of noise possible with bangers, screamers, and pot banging.

Kress chimed in that crews have also tried (in vain) to use a mannequin to startle the herons. There was one researcher years ago who dressed up as the action film character Rambo to hunt a heron that was terrorizing chicks. Another attempt to use lights to see herons resulted in federal authorities roaring out to Stratton in a boat, on a tip that it was a landing strip for drug runners.  

Sadly, right after this visit, a heron evaded the crew and unleashed another lethal attack, reducing the number of least tern chicks from more than 60 to less than 20. The moment was symbolic of how Kress’s original vision for Project Puffin evolved dramatically over the years.

A least tern and its chick on Stratton Island, Maine. Photo by Derrick Z. Jackson. Protecting tern chicks from predators and other threats

All Kress had wanted to do a half-century ago was restore just one species, the Atlantic puffin, to Eastern Egg Rock, one small island off the coast of Maine. Puffins were hunted off nearly every island in Maine in the 1880s. Kress hoped that once he re-established the bird, with chicks translocated from Canada, it could maintain itself and that would be the end of the project.

He came to realize that breeding puffins and eventually other birds, such as terns, requires people to guard them for the entire 3 to 4 months of their breeding season. Whatever the ecosystem was centuries ago that allowed puffins and terns to thrive in Maine, now there are just too many threats. Some threats are other birds that thrive thanks to major conservation victories. For example, herring gulls, which also were slaughtered for hat feathers, recovered with the 1918 treaty. Bald eagles and peregrine falcons are flourishing again after the 1972 banning of the pesticide DDT. Other threats are tied to human sloppiness: Gulls went beyond recovery to crowding out other birds on Maine islands, boosted by banquets of coastal landfills and fishing waste.

It may all be part of a larger struggle of birds competing for dwindling habitat in the face of development, climate change, pesticides, industrial agriculture, and pollution. A 2019 study in the journal Science found that North America has lost more than a quarter of its bird population since 1970; there are nearly 3 billion birds less than there used to be.

“I had no idea we would face this complexity of the ongoing need for management,” Kress said. “It’s a myth that islands are separate from everything else. We can’t walk away from [the restorations], or they would eventually unravel.”

A murre, restored to Maine by Project Puffin, joins a group of puffins off the coast of Maine. Photo by Derrick Z. Jackson. Passing on the torch at Project Puffin

They have not unraveled. The project has had at least 700 research assistants. At 28 years old, Becker, Garlick-Ott, and Christian are the same age that Kress (now 78) and his colleagues were when they started Project Puffin 51 years ago. The half-century age gap punctuates the success of Kress effectively sharing his vision with young researchers and entrusting them to carry out the mission. (That is exceedingly elusive in other spheres. For example, a 2008 Harvard Business School paper estimated that 4 of every 5 founders or co-founders are eventually forced out as CEOs. The long list includes founders or co-founders of Apple, JetBlue, Tesla, Zipcar, Twitter, Uber, PayPal, OpenAI, and Yahoo!.)

As Kress’s co-author and photographer on two books about Project Puffin, this aspect, the passing on of the founder’s torch, has enthralled me as much as the birds. Garlick-Ott, a former island supervisor who studies tern aggression on Stratton for her doctorate at the University of California Davis, said, “You get a quick sense that the torch is constantly being passed. It’s empowering and humbling at the same time. I feel like I have a purpose and a place in this project. When I became a supervisor, I wanted so badly to do what my supervisor did. I really wanted to be like her.”

Keenan Yakola, 31, is in his 11th summer with Project Puffin and the Seabird Institute. A former island supervisor and now a doctoral student at Oregon State University, he leads the GPS tagging of puffins, terns, and storm petrels to study where they feed. The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming seas on Earth. He hopes the tracking will indicate how seabirds adapt to ocean heatwaves and help offshore wind developers site facilities to avoid conflict with birds.

Yakola said he learned early on that Project Puffin patiently welcomed innovation by college-age assistants. Perhaps that was because Kress himself almost did not get the chance to restore puffins. At first, a top Canadian official balked at the idea that Newfoundland puffin chicks would return to Maine as adults. Even after getting permission, it took eight years until Kress, then an Audubon camp bird instructor, reestablished puffin breeding on Eastern Egg Rock. His first artificial burrows for chicks were too hot or they flooded. The puffin chicks he raised in 1973 and 1974 disappeared into the Atlantic, never to be seen again.    

“My first summer on the project, I didn’t feel I had a particular contribution to make other than to be a good intern and collect data,” Yakola said. “I just thought it was cool being with birds. But when I asked about analyzing diet data for my undergraduate thesis [at the University of Massachusetts Amherst], Paula [Shannon, the institute’s seabird sanctuary manager)] simply said, ‘Yeah, sure. Just ask Steve.’”

Shannon, 48, a former island supervisor who first began working with the project in 2002 and co-authored a 2016 paper with Kress showing how puffin diet was changing with the warming Gulf of Maine, seconded Yakola. She talked about how crews kept repositioning common murre decoys on Matinicus Rock until the first egg in more than a century was laid on that island in 2009. A cousin of the puffin, common murres, were also hunted in the 1800s until there were no breeding pairs left in Maine. Last year, a dozen murre chicks fledged off Matinicus Rock.

Kress once asked Shannon and others a question about an extinct bird.

“What would you do if a Great Auk showed up with the puffins?” he said.

She laughed and replied to him, “We’d probably take a picture and send the bird on its way because no one would believe us.” The question was both in jest and a suggestion that trying new things can have unforeseen victories in science.

The Great Auk indeed will never come back, but Kress’s restoration of puffins and murre have helped conservationists all over the world bring back seabirds from the brink of extinction. One or more of the methods used by Project Puffin, such as the translocation of chicks, decoys, taped bird calls, and mirrors, have now been used in more than 850 projects in 36 countries to restore (or relocate from danger or competition with other animals), 138 seabird species. Some restored species were thought to be extinct, such as the Chinese crested tern.

Sue Schubel, 62, has been associated with the project for most of the last 40 years. In 1996, she advised the placing of murre decoys, mirrors, and recorded calls atop a northern California sea stack. A colony of 2,900 breeding murre had been wiped out by an oil spill a decade earlier. The day after decoys were installed, murres returned and began breeding again.

Affectionately known as Seabird Sue, current research assistants say they are inspired by her ceaseless energy. She is an assistant sanctuary manager, decoy project manager, a logistics expert for all the boats that get crews, provisions and gear on and off the islands, public educator, and artist. When she first joined the project, she herself fed off the sense that “everybody was willing to do everything for the birds.”

A culture of caring for the birds, for each other

Kress and Schubel came out to Eastern Egg Rock this summer to see what has become of his original project island. The crew of supervisor Theresa Rizza, 28, and assistants Arden Kelly, 25, Coco Deng, 19, Camryn Zoeller, 20, and Anson Tse, 27, said they know they are in a special world.

“This is an island and project of hope,” Zoller said. “The fact that this project is a success is a reason to not get distraught about all the destruction all around us.”

Rizza added, “The puffins are proof that as long as someone wants to try, good things can happen.”

Arden said, “You really see the can see the passion that is still in their eyes. You want to be your own Steve Kress.”

(Left to right, top row) Stratton Island supervisor Ben Becker, Project Puffin founder Steve Kress, former Eastern Egg Rock supervisor Kay Garlick-Ott, and research assistant Joe Sweeney. (Left to right, bottom row) Research assistants Katelyn Shelton, Tiffany Christian and Ellie Bretscher. Photo by Derrick Z. Jackson.

The sentiments were echoed 32 miles away in the Gulf of Maine out on Seal Island, another island where puffins were restored after a century’s absence. The crew there consisted of supervisor Coco Faber, 30, and assistants Amiel Hopkins, 19, Liv Ridley, 26, Reed Robinson, 19, and Nacho Gutierrez, 24.

Faber, in her ninth summer with the project, has seen some of the most volatile years of boom and bust for seabirds with the warming Gulf of Maine. “With climate change, the threats feel so amorphous and big, it’s hard to know where to go,” she said. “There are no more normal years. I now wonder every summer, what am I going to witness. When I [feel] down, I think of Steve and all his optimism, and how he threw spaghetti at the wall to bring these birds back.”

Ridley added, “They say one person can only do so much,” Ridley said, “But here, with [Kress’s] legacy you know you’re carrying on. You’re inspired to say I’m going to give my life to seabirds.”

Kress retired from the project in 2019, handing it over to Don Lyons, a tern researcher from Oregon State. Lyons said Kress left behind “community and continuity” that he could not find a comparison to.

“Steve is very focused on thanking people for their contributions,” Lyons, 59, said. “That includes a new researcher who lugged a boat up onto rocks or other seemingly menial tasks like data entry. It makes people feel valuable.”

So valuable that back on Stratton Island, Tiffany Christian, who lives the rest of the year in the Chicago area and is in her first summer on a Maine research island, said the magic of being surrounded by seabirds on an island was like being in “an ornate castle built in the sky.” She said the project’s legacy and the camaraderie “gives me a new awareness of what I want to do in the future.”

Kress himself said he did not intentionally set out to pass on a culture of such caring, but as it turns out, he looks at that culture as the “greatest hope” for seabirds. “Wherever I go, China, Ecuador, I see the same type of person,” he said. “There is this idea of healing the earth. I sure didn’t create that, but perhaps there’s something about this project that captured that.

“It helps that this project is such a conspicuous success that people are today surrounded by come-back birds, baby birds, all this life. I hope that future generations of seabird stewards  continue this amazing story. You can’t avoid the feel-good part of it. I don’t need to say anything. The birds constantly remind the researchers that they are part of a miracle.”

Read more about Puffin Island and the efforts to save seabirds in Maine here and here.

As Antarctic tourism grows, so does the environmental impact. Now scientists and artists who work on the continent hope to encourage us to admire from afar

“If Antarctica were music, it would be Mozart,” the Australian broadcaster Andrew Denton once wrote, after one of his many (at least seven) trips to the continent. “Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.”

And yet it is not as it should be: last year, Antarctic sea ice cover dropped for six months straight.

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The rapidly spreading fire has consumed over 426,000 acres since it started burning in late July.

We need new laws to protect important ecosystems.

UN says a global ‘backlash’ against climate action is being stoked by fossil fuel companies

Fossil fuel companies are running “a massive mis- and disinformation campaign” so that countries will slow down the adoption of renewable energy and the speed with which they “transition away” from a carbon-intensive economy, the UN has said.

Selwin Hart, the assistant secretary general of the UN, said that talk of a global “backlash” against climate action was being stoked by the fossil fuel industry, in an effort to persuade world leaders to delay emissions-cutting policies. The perception among many political observers of a rejection of climate policies was a result of this campaign, rather than reflecting the reality of what people think, he added.

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A year after the fire some try to rebuild life in the city known as the ‘ninth Hawaiian island’ – as temperatures top 117F

Remedios Ramos moved into her newly built, sand-colored Las Vegas home during a blistering week in July, when temperatures topped 117F. Inside her air-conditioned living room, a shiny grandfather clock, its price tag still attached, chimed every half hour. “I like it here,” Ramos said, glancing around at her pristine surroundings: brand new reclining chairs, a glossy dining set, a television still in its box.

“But,” she sighed, scrunching her face, “I like it better back home, in Hawaii.”

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Temperatures in Canada – and especially the Arctic – are climbing faster than the global average, with highs of 33C

The arrival of August in the Arctic typically hints that autumn, with its dwindling daylight and cold weather, will soon return.

But on a recent afternoon, Sandy Gordon and her four children plunged into the silty waters of the Canada’s Mackenzie River, escaping a searing heatwave that has descended on the town of Inuvik.

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Ultraprocessed food companies are taking advantage of worsening environmental conditions to increase their profits.

The suspension of congestion pricing has put off critically needed repairs to New York City’s transit network. Experts say the system hangs by a thread.

And it’s not even in the Olympics!

• See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here

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Even those who are concerned about climate crisis were influenced by false claims, showing how ‘insidious’ repetition is, researcher says

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Repeating false and sceptical claims about climate science makes them seem more credible – including to people who accept the science and are alarmed by the climate crisis – new research has found.

The study’s lead author, Mary Jiang, from the Australian National University, said: “The findings show how powerful and insidious repetition is and how it can influence people’s assessment of truth.”

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The heating of the planet is increasing the amount of moisture in the atmosphere. That helps to load hurricanes and other storms with more water.

A new study found that temperatures in the Coral Sea have reached their highest levels in at least four centuries.

More than 95% of investors urged commodities firm to keep highly profitable fossil fuel arm to help maximise shareholder cash

Glencore has scrapped plans to spin off its coal business after shareholders urged the commodities company to hold on to the highly profitable but heavily polluting division.

The FTSE 100 company said that an overwhelming majority of its shareholders favoured retaining the coal business over its plan to list the division as a separate company on the New York stock exchange.

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This has been a summer of extreme heat around the world. The Guardian is investigating how it harms our planet and leaves the world’s most vulnerable people exposed to its impact

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A staple of dystopian science fictions is an inner sanctum of privilege and an outer world – chemical desert/airless waste/District 12 – peopled by the desperate poor. The insiders, living off the exploited labour of the outlands, are indifferent to the horrors beyond their walls. Well, here we are.

Even as extreme heat raged across the southern United States this summer, the governors of Florida and Texas struck down heat protections for outdoor workers. Construction companies and agricultural firms lobbied against the rights of workers to water, shade and rest breaks when temperatures soar – and Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, two men also lavishly funded by the fossil fuel industry, gave them what they wanted.

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Kamala Harris’s running mate boasts a strong record on climate policy and green energy as Minnesota governor

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Tim Walz, tapped as Vice-President Kamala Harris’s running mate on Tuesday, may not be a household name, but the Minnesota governor is well known as a climate champion in green advocacy circles.

“Like Vice-President Harris, Governor Walz knows that climate change is the existential threat of our time,” the Sierra Club executive director, Ben Jealous, said in a statement. “The Harris-Walz ticket is one that understands the fight before us.”

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