Forests Are Getting Shorter and Younger All Over the World

This is unsurprising and certainly not welcome.  Restoration of old growth refugia will not happen in our lifetimes.

What will happen is two things.  The big one will be global reforestration which is now well underway and expanding rapidly.  This by itself makes it all younger.

The second thing will be the implimentation of forest grooming.

All that will lead to protection of remaining old growth and the establishment of future old growth in combination with selective harvesting.

Forests Are Getting Shorter and Younger All Over the World 

The loss of the oldest, tallest trees makes forests store less carbon dioxide and diminishes the wildlife they can support A forest in Koenigshain, Germany. (Photo by Florian Gaertner/Photothek via Getty Images)

By Alex Fox

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM

jUNE 2, 2020 2:27PM 

The world’s forests are losing their big, old trees, rendering those forests shorter and younger on average, according to new research. These old growth trees, which provide vital habitat for wildlife and store more carbon than younger trees, are being destroyed by a host of contributing factors, including rising global temperatures, climate-related disasters such as fire and insect outbreaks, and deforestation, reports Craig Welch for National Geographic.https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/forests-are-getting-shorter-and-younger-all-over-world-180975017

The study, published last week in the journal Science, draws on more than 160 prior studies to take a comprehensive look at the erasure and degradation of the planet’s forests over the last century.

"It's not a shock but it's very sad," Kristina Anderson-Teixeira, an ecologist and leader of the ForestGEO Ecosystems & Climate Program at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute who worked on the new research, tells Nathan Rott of NPR. "We as a human society are hitting these forests so rapidly with so many different changes that they can't keep up."

The international team of more than 20 researchers from more than a dozen institutions conducted an exhaustive survey of existing studies that looked at forest loss and combined those results with satellite imagery and computer modelling to track forest loss from 1900 to 2015, reports National Geographic.

The team found that over the last 115 years, the world has lost more than one-third of its old-growth forests, reports Damian Carrington of the Guardian. North American and European forests, about which more detailed data exist, saw tree mortality double over the past 40 years, with the majority of those deaths comprised of older trees, according to National Geographic.

The change has not been directly caused by any one factor, though the Guardian reports that scientists estimate 12 percent of the total forest area lost since 1900 has come from human land-clearing. Climate change-related stresses such as drought, wildfire and insect outbreaks are also driving the death of old trees and the loss of forests, and they’re all predicted to get worse in coming decades, Tom Pugh, a scientist at the University of Birmingham and co-author of the study, tells the Guardian.

Because plants use carbon dioxide (CO2) to convert sunlight into food, some thought the grand human experiment of pumping ever-increasing quantities of carbon into the atmosphere might actually accelerate tree growth, according to National Geographic. But the world heats up, trees start to batten down the hatches to avoid drying up which stops them from making use of all that extra CO2.

Nate McDowell, a tree physiologist with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the study’s lead author, tells National Geographic it’s akin to “going to an all-you-can-eat buffet with duct tape over their mouths.”

As the world loses its largest, oldest trees, McDowell tells National Geographic the impact on greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is twofold. “When old trees die, they decompose and stop sucking up CO2 and release more of it to the atmosphere,” he says. “It’s like a thermostat gone bad. Warming begets tree loss, then tree loss begets more warming.”

The researchers did find some locales in which the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may wind up increasing tree growth, reports NPR, but it’s a tiny fraction and not nearly enough to override the lost capacity of those forests to draw-down and store carbon.

Researchers not involved in the study unscored the gravity of its findings but sought to point out that the worrying trends make the world’s remaining forests that much more important.

Tom Crowther, an environmental scientist at ETH Zurich University in Switzerland who was not involved in the study, tells the Guardian, "if we can protect the forests that we already have, and allow them to grow to maturity, there is a huge potential for them to capture a lot of additional carbon.”

Another researcher who was not involved in the report, Simon Lewis, an environmental scientist at University College London, tells the Guardian, “the world’s forests currently slow climate change, and while future mortality trends could reverse this, the ideas in the new report don’t change what the world needs to do: stabilize the climate by quickly driving fossil fuel emissions to zero and protect the world’s forests.”

Re-Uniting with the Dolphins

Read More →

It has been long obvious that the dolphin is the sea version of humanity.  It is clearly intelligent, retains mind to mind communication and is seriously over engineered for its environment just as we are.

 

We need to develop tools for them.  they can use them.  We also need to work with them in developing successful husbandry systems and have them manage same.

Sounds ambitious but it all becomes viable with mind to mind work.  Look here to observe a dolphin doing mind probe work on the tourists.  One way to ensure safety.  And yes they love private corrals such as all those atolls.  Keeps trouble out.

 

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The Soul in the Sea: Re-Uniting with the Dolphins

 May 11, 2017

Frank Joseph,

http://www.wakingtimes.com/2017/05/11/soul-sea-re-uniting-dolphins/

“What mystery is the sea,” exclaimed Herman Melville, “whose stirrings speak of a hidden soul beneath!”¹ I only understood what the great American meant for the first time two years ago, while visiting the Roatán Institute for Marine Sciences in Honduras. It was located at an otherwise uninhabited islet just off the mainland, where a shallow barrier corralled more than thirty dolphins within some six square acres. The top of the fence stood so low above the water, all but the most arthritic dolphin could easily hop over it. In fact, several have made good their escape in this manner, I was told, only to jump back inside a few days later.

As part of their daily routine, all the resident dolphins are herded together and taken out to sea, where they often frolic with their friends and relations in the wild for an hour or so – much like walking one’s pet dogs – before returning to the fenced-in islet. Perhaps they regard it as a sanctuary from sharks, enjoy its largesse of flattering attention from scientists and tourists, are bribed by free squid and herring – among their favourite delicacies – or all these amenities and more no human can guess.

Together with fellow tourists guided by a local handler, we waded into shallow depths and were immediately met by a female dolphin, which allowed us to come quite close, even touch her. Expecting to feel a hard or at least tough, scaly exterior, I was surprised by her supple, smooth, warm skin, so human-like.

“No one who has ever touched the skin of a dolphin,” wrote famed oceanographer, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, “is likely to forget the silken, elastic, soft feel of it.”² But a deeper impression was made by her light brown eyes. Behind the anticipated high intelligence and complex awareness, there was something even more compelling lurking deeper inside. If, as the old French saying has it, “the eyes are the mirror of the soul,” then her gaze betrayed a core mystery comparable only to a kindred connection.³

The feeling is not uncommon. Cetacean researcher Ann Spurgeon spoke for many, when she observed, “We looked often into the dolphins’ eyes, and the quality of the look they returned was unlike that of any animal we have known.”⁴

According to no less an authority on the sea than Cousteau himself, “it is obvious that dolphins are often motivated by curiosity, and especially by curiosity about man. One literally can see it in their eyes. This is a fact that can be doubted only by someone who has never really looked a dolphin in the eye. The brilliance of that organ, the spark that is so evident there, seems to come from another world. The look which the dolphin gives – a keen look, slightly melancholy and mischievous, but less insolent, conniving and cynical than that of monkeys – seems full of indulgence for the uncertainties of the human condition.”⁵

Belgium’s pioneering underwater archaeologist and the world’s first aquanaut went further: “The glimmer of interest which sparkled in their eyes seemed to be a human glimmer.”⁶ Robert Sténuit’s radical suggestion articulated my, as yet, unformulated suspicion – a wordless knowing beyond understanding, much less expression, as though my own mind had been somehow confronted with or partially overtaken by a significant truth too grand or potent for me to really comprehend or to put into words.

Richard Wagner’s Hans Sachs articulated my perplexity in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg: “I feel it, but cannot understand it; cannot completely recall it, but can never forget it. I can grasp it entirely, ’though cannot measure it. But how can I grasp that which seems immeasurable? … It seemed so old, and yet was so new.”⁷

Cousteau was no less taken by his first, personal contact with a wild dolphin. “It was an extraordinary situation,” he confessed, “as though the barrier between man and animal no longer existed. There was some sort of strange understanding between us. It would be very difficult for me to say exactly what our feelings were for one another, but there was undoubtedly something.”⁸

Such an inexpressibly profound impression is not unknown to other persons touched by the creature’s singular energy field. “Those who have come very close to dolphins feel it inside themselves,” stated Dr. Horace Dobbs, a leading delphinologist, “yet cannot explain it. Exactly what it is remains a mystery. For want of a better word, let us call it spirit of the dolphin.”⁹

Dolphin Meets Humans

From the moment the Roatán dolphin first approached our gaggle of tourists, I could not escape the strong impression – realisation, perhaps – that it was very rapidly probing us with the powerful energy of some unseen and inconceivable instrument; scanning each one of us individually; psychically scoping us out down to the absolute bottom of our souls; reading everything in our conscious and subconscious minds; assessing the totality of our identity; determining our threat or friendly potential; yes, judging us – completely and thoroughly within the matter of a few seconds.


[ we lost this ability in order to accelerate our advancement of other skills but we will have them returned some day. - arclein ]

Being in the ocean with a living, breathing dolphin close enough to touch it was nothing like seeing one perform at Sea World, watching it on television, or reading about cetaceans in a library. No “virtual reality” approximates sharing the same water with such a singular creature. Although common enough these days, and similarly enjoyed by many thousands of tourists around the world, my dolphin encounter near Roatán was nevertheless a memorable, if ineffably real occurrence.

I approached it with no expectations, no preconceived ideas, but left myself open to whatever might or might not happen. I did not endeavour to “mind meld” with the creature, nor force any such boorish impertinence upon it, and instead hoped to learn something not otherwise available in less personal circumstances. To be honest, the experience was somewhat tinged with fear, not for what the dolphin would do, but what it could do. However amiable it outwardly appeared, being at the mercy of a nine-foot-long, three-hundred-ten-pound, mentally sharp beast moving through the water seven times faster than the best human swimmer and with the agility of a bull-whip in an environment where bodily inferior men are sluggish and clumsy, gave me pause. Aristotle and his 4^th century BCE colleagues believed the dolphin was the fastest creature in the sea, and they may have been right.

In 1975, Jacques Cousteau wrote of his personal experience aboard a French Navy cruiser “in the waters of the Far East… I realised that the school of dolphins, in catching up to and then passing the Primauguet, as it moved at full power, must have been swimming at a speed of no less than fifty miles per hour!” Later, he calculated that a dolphin needed to beat its tail one hundred twenty times per minute, or two strokes every second, to reach a speed of just ten knots, or 11.5 miles per hour.¹⁰

Professor Paul Budker, director of the National Museum of Natural History and the Laboratory of Colonial Fisheries in Paris, found that dolphins “move as though by magic, and are capable of producing more power per pound of muscle than any other animal.”¹¹

Cambridge University’s Sir James Gray observed that “the form given by Nature to the dolphin is more effective than that of any submarine or torpedo conceived by man.”¹²

Dolphin Aggression Rare

While friendly toward humans, dolphins do have a temper and occasionally show aggressive behaviour, not always for obvious reasons. “A dolphin could kill a man with a blow of its snout,” writes Sténuit. “It could dismember him with a snap of its jaws, because it possesses a double row of strong, conical teeth, eighty-eight in all, which sink in with precision. But never, absolutely never, has a dolphin or a porpoise attacked a man, even in legitimate defence, with a harpoon in its side, or when, with electrodes in its skull, it has been massacred in the name of science.”¹³

Since Sténuit made this statement in 1968, three humans have, in fact, been killed by Orcas, the first on 21 February 1991, at Canada’s Sealand of the Pacific, in British Columbia, which thereafter closed its doors for good; again in 1999, but most recently and famously, eleven years later in Shamu Stadium at San Diego, California’s Sea World, by the largest Orca in captivity, weighing six-and-a-quarter tons and measuring over twenty-two feet long.

In spring 1985, author Timothy Wyllie was brutally attacked at Key Largo, Florida by a sexually aggressive male dolphin intent on raping him. All these incidents and similarly negative encounters occurred with captive dolphins, whose naturally amiable dispositions were perverted by the unnatural conditions imposed on them

For example, the “Seaworld of Hurt” web site reports that an Orca called “Tilikum” was “held captive against his will; all he could do was swim in small circles and float aimlessly at the surface of the water, far away from the expansive ocean in which he had swum a hundred miles a day alongside his family members.” His artificial environment was a “barren one-hundred-foot-by-fifty-foot pool – just thirty-five feet deep… He was forced to perform every hour, on the hour, eight times a day, seven days a week. When ‘Tilikum’ did not perform a trick correctly, food was withheld from both him and his tank-mates, which caused a great deal of tension, and as a result, ‘Haida’ and ‘Nootka’ would bite ‘Tilikum’ and rake the entire length of his body with their teeth. The constant stress and exhaustion gave him stomach ulcers.

“When the park closed its doors at the end of each day, the three incompatible Orcas were crammed into a tiny, round, metal-sided module for more than fourteen hours until the park reopened the next morning. Over the course of twenty-one years at SeaWorld, where he is confined to a tank containing 0.0001 percent of the quantity of water that he would traverse in a single day in nature, ‘Tilikum’ has been involved in multiple incidents of aggression. The stress of captivity drives ‘Tilikum’ to exhibit abnormal repetitive behaviour, including chewing on metal gates and the concrete sides of his tank – so much so that most of his teeth are completely worn down.”¹⁴

These typical seaquarium conditions – less hideous than those in so-called “Third World” countries – are on a par with the worst penitentiaries, which similarly bring out the worst in human behaviour. “No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be,” Jacques Cousteau pointed out, “can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal… There is no doubt that a dolphin who lives among humans for any length of time undergoes a deep psychological modification.”¹⁵

Aggressive confrontations between dolphins and ourselves take place mostly under captive environments. Free dolphins in the wild are not known to have ever deliberately killed or injured anyone. That said, there are accounts, however rare, of their overt sexual interest. Wyllie writes that the only man he ever knew who truly hated dolphins was a father who claimed that his son was raped by one, although under what circumstances, he did not specify.¹⁶

If real enough, the isolated and extreme rarity of these incidents must nevertheless be stressed to put them into balanced perspective. Guilt for negative encounters with dolphins, however, has been and continues to be virtually entirely on the human side. They are, after all, our fellow mammals, still imperfect, for all their admirable qualities, and far more typically dedicated to refraining from killing us, for which, in view of our past and present atrocities committed against all cetaceans, they have abundant justification.

“When we work to save them,” stated Frank Robson, New Zealand’s leading cetologist of the last century, “we are, in a sense, acting to save ourselves.”¹⁷ In spite of the horrific abuses we continue to heap upon them, wild dolphins continue, as they always have, to seek out and enjoy our company, even volunteering to rescue unknown numbers of us from otherwise certain death at sea. In this, they are either abysmally naive or angelically high-minded. Given their prodigious brain, however, the former alternative is less likely. It is as though they remember how, more than twenty-five centuries ago, Greeks made killing dolphins a capital offense, and enacted their own form of reciprocal legislation against taking human life. However rarely observed, Pacific killer whales occasionally encircle a pod, individually seizing and devouring a victim, until all the dolphins have been devoured, behaviour from which the species’ original term derived: Orca gladiator.

No less appropriately, the genus name Orcinus means “of the kingdom of the dead,” from the original Etruscan and later Roman god, Orcus, punisher of evil souls in the Afterlife. Among themselves, killer whales, as well as dolphins, commit infanticide, similarly practiced by raptors, most notably eagles, as well as elite human societies, such as those made famous by the Spartans and Vikings. Alpha males of our own, pre-modern, militaristic ancestors routinely inspected newborns for the slightest indication of physical deformity or any other inherent anomaly, as predatory birds still do. If discovered, the baby or hatching was, or is, discarded to safeguard the species’ genetic integrity.

Such behaviour may contrast with but cannot detract from the dolphins’ over-riding amiability toward fellow mammals, us included. Even the dolphin I met off the coast of Honduras, while certainly congenial, pointedly refused to obey some of its human handler’s instructions. As Robson discovered, “there is absolutely no way a wild dolphin can be forced to comply with the wishes of a human. If it suits him, he’ll comply. If he doesn’t feel like it, he won’t.”¹⁸

Dolphin Conference

Of all the enigmas Jacques Cousteau observed during almost seven decades of underwater exploration, perhaps his most bizarre encounter took place sixty years ago, off a reef in the middle of the Indian Ocean. In the process of gathering material for his now-classic film, The Silent World, he “saw a dolphin rise to the surface to breathe, and then let himself sink down into the water again, without swimming.” This sighting followed several days of other, unusual delphine behaviour, when, “every morning at about ten o’clock,” a small pod of dolphins swam by his anchored research vessel. Intrigued, Cousteau and a fellow diver slipped into the sea.

“To this day, I have not forgiven myself for not taking a camera,” he recalled. “The sight that greeted us was one that we have never seen again. There were about fifteen dolphins – probably the school that we had seen going past Calypso every morning – in the crystal-clear water, on the side of the reef. They were sitting on the bottom, in a group, as though they were holding a conference. I say ‘sitting;’ I mean that they were literally poised on their tails.

“They remained where they were, stirring a bit and looking at one another. Then they continued with their meeting. But when we tried to move in closer to them, they swam away immediately. It was a unique and extraordinarily impressive sight. The truth is that I still have no idea what they were doing.” Telepathically communicating with each other, most likely. Cousteau himself wrote that their “meeting” suggested “an underwater congress.”¹⁹

More intriguing still, about what did they confer? Given their proximity to Calypso, they were probably discussing the untypical presence of anthropomorphic divers in an otherwise unvisited area of the vast Indian Ocean; what could have brought the strangers here, how should the pod regard them, and related issues of the moment. The dolphins sat together, as humans do, yet another comparison between both species – like eye similarity, the soft spot at the top of our head corresponding to the dolphin’s blow hole, human-like fingers, hands, thighs, knees, feet and toes in the dolphin embryo, etc., etc. – indicating a shared evolution of some kind.

Can all this mean that we were once dolphins before our ancestors returned to dry land, where primate attributes are more useful? If so, do the dolphins still preserve a cultural or collective memory of our aquatic past, and regard us on account of it as their mammalian relatives? Is that the real basis for their demonstrable love of humankind? Given their immense intellect, they may know much more; everything, in fact, there is to understand concerning the illimitable bounty of the sea. What they might teach us about it could mean the difference between our annihilation or survival in an age of extinction.

Poisoning of the Oceans

The animals’ wholesale slaughter by Japan has assumed international notoriety, but even more devastating is progressive poisoning of the planet’s water resources. Just how far rising levels of toxicity have already gone to reduce dolphin world population is difficult to determine. But cetologists do know that the first birth given by a dolphin mother dies from all the human toxins it ingests, while a second birth usually survives, because its immediate predecessor absorbed most of the toxins. This process, even if it continues at present levels – which, of course, it won’t – must result in at least cutting dolphin populations in half.

“The growing presence of toxic chemicals in the marine environment presents a crisis unlike any ever faced on this planet,” warns Blue Voice, an ocean conservation organisation founded in 2000. “Vast quantities of toxic chemicals enter the waterways and oceans of the world each day and accumulate, then bio-magnify in the marine food chain. In a time when we have reduced the number of large pelagic fish by ninety percent and the bio-mass of the oceans by seventy percent, we are poisoning much of the living marine resources that remain. This has staggering global implications for ocean life and human health. A level of one hundred parts per million of mercury has been found in a bottlenose dolphin killed for food in Japan – a level more than one hundred times that accepted by Japanese health authorities… Dolphins, toothed whales, large tuna and swordfish are among the marine creatures with highest levels of contamination, because they feed at the apex of the food chain.”²⁰

Whenever greed and self-interest are at issue, Man’s indifference to the suffering and extermination of his fellow creatures – even if their plight endangers himself – is human nature. As such, it cannot be eradicated by education or legislation, but will only disappear with himself. This was what Cousteau and other scientists realised and advocated in the last century.

“Redemption will come only when we return to the water, as sea mammals did in the past,” Cousteau repeatedly declared; “gravity is the original sin… The sea, the great unifier, is man’s only hope… We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilisation is all about – farming replacing hunting… If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed, and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect. If we were logical, the future would be bleak, indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work.”²¹

That work, as he envisioned it, was gradually returning us to our aquatic origins in the baptism of a new species to wash away the original sin of our human-all-too-human nature. Nor is the prospect as fantastic as it may seem. Some human populations living in an intimate relationship with the sea are already developing marine mammal characteristics.

Projecting what we have learned or suspect about such transformational potentials and our own aquatic origins into some inconceivably distant future, we can imagine an Earth entirely restored to its original, pristine condition. All its creatures roam free – unhunted, unexploited, and unharmed, save by natural predators, as part of the eternal balance of life – through an unpolluted environment of worldwide fresh air and water.

The wheel of organic existence runs on undisturbed, because no trace may be found of the viral species that formerly dominated this exquisitely beautiful planet, save among the last vestiges of its overgrown and crumbling cities. Their former inhabitants are gone, for the good of the world and themselves. Nor can the descendants of this lost race be found among the deserted, disintegrating ruins, because they have – all of them – reunited with their brother and sister dolphins in the sea.

Time is an object

In order for consciousness to make a single decission, it must first create TIME and that is first created by producing the TIME SPACE Pendulum.

time then is a succession of such creations filling the void because any such act produces several potential successor acts of creation impertectly packed.  sort of looks like a BIG BANG filling the Void.  Understand though that all this is sublight and also produces light speed photons as well.

further self assembly and decay then produces the universe we see.  All such acts of creation end up producing a Galaxy of sublight particles which we can see.

In the end TIME looks like the smallest possible scale in an empirical universe and is uniform within its Galaxy at least..

Time as we see it has obviously expanded, but the rate is declining by the inverse of observed size.

Time is an object

Not a backdrop, an illusion or an emergent phenomenon, time has a physical size that can be measured in laboratories

Red-eyed tree frog, near Arenal Volcano, Costa Rica. Photo by Ben Roberts/Panos Pictures

Sara Walker

is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, where she is deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration. She is also external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a fellow at the Berggruen Institute.

Lee Cronin  is Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow in Scotland and CEO of Chemify.

5,100 words

Published in association with Santa Fe Institute, an Aeon Strategic Partner

Atimeless universe is hard to imagine, but not because time is a technically complex or philosophically elusive concept. There is a more structural reason: imagining timelessness requires time to pass. Even when you try to imagine its absence, you sense it moving as your thoughts shift, your heart pumps blood to your brain, and images, sounds and smells move around you. The thing that is time never seems to stop. You may even feel woven into its ever-moving fabric as you experience the Universe coming together and apart. But is that how time really works?

According to Albert Einstein, our experience of the past, present and future is nothing more than ‘a stubbornly persistent illusion’. According to Isaac Newton, time is nothing more than backdrop, outside of life. And according to the laws of thermodynamics, time is nothing more than entropy and heat. In the history of modern physics, there has never been a widely accepted theory in which a moving, directional sense of time is fundamental. Many of our most basic descriptions of nature – from the laws of movement to the properties of molecules and matter – seem to exist in a universe where time doesn’t really pass. However, recent research across a variety of fields suggests that the movement of time might be more important than most physicists had once assumed.

A new form of physics called assembly theory suggests that a moving, directional sense of time is real and fundamental. It suggests that the complex objects in our Universe that have been made by life, including microbes, computers and cities, do not exist outside of time: they are impossible without the movement of time. From this perspective, the passing of time is not only intrinsic to the evolution of life or our experience of the Universe. It is also the ever-moving material fabric of the Universe itself. Time is an object. It has a physical size, like space. And it can be measured at a molecular level in laboratories.

The unification of time and space radically changed the trajectory of physics in the 20th century. It opened new possibilities for how we think about reality. What could the unification of time and matter do in our century? What happens when time is an object?

For Newton, time was fixed. In his laws of motion and gravity, which describe how objects change their position in space, time is an absolute backdrop. Newtonian time passes, but never changes. And it’s a view of time that endures in modern physics – even in the wave functions of quantum mechanics time is a backdrop, not a fundamental feature. For Einstein, however, time was not absolute. It was relative to each observer. He described our experience of time passing as ‘a stubbornly persistent illusion’. Einsteinian time is what is measured by the ticking of clocks; space is measured by the ticks on rulers that record distances. By studying the relative motions of ticking clocks and ticks on rulers, Einstein was able to combine the concepts of how we measure both space and time into a unified structure we now call ‘spacetime’. In this structure, space is infinite and all points exist at once. But time, as Einstein described it, also has this property, which means that all times – past, present and future – are equally real. The result is sometimes called a ‘block universe’, which contains everything that has and will happen in space and time. Today, most physicists support the notion of the block universe.

But the block universe was cracked before it even arrived. In the early 1800s, nearly a century before Einstein developed the concept of spacetime, Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot and other physicists were already questioning the notion that time was either a backdrop or an illusion. These questions would continue into the 19th century as physicists such as Ludwig Boltzmann also began to turn their minds to the problems that came with a new kind of technology: the engine.

Though engines could be mechanically reproduced, physicists didn’t know exactly how they functioned. Newtonian mechanics were reversible; engines were not. Newton’s solar system ran equally well moving forward or backward in time. However, if you drove a car and it ran out of fuel, you could not run the engine in reverse, take back the heat that was generated, and unburn the fuel. Physicists at the time suspected that engines must be adhering to certain laws, even if those laws were unknown. What they found was that engines do not function unless time passes and has a direction. By exploiting differences in temperature, engines drive the movement of heat from warm parts to cold parts. As time moves forward, the temperature difference diminishes and less ‘work’ can be done. This is the essence of the second law of thermodynamics (also known as the law of entropy) that was proposed by Carnot and later explained statistically by Boltzmann. The law describes the way that less useful ‘work’ can be done by an engine over time. You must occasionally refuel your car, and entropy must always increase.

Do we really live in a universe that has no need for time as a fundamental feature?

This makes sense in the context of engines or other complex objects, but it is not helpful when dealing with a single particle. It is meaningless to talk about the temperature of a single particle because temperature is a way of quantifying the average kinetic energy of many particles. In the laws of thermodynamics, the flow and directionality of time are considered an emergent property rather than a backdrop or an illusion – a property associated with the behaviour of large numbers of objects. While thermodynamic theory introduced how time should have a directionality to its passage, this property was not fundamental. In physics, ‘fundamental’ properties are reserved for those properties that cannot be described in other terms. The arrow of time in thermodynamics is therefore considered ‘emergent’ because it can be explained in terms of more fundamental concepts, such as entropy and heat.

Charles Darwin, working between the steam engine era of Carnot and the emergence of Einstein’s block universe, was among the first to clearly see how life must exist in time. In the final sentence from On the Origin of Species (1859), he eloquently captured this perspective: ‘[W]hilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.’ The arrival of Darwin’s ‘endless forms’ can be explained only in a universe where time exists and has a clear directionality.

During the past several billion years, life has evolved from single-celled organisms to complex multicellular organisms. It has evolved from simple societies to teeming cities, and now a planet potentially capable of reproducing its life on other worlds. These things take time to come into existence because they can emerge only through the processes of selection and evolution.

We think Darwin’s insight does not go deep enough. Evolution accurately describes changes observed across different forms of life, but it does much more than this: it is the only physical process in our Universe that can generate the objects we associate with life. This includes bacteria, cats and trees, but also things like rockets, mobile phones and cities. None of these objects fluctuates into existence spontaneously, despite what popular accounts of modern physics may claim can happen. These objects are not random flukes. Instead, they all require a ‘memory’ of the past to be made in the present. They must be produced over time – a time that continually moves forward. And yet, according to Newton, Einstein, Carnot, Boltzmann and others, time is either nonexistent or merely emergent.

The times of physics and of evolution are incompatible. But this has not always been obvious because physics and evolution deal with different kinds of objects. Physics, particularly quantum mechanics, deals with simple and elementary objects: quarks, leptons and force carrier particles of the Standard Model. Because these objects are considered simple, they do not require ‘memory’ for the Universe to make them (assuming sufficient energy and resources are available). Think of ‘memory’ as a way to describe the recording of actions or processes that are needed to build a given object. When we get to the disciplines that engage with evolution, such as chemistry and biology, we find objects that are too complex to be produced in abundance instantaneously (even when energy and materials are available). They require memory, accumulated over time, to be produced. As Darwin understood, some objects can come into existence only through evolution and the selection of certain ‘recordings’ from memory to make them.

This incompatibility creates a set of problems that can be solved only by making a radical departure from the current ways that physics approaches time – especially if we want to explain life. While current theories of quantum mechanics can explain certain features of molecules, such as their stability, they cannot explain the existence of DNA, proteins, RNA, or other large and complex molecules. Likewise, the second law of thermodynamics is said to give rise to the arrow of time and explanations of how organisms convert energy, but it does not explain the directionality of time, in which endless forms are built over evolutionary timescales with no final equilibrium or heat-death for the biosphere in sight. Quantum mechanics and thermodynamics are necessary to explain some features of life, but they are not sufficient.

These and other problems led us to develop a new way of thinking about the physics of time, which we have called assembly theory. It describes how much memory must exist for a molecule or combination of molecules – the objects that life is made from – to come into existence. In assembly theory, this memory is measured across time as a feature of a molecule by focusing on the minimum memory required for that molecule (or molecules) to come into existence. Assembly theory quantifies selection by making time a property of objects that could have emerged only via evolution.

We began developing this new physics by considering how life emerges through chemical changes. The chemistry of life operates combinatorially as atoms bond to form molecules, and the possible combinations grow with each additional bond. These combinations are made from approximately 92 naturally occurring elements, which chemists estimate can be combined to build as many as 1060 different molecules – 1 followed by 60 zeroes. To become useful, each individual combination would need to be replicated billions of times – think of how many molecules are required to make even a single cell, let alone an insect or a person. Making copies of any complex object takes time because each step required to assemble it involves a search across the vastness of combinatorial space to select which molecules will take physical shape.

Combinatorial spaces seem to show up when life exists

Consider the macromolecular proteins that living things use as catalysts within cells. These proteins are made from smaller molecular building blocks called amino acids, which combine to form long chains typically between 50 and 2,000 amino acids long. If every possible 100-amino-acid-long protein was assembled from the 20 most common amino acids that form proteins, the result would not just fill our Universe but 1023 universes.

Photo by Donna Enriquez/Flickr

The space of all possible molecules is hard to fathom. As an analogy, consider the combinations you can build with a given set of Lego bricks. If the set contained only two bricks, the number of combinations would be small. However, if the set contained thousands of pieces, like the 5,923-piece Lego model of the Taj Mahal, the number of possible combinations would be astronomical. If you specifically needed to build the Taj Mahal according to the instructions, the space of possibilities would be limited, but if you could build any Lego object with those 5,923 pieces, there would be a combinatorial explosion of possible structures that could be built – the possibilities grow exponentially with each additional block you add. If you connected two Lego structures you had already built every second, you would not be able to exhaust all possible objects of the size of the Lego Taj Mahal set within the age of the Universe. In fact, any space built combinatorially from even a few simple building blocks will have this property. This includes all possible cell-like objects built from chemistry, all possible organisms built from different cell-types, all possible languages built from words or utterances, and all possible computer programs built from all possible instruction sets. The pattern here is that combinatorial spaces seem to show up when life exists. That is, life is evident when the space of possibilities is so large that the Universe must select only some of that space to exist. Assembly theory is meant to formalise this idea. In assembly theory, objects are built combinatorially from other objects and, just as you might use a ruler to measure how big a given object is spatially, assembly theory provides a measure – called the ‘assembly index’ – to measure how big an object is in time.

The Lego Taj Mahal set is equivalent to a complex molecule in this analogy. Reproducing a specific object, like a Lego set, in a way that isn’t random requires selection within the space of all possible objects. That is, at each stage of construction, specific objects or sets of objects must be selected from the vast number of possible combinations that could be built. Alongside selection, ‘memory’ is also required: information is needed in the objects that exist to assemble the specific new object, which is implemented as a sequence of steps that can be completed in finite time, like the instructions required to build the Lego Taj Mahal. More complex objects require more memory to come into existence.

In assembly theory, objects grow in their complexity over time through the process of selection. As objects become more complex, their unique parts will increase, which means local memory must also increase. This ‘local memory’ is the causal chain of events in how the object is first ‘discovered’ by selection and then created in multiple copies. For example, in research into the origin of life, chemists study how molecules come together to become living organisms. For a chemical system to spontaneously emerge as ‘life’, it must self-replicate by forming, or catalysing, self-sustaining networks of chemical reactions. But how does the chemical system ‘know’ which combinations to make? We can see ‘local memory’ in action in these networks of molecules that have ‘learned’ to chemically bind together in certain ways. As the memory requirements increase, the probability that an object was produced by chance drops to zero because the number of alternative combinations that weren’t selected is just too high. An object, whether it’s a Lego Taj Mahal or a network of molecules, can be produced and reproduced only with memory and a construction process. But memory is not everywhere, it’s local in space and time. This means an object can be produced only where there is local memory that can guide the selection of which parts go where, and when.

In assembly theory, ‘selection’ refers to what has emerged in the space of possible combinations. It is formally described through an object’s copy number and complexity. Copy number or concentration is a concept used in chemistry and molecular biology that refers to how many copies of a molecule are present in a given volume of space. In assembly theory, complexity is as significant as the copy number. A highly complex molecule that exists only as a single copy is not important. What is of interest to assembly theory are complex molecules with a high copy number, which is an indication that the molecule has been produced by evolution. This complexity measurement is also known as an object’s ‘assembly index’. This value is related to the amount of physical memory required to store the information to direct the assembly of an object and set a directionality in time from the simple to the complex. And, while the memory must exist in the environment to bring the object into existence, in assembly theory the memory is also an intrinsic physical feature of the object. In fact, it is the object.

Life is stacks of objects building other objects that build other objects – it’s objects building objects, all the way down. Some objects emerged only relatively recently, such as synthetic ‘forever chemicals’ made from organofluorine chemical compounds. Others emerged billions of years ago, such as photosynthesising plant cells. Different objects have different depths in time. And this depth is directly related to both an object’s assembly index and copy number, which we can combine into a number: a quantity called ‘Assembly’, or A. The higher the Assembly number, the deeper an object is in time.

To measure assembly in a laboratory, we chemically analyse an object to count how many copies of a given molecule it contains. We then infer the object’s complexity, known as its molecular assembly index, by counting the number of parts it contains. These molecular parts, like the amino acids in a protein string, are often inferred by determining an object’s molecular assembly index – a theoretical assembly number. But we are not inferring theoretically. We are ‘counting’ the molecular components of an object using three visualising techniques: mass spectrometry, infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Remarkably, the number of components we’ve counted in molecules maps to their theoretical assembly numbers. This means we can measure an object’s assembly index directly with standard lab equipment.

A high Assembly number – a high assembly index and a high copy number – indicates that it can be reliably made by something in its environment. This could be a cell that constructs high-Assembly molecules like proteins, or a chemist that makes molecules with an even higher Assembly value, such as the anti-cancer drug Taxol (paclitaxel). Complex objects with high copy numbers did not come into existence randomly but are the result of a process of evolution or selection. They are not formed by a series of chance encounters, but by selection in time. More specifically, a certain depth in time.

It’s like throwing the 5,923 Lego Taj Mahal pieces in the air and expecting them to come together spontaneously

This is a difficult concept. Even chemists find this idea hard to grasp since it is easy to imagine that ‘complex’ molecules form by chance interactions with their environment. However, in the laboratory, chance interactions often lead to the production of ‘tar’ rather than high-Assembly objects. Tar is a chemist’s worst nightmare, a messy mixture of molecules that cannot be individually identified. It is found frequently in origin-of-life experiments. In the US chemist Stanley Miller’s ‘prebiotic soup’ experiment in 1953, the amino acids that formed at first turned into a mess of unidentifiable black gloop if the experiment was run too long (and no selection was imposed by the researchers to stop chemical changes taking place). The problem in these experiments is that the combinatorial space of possible molecules is so vast for high-Assembly objects that no specific molecules are produced in high abundance. ‘Tar’ is the result.

It’s like throwing the 5,923 pieces from the Lego Taj Mahal set in the air and expecting them to come together, spontaneously, exactly as the instructions specify. Now imagine taking the pieces from 100 boxes of the same Lego set, throwing them into the air, and expecting 100 copies of the exact same building. The probabilities are incredibly low and might be zero, if assembly theory is on the right track. It is as likely as a smashed egg spontaneously reforming.

But what about complex objects that occur naturally without selection or evolution? What about snowflakes, minerals and complex storm systems? Unlike objects generated by evolution and selection, these do not need to be explained through their ‘depth in time’. Though individually complex, they do not have a high Assembly value because they form randomly and require no memory to be produced. They have a low copy number because they never exist in identical copies. No two snowflakes are alike, and the same goes for minerals and storm systems.

Assembly theory not only changes how we think about time, but how we define life itself. By applying this approach to molecular systems, it should be possible to measure if a molecule was produced by an evolutionary process. That means we can determine which molecules could have been made only by a living process, even if that process involves chemistries different to those on Earth. In this way, assembly theory can function as a universal life-detection system that works by measuring the assembly indexes and copy numbers of molecules in living or non-living samples.

In our laboratory experiments, we found that only living samples produce high-Assembly molecules. Our teams and collaborators have reproduced this finding using an analytical technique called mass spectrometry, in which molecules from a sample are ‘weighed’ in an electromagnetic field and then smashed into pieces using energy. Smashing a molecule to bits allows us to measure its assembly index by counting the number of unique parts it contains. Through this, we can work out how many steps were required to produce a molecular object and then quantify its depth in time with standard laboratory equipment.

To verify our theory that high-Assembly objects can be generated only by life, the next step involved testing living and non-living samples. Our teams have been able to take samples of molecules from across the solar system, including diverse living, fossilised and abiotic systems on Earth. These solid samples of stone, bone, flesh and other forms of matter were dissolved in a solvent and then analysed with a high-resolution mass spectrometer that can identify the structure and properties of molecules. We found that only living systems produce abundant molecules with an assembly index above an experimentally determined value of 15 steps. The cut-off between 13 and 15 is sharp, meaning that molecules made by random processes cannot get beyond 13 steps. We think this is indicative of a phase transition where the physics of evolution and selection must take over from other forms of physics to explain how a molecule was formed.

These experiments verify that only objects with a sufficiently high Assembly number – highly complex and copied molecules – seem to be found in life. What is even more exciting is that we can find this information without knowing anything else about the molecule present. Assembly theory can determine whether molecules from anywhere in the Universe were derived from evolution or not, even if we don’t know what chemistry is being used.

The possibility of detecting living systems elsewhere in the galaxy is exciting, but more exciting for us is the possibility of a new kind of physics, and a new explanation of life. As an empirical measure of objects uniquely producible by evolution, Assembly unlocks a more general theory of life. If the theory holds, its most radical philosophical implication is that time exists as a material property of the complex objects created by evolution. That is, just as Einstein radicalised our notion of time by unifying it with space, assembly theory points to a radically new conception of time by unifying it with matter.

Assembly theory explains evolved objects, such as complex molecules, biospheres, and computers

It is radical because, as we noted, time has never been fundamental in the history of physics. Newton and some quantum physicists view it as a backdrop. Einstein thought it was an illusion. And, in the work of those studying thermodynamics, it’s understood as merely an emergent property. Assembly theory treats time as fundamental and material: time is the stuff out of which things in the Universe are made. Objects created by selection and evolution can be formed only through the passing of time. But don’t think about this time like the measured ticking of a clock or a sequence of calendar years. Time is a physical attribute. Think about it in terms of Assembly, a measurable intrinsic property of a molecule’s depth or size in time.

This idea is radical because it also allows physics to explain evolutionary change. Physics has traditionally studied objects that the Universe can spontaneously assemble, such as elementary particles or planets. Assembly theory, on the other hand, explains evolved objects, such as complex molecules, biospheres, and computers. These complex objects exist only along lineages where information has been acquired specific to their construction.

If we follow those lineages back, beyond the origin of life on Earth to the origin of the Universe, it would be logical to suggest that the ‘memory’ of the Universe was lower in the past. This means that the Universe’s ability to generate high-Assembly objects is fundamentally limited by its size in time. Just as a semi-trailer truck will not fit inside a standard home garage, some objects are too large in time to come into existence in intervals that are smaller than their assembly index. For complex objects like computers to exist in our Universe, many other objects needed to form first: stars, heavy elements, life, tools, technology, and the abstraction of computing. This takes time and is critically path-dependent due to the causal contingency of each innovation made. The early Universe may not have been capable of computation as we know it, simply because not enough history existed yet. Time had to pass and be materially instantiated through the selection of the computer’s constituent objects. The same goes for Lego structures, large language models, new pharmaceutical drugs, the ‘technosphere’, or any other complex object.

The consequences of objects having an intrinsic material depth in time is far reaching. In the block universe, everything is treated as static and existing all at once. This means that objects cannot be ordered by their depth in time, and selection and evolution cannot be used to explain why some objects exist and not others. Re-conceptualising time as a physical dimension of complex matter, and setting a directionality for time could help us solve such questions. Making time material through assembly theory unifies several perplexing philosophical concepts related to life in one measurable framework. At the heart of this theory is the assembly index, which measures the complexity of an object. It is a quantifiable way of describing the evolutionary concept of selection by showing how many alternatives were excluded to yield a given object. Each step in the assembly process of an object requires information, memory, to specify what should and shouldn’t be added or changed. In building the Lego Taj Mahal, for example, we must take a specific sequence of steps, each directing us toward the final building. Each misstep is an error, and if we make too many errors we cannot build a recognisable structure. Copying an object requires information about the steps that were previously needed to produce similar objects.

This makes assembly theory a causal theory of physics, because the underlying structure of an assembly space – the full range of required combinations – orders things in a chain of causation. Each step relies on a previously selected step, and each object relies on a previously selected object. If we removed any steps in an assembly pathway, the final object would not be produced. Buzzwords often associated with the physics of life, such as ‘theory’, ‘information’, ‘memory’, ‘causation’ and ‘selection’, are material because objects themselves encode the rules to help construct other ‘complex’ objects. This could be the case in mutual catalysis where objects reciprocally make each other. Thus, in assembly theory, time is essentially the same thing as information, memory, causation and selection. They are all made physical because we assume they are features of the objects described in the theory, not the laws of how these objects behave. Assembly theory reintroduces an expanding, moving sense of time to physics by showing how its passing is the stuff complex objects are made of: the size of the future increases with complexity.

This new conception of time might solve many open problems in fundamental physics. The first and foremost is the debate between determinism and contingency. Einstein famously said that God ‘does not play dice’, and many physicists are still forced to conclude that determinism holds, and our future is closed. But the idea that the initial conditions of the Universe, or any process, determine the future has always been a problem. In assembly theory, the future is determined, but not until it happens. If what exists now determines the future, and what exists now is larger and more information-rich than it was in the past, then the possible futures also grow larger as objects become more complex. This is because there is more history existing in the present from which to assemble novel future states. Treating time as a material property of the objects it creates allows novelty to be generated in the future.

Novelty is critical for our understanding of life as a physical phenomenon. Our biosphere is an object that is at least 3.5 billion years old by the measure of clock time (Assembly is a different measure of time). But how did life get started? What allowed living systems to develop intelligence and consciousness? Traditional physics suggests that life ‘emerged’. The concept of emergence captures how new structures seem to appear at higher levels of spatial organisation that could not be predicted from lower levels. Examples include the wetness of water, which is not predicted from individual water molecules, or the way that living cells are made from individual non-living atoms. However, the objects traditional physics considers emergent become fundamental in assembly theory. From this perspective, an object’s ‘emergent-ness’ – how far it departs from a physicist’s expectations of elementary building blocks – depends on how deep it lies in time. This points us toward the origins of life, but we can also travel in the other direction.

If we are on the right track, assembly theory suggests time is fundamental. It suggests change is not measured by clocks but is encoded in chains of events that produce complex molecules with different depths in time. Assembled from local memory in the vastness of combinatorial space, these objects record the past, act in the present, and determine the future. This means the Universe is expanding in time, not space – or perhaps space emerges from time, as many current proposals from quantum gravity suggest. Though the Universe may be entirely deterministic, its expansion in time implies that the future cannot be fully predicted, even in principle. The future of the Universe is more open-ended than we could have predicted.

Time may be an ever-moving fabric through which we experience things coming together and apart. But the fabric does more than move – it expands. When time is an object, the future is the size of the Universe.

List of Bad Things Attributed to Global Warming

This is more humor than any creditable science.  About two years ago, the global warming propaganda machine created such pressure that any scientist that wished to attract funding somehow found a way to mention global warming in his grant applications and obviously into the paper production.  Two years of effort has produced this mountain of perfectly good science hiding under the same umbrella.

 

It is still not quite as bad as the cure for cancer umbrella which rolled on for decades.  This one at least ended pretty badly a few weeks back.

 

This is a typical case of jumping on a strong horse to advance one’s own work.  Let us hope that few suffer any real damage.  After all, it was all about PR.

 

A Complete List Of Bad Things Attributed To Global Warming

 Posted 04/05/2010 05:05 PM ET

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=529363

Hardly a day goes by that the media don't blame something on global warming. Or so it seems. The British-based science watchdog, Number Watch, wondered just how many and went to the trouble of documenting them.

It has kept on its Web site a near-comprehensive set of links to a long list of things attributed by either scientific research or the media to global warming. As you read it, some items will strike you as contradictory. Others, perhaps, as merely absurd. And still others as factually impossible.

However they strike you, in perusing the list one thing will become clear: just how much the fear of global warming has come to taint both science and news reporting on the issue.

Following is the list of phenomena (756 entries in all) linked at one time or another to warming. They range from acne, bubonic plague and a drop in circumcisions to Yellow fever, whale beachings, walrus stampedes, witchcraft executions and the threat of zebra mussels.

Actual links to stories that make the claims listed below can be found at http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm. (Below the list are some claims that no longer have working Internet links.)

The list:

Acne, agricultural land increase, Afghan poppies destroyed, aged deaths, poppies more potent, Africa devastated, Africa in conflict, African aid threatened, African summer frost, aggressive weeds, Air France crash, air pressure changes, airport farewells virtual, airport malaria, Agulhas current, Alaskan towns slowly destroyed, al-Qaida and Taliban being helped, allergy increase, allergy season longer, alligators in the Thames, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American Dream end, amphibians breeding earlier (or not), anaphylactic reactions to bee stings, ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, animals shrink, Antarctic grass flourishes, Antarctic ice grows, Antarctic ice shrinks, Antarctic sea life at risk, anxiety treatment, algal blooms, archaeological sites threatened, Arctic bogs melt, Arctic in bloom, Arctic ice free, Arctic ice melt faster, Arctic lakes disappear, Arctic tundra lost, Arctic warming (not), a rose by any other name smells of nothing, asteroid strike risk, asthma, Atlantic less salty, Atlantic more salty, atmospheric circulation modified, attack of the killer jellyfish, avalanches reduced, avalanches increased, Baghdad snow, Bahrain under water, bananas grow, barbarization, bats decline, beer and bread prices to soar, beer better, beer worse, beetle infestation, bet for $10,000, big melt faster, billion-dollar research projects, billion homeless, billions face risk, billions of deaths, bird distributions change, bird loss accelerating, bird strikes, bird visitors drop, birds confused, birds decline (Wales), birds driven north, birds face longer migrations, birds return early, birds shrink (Australia), birds shrink (U.S.), bittern boom ends, blackbirds stop singing, blackbirds threatened, Black Hawk down, blizzards, blood contaminated, blue mussels return, borders redrawn, bluetongue, brain-eating amoebae, brains shrink, bridge collapse (Minneapolis), Britain one big city, Britain Siberian, Britain's bananas, British monsoon, brothels struggle, brown Ireland, bubonic plague, Buddhist temple threatened, building collapse, building season extension, bushfires, butterflies move north,butterflies reeling, carbon crimes, camel deaths, cancer deaths in England, cannibalism, caterpillar biomass shift, cave paintings threatened, childhood insomnia, Cholera, circumcision in decline, cirrus disappearance, civil unrest, cloud increase, coast beauty spots lost, cockroach migration, cod go south, coffee threatened, coffee berry borer, coffee berry disease, cold climate creatures survive, cold spells (Australia), cold wave (India), cold weather (world), computer models, conferences, conflict, conflict with Russia, consumers foot the bill, coral bleaching, coral fish suffer, coral reefs dying, coral reefs grow,coral reefs shrink, coral reefs twilight, cost of trillions, cougar attacks, crabgrass menace, cradle of civilization threatened, creatures move uphill, crime increase, crocodile sex, crops devastated, crumbling roads, buildings and sewage systems, curriculum change, cyclones (Australia), danger to kid's health, Dartford Warbler plague, deadly virus outbreaks, death rate increase (U.S.), deaths to reach 6 million, Dengue hemorrhagic fever, depression, desert advance, desert retreat, destruction of the environment, dig sites threatened, disasters, diseases move north, dog disease, dozen deadly diseases — or not, drought, ducks and geese decline, dust bowl in the corn belt, earlier pollen season, Earth axis tilt, Earth biodiversity crisis, Earth dying, Earth even hotter, Earth light dimming, Earth lopsided, Earth melting, Earth morbid fever, Earth on fast track, Earth past point of no return, Earth slowing down, Earth spins faster, Earth to explode, Earth upside down, earthquakes, earthquakes redux, El Nino intensification, end of the world as we know it, erosion, emerging infections, encephalitis, English villages lost, equality threatened, Europe simultaneously baking and freezing, eutrophication, evolution accelerating, expansion of university climate groups, extinctions (human, civilization, koalas, logic, Inuit, smallest butterfly, cod, penguins, pikas, polar bears, possums, walrus, tigers, toads,turtles, plants, ladybirds, rhinoceros, salmon, trout, wild flowers, woodlice, a million species, half of all animal and plant species, mountain species, not polar bears, barrier reef, leaches, salamanders, tropical insects) experts muzzled, extreme changes to California, fading fall foliage, fainting, famine, farmers benefit, farmers go under, farm output boost, farming soil decline, fashion disaster, fever, figurehead sacked, fir cone bonanza, fires fanned in Nepal, fish bigger, fish catches drop, fish downsize, fish deaf, fish get lost, fish head north, fish shrinking, fish stocks at risk, fish stocks decline, five million illnesses, flesh eating disease, flies on Everest, flood patterns change, floods, floods of beaches and cities, flood of migrants, flood preparation for crisis, flora dispersed, Florida economic decline, flowers in peril, fog increase in San Francisco, fog decrease in San Francisco, food poisoning, food prices rise, food prices soar, food security threat, football team migration, forest decline, forest expansion, foundations threatened, frog with extra heads, frosts, frostbite, frost damage increased, fungi fruitful, fungi invasion, games change, Garden of Eden wilts, geese decline in Hampshire, genetic changes, genetic diversity decline, gene pools slashed, geysers imperiled, giant icebergs (Australia), giant oysters invade, giant pythons invade, giant squid migrate, gingerbread houses collapse, glacial earthquakes, glacial retreat, glacier grows (California), glaciers on Snowden, glacier wrapped, global cooling, glowing clouds, golf course to drown, golf Masters wrecked, grain output drop (China), grandstanding, grasslands wetter, gravity shift, Great Barrier Reef 95% dead, Great Lakes drop, great tits cope, greening of the North, Grey whales lose weight, Gulf Stream failure, habitat loss, haggis threatened, Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, harvest increase, harvest shrinkage, hay fever epidemic, health affected, health of children harmed, health risks (even more) heart disease, heart attacks and strokes (Australia), heat waves, hedgehogs bald, hibernation affected, hibernation ends too soon, hibernation ends too late, homeless 50 million, hornets, human development faces unprecedented reversal, human fertility reduced, human health risk, human race oblivion, hurricanes, hurricane reduction, hurricanes fewer, hurricanes more intense, hurricanes not, hydropower problems, hyperthermia deaths, ice age, ice sheet growth, ice sheet shrinkage, icebergs, illness and death, inclement weather, India drowning, infrastructure failure (Canada), indigestion, industry threatened, infectious diseases, inflation in China, insect explosion, insect invasion, insurance premium rises, Inuit displacement, Inuit poisoned, Inuit suing, invasion of alien worms, invasion of Antarctic aliens, invasion of Asian carp, invasion of cats, invasion of crabgrass, invasion of herons, invasion of jellyfish, invasion of king crabs, invasion of midges,invasion of slugs, island disappears, islands sinking, Italy robbed of pasta, itchier poison ivy, jellyfish explosion, jet stream drifts north, jets fall from sky, Kew Gardens taxed, kidney stones, killer cornflakes, killing us, kitten boom, koalas under threat, krill decline, lake and stream productivity decline, lake empties, lake shrinking and growing, landslides, landslides of ice at 140 mph, large trees decline, lawsuits increase,lawsuit successful, lawyers' income increased, lawyers want more, legionnaires' surge, lives lost, lives saved, Loch Ness monster dead, locust plagues suppressed, lush growth in rain forests, Lyme disease, Malaria, malnutrition, mammoth dung melt, mango harvest fails, Maple production advanced, Maple syrup shortage, marine diseases, marine food chain decimated, Meaching (end of the world), Meat eating to stop, Mediterranean rises, megacryometeors, Melanoma, Melanoma decline, mental illness, methane emissions from plants, methane burps, methane runaway, melting permafrost, Middle Kingdom convulses, migration, migratory birds huge losses, microbes to decompose soil carbon more rapidly, minorities hit, monkeys at risk, monkeys on the move, Mont Blanc grows, monuments imperiled, moose dying, more bad air days, more research needed, mortality increased, mosquitoes adapting, mountain (Everest) shrinking, mountaineers fears, mountains break up, mountains green and flowering, mountains taller, mortality lower, murder rate increase, musk ox decline, Myanmar cyclone, narwhals at risk, National Parks damaged, National security implications, native wildlife overwhelmed, natural disasters quadruple, new islands, next ice age, NFL threatened, Nile delta damaged, noctilucent clouds, no effect in India, Northwest Passage opened, nuclear plants bloom, oaks dying, oaks move north, oblivion, ocean acidification, ocean acidification faster, ocean dead spots, ocean dead zones unleashed, ocean deserts expand, ocean waves speed up, Olympic Games to end, opera house to be destroyed, outdoor hockey threatened, oxygen depletion zones, ozone repair slowed, ozone rise, penguin chicks frozen, penguin chicks smaller, penguins replaced by jellyfish, personal carbon rationing,pest outbreaks, pests increase,phenology shifts, pines decline, pirate population decrease, plankton blooms, plankton wiped out, plants lose protein, plants march north, plants move uphill, polar bears aggressive, polar bears cannibalistic, polar bears deaf, polar bears drowning, polar tours scrapped, popcorn rise, porpoise astray, profits collapse, psychiatric illness, puffin decline, pushes poor women into prostitution, rabid bats, radars taken out, railroad tracks deformed, rainfall increase, rape wave, refugees, reindeer endangered, reindeer larger, release of ancient frozen viruses, resorts disappear, rice threatened, rice yields crash, rift on Capitol Hill, rioting and nuclear war, river flow impacted, rivers raised, road accidents, roads wear out, robins rampant, rocky peaks crack apart, roof of the world a desert, rooftop bars, Ross river disease, ruins ruined, Russia under pressure, salinity reduction, salinity increase, Salmonella, salmon stronger, satellites accelerate, school closures, sea level rise, sea level rise faster, seals mating more, seismic activity, sewer bills rise, severe thunderstorms, sex change, sexual promiscuity, shark attacks, sharks booming, sharks moving north, sheep change color, sheep shrink, shop closures, short-nosed dogs endangered, shrimp sex problems, shrinking ponds, shrinking sheep, shrinking shrine, Sidney Opera House wiped out, ski resorts threatened, slow death, smaller brains, smelt down, smog, snowfall decrease, snowfall increase, snowfall heavy, snow thicker, soaring food prices, societal collapse, soil change, songbirds change eating habits, sour grapes, space problem, spectacular orchids, spiders getting bigger, spiders invade Scotland, squid larger, squid population explosion, squid tamed, squirrels reproduce earlier, stingray invasion, storms wetter, stratospheric cooling, street crime to increase,subsidence, suicide, swordfish in the Baltic, Tabasco tragedy, taxes, tectonic plate movement, terrorists (India), thatched cottages at risk, threat to peace, ticks move northward (Sweden), tides rise, tigers eat people, tomatoes rot, tornado outbreak, tourism increase, toxic seaweed, trade barriers, trade winds weakened, traffic jams, transportation threatened, tree foliage increase (U.K.), tree growth slowed, tree growth faster, trees in trouble, trees less colorful, trees more colorful, trees lush, trees on Antarctica, treelines change, tropics expansion, tropopause raised, truffle shortage, truffles down, turtles crash, turtle feminized, turtles lay earlier, UFO sightings, U.K. coastal impact, U.K. Katrina, Vampire moths, Venice flooded, violin decline, volcanic eruptions, walrus pups orphaned, walrus stampede, wars over water, wars sparked, wars threaten billions, wasps, water bills double, water scarcity (20% of increase), wave of natural disasters, waves bigger, weather out of its mind, weather patterns awry, weather patterns last longer, Western aid cancelled out, West Nile fever, whale beachings, whales lose weight, whales move north, whales wiped out, wheat yields crushed in Australia, wildfires,wind shift, wind reduced, winds stronger, winds weaker, wine — Australian baked, wine — harm to Australian industry, wine industry damage (California), wine industry disaster (U.S.), wine — more English, wine — England too hot, wine — German boon, wine — no more French, wine passé (Napa), wine — Scotland best, wine stronger, winters in Britain colder, winter in Britain dead, witchcraft executions, wolverine decline, wolves eat more moose, wolves eat less, workers laid off, World at war, World War 4, World bankruptcy, World in crisis, World in flames, Yellow fever, zebra mussel threat, zoonotic diseases.