Purpose of the articles posted in the blog is to share knowledge and occurring events for ecology and biodiversity conservation and protection whereas biology will be human’s security. Remember, these are meant to be conversation starters, not mere broadcasts :) so I kindly request and would vastly prefer that you share your comments and thoughts on the blog-version of this Focus on Arts and Ecology (all its past + present + future).

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Eggplant Stuffed With Cheese And Tomatoes

Posted on April 29, 2018 by  in 

eggplant baked with ground lamb
Eggplant is the poor man’s meat in the Middle East, but when you serve it stuffed with good local cheese and sweet cherry tomatoes, it’s a luxury. We also do a variation on eggplant Parmesan, here.
This recipe is different in that the eggplants are simmered whole in water before filling and baking, rather than being baked beforehand. This results in a soft, rather than chunky filling. In handling the hot eggplants, take care not to crack or pierce the skins.
Try and find baladi eggplants like the one Karin is holding here. They make for flavorful, tastier eggplant anything. Look for shiny and heavy as signs of freshness. If soft or brownish, dull: don’t buy.
Pair two stuffed eggplant halves per person with plenty of salad and a basket of crusty bread, and you have a delicious, light, vegetarian meal.

Eggplant Stuffed With Cheese And Tomatoes

8 servings – enough for 4 people, or 8 appetizers

Ingredients

4 large, whole and unpeeled eggplants
3 tablespoons olive oil
12 mixed yellow and red cherry tomatoes, halved
1 large onion, chopped fine
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 cup grated cheese of choice (recommended: mozzarella, feta, or kashkeval)
1 tsp. salt, or to taste
2 tablespoons fresh basil leaves, chopped
Salt and pepper
1/4 cup pine nuts
Olive oil for drizzling

Putting it all together

Preheat the oven to 350°F/175°C.
Have ready a large pot (or two, if the eggplants don’t fit into one). Place the whole eggplants in the pot and cover with room-temperature water.
Bring the water to a boil. Cover the pot and cook the eggplants 10 minutes, until tender but not mushy.
Carefully lift the eggplants out. Drain them in a colander and set them on a platter to cool.
While the eggplants are cooling, fry the onions and halved cherry tomatoes in the olive oil until the onions are wilted and the tomatoes are soft and wrinkled. Add the chopped garlic and cook 1 more minute. Remove the skillet from the heat.
Slice each eggplant in half horizontally, leaving the stem on.
With a spoon, remove the flesh from the eggplants.
Place the eggplant shells on a baking tray lined with parchment paper.
Chop the flesh and add it to the skillet with the onions and tomatoes.
Put the skillet back on medium heat and stir the vegetables. Add the cheese, chopped basil and salt and pepper to taste. If using a salty feta, you may not need to add much salt.
Cook and stir another few minutes, just enough to mix everything.
Fill the eggplant halves with the eggplant mixture. Pile it up.
Sprinkle each eggplant half with pine nuts.
Drizzle a little more olive oil over the filling.
Bake for 20 minutes.
Serve hot, and enjoy!
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Dahr Jamail | In the Midst of Worldwide Water Scarcity, an Artist Reminds Us, "We Are Water"

Monday, March 19, 2018

By Dahr JamailTruthout | Report
Installing Desert Fountain at the Albuquerque Museum. (Photo: Basia Irland)Installing "Desert Fountain" at the Albuquerque Museum. (Photo: Basia Irland)As a journalist and author covering anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD), when I write about what is happening in the liquid realms of the biosphere, my focus tends to be on how rapidly certain parts of the cryosphere are melting. Additionally, sea level rise, thermal expansion of the oceans, floods and droughts are what tend to make it into my Climate Disruption Dispatches and my book.
Hence, I, like most of us, tend to overlook the most blatantly obvious place where water is present ... my own body.
But when I interviewed Fulbright Scholar, author, poet, sculptor and installation artist Basia Irland, she began her observations about water in exactly this location: our interior physical worlds.
"One cannot discuss water without first emphasizing interconnections," Irland explained to Truthout.
Irland blogs for National Geographic about various rivers, writing each post from the perspective of the river itself. She sees human bodies as bodies of water, too.
"We are water," she said in our interview. "Our bodies house streams: lymph, bile, sweat, blood, mucus, urine. Water enters, circulates, leaves -- individualized hydrologic cycles. Each of us is a walking river, sloshing down the hallway with damp innards held together by a paper-thin epidermis."

I, like most of us, tend to overlook the most blatantly obvious place where water is present ... my own body.

Irland, along with lecturing and exhibiting extensively, is professor emerita at University of New Mexico, where she founded the school's Art and Ecology Program. She also works with scholars from diverse disciplines building rainwater harvesting systems; connects communities along the entire length of rivers and fosters dialogue among them; films water documentaries; sculpts hand-carved ice books embedded with native riparian seeds for river restoration projects; and creates waterborne disease projects around the world to heighten awareness.
Irland reminds us that cycles of moisture connect us across distance and time. She points to Henry David Thoreau, who described laying down his book and going to the well for water. There he met an imaginary man drawing water for a Brahmin priest. Thoreau remarks how "our buckets, as it were, grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges."

The same water the dinosaurs drank circulates in our bodies. The artist's wet breath mixes with moisture exhaled by aspen trees, river otters, blue herons and ravens.

Another way to view this bond comes from theoretical high-energy physicist and author Fritjof Capra, who has written about the basic oneness of the universe as a central characteristic of both modern physics and the mystical experience. He writes in The Tao of Physics, " ... the constituents of matter and the basic phenomena involving them are all interconnected, interrelated, and interdependent; that they cannot be understood as isolated entities, but only as integrated parts of the whole."
For Irland, the hydrologic cycle is a perfect example of this inherent interconnectivity.
"Clouds gather overhead, conferring about how soon to release their moisture," she said. "Slow, steady rain builds to a crescendo. Winds blow. Temperatures drop. Snow accumulates. Months pass, and the frozen elements melt, trickling toward a river, flowing out to sea, eventually evaporating to re-form the cloud committee, and the hydrologic cycle continues its primeval rhythms, as it has for eons. The same water the dinosaurs drank circulates in our bodies. The artist's wet breath mixes with moisture exhaled by aspen trees, river otters, blue herons and ravens."

The Magic of Water

Earth's total water supply -- the same supply that was here 3 billion years ago -- remains relatively constant. Irland explained that it has been recycled over and over through evaporation, condensation and precipitation, yet gets redistributed, causing floods in certain regions, and drought in others. She notes that nature's vast cycles are thousands and millions of years in duration, whereas our human cycles are relatively brief and short-sighted. We often upset the equilibrium in a water system.
"In our hubris, we build houses in a floodplain and then get angry at a river for doing what it does naturally, which is to flood," she said. "Our response is to channelize the river, dam it, straighten it, make it behave as we wish it would. We try and dominate the waters of the world, but, ah-ha, nature always gets the last laugh."
As an example, she pointed to how California has suffered a long drought, and then, at least temporarily, the rains returned, causing rivers to crest their banks and dams to reach a breaking point.

We try and dominate the waters of the world, but ... nature always gets the last laugh.

Meanwhile, we cannot survive without water. While a human might carry on for three to four weeks without food, most of us would be gone in just a few days without water.
The greatest civilizations in history were nurtured by rivers, from the Tigris and Euphrates in what is now Iraq, to the Indus in Pakistan, to the Yangtse and Yellow Rivers in China, to the Nile of Egypt.
Phillip Ball, in his book H2O: A Biography of Water, wrote, "The fundamental nature of this dependence on water is reflected linguistically in Persian, in which the first word of the dictionary is ab, meaning 'water.'  Herein lies the root of the word 'abode'.... Quite literally, water constitutes the beginning of civilization."
When I asked Irland about the role of water in why humans are here, she replied,
"I will simply quote one of my favorite authors, Loren Eiseley: 'If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.'"

Dehydrated Life

Hydrogrid. Carved wooden book coated with earth. The graph depicts stream flow on a specific date in Boulder Creek, Colorado. This line, similar to a heartbeat, can sometimes flatline as a stream dries up and dies. (Photo: Basia Irland)"Hydrogrid." Carved wooden book coated with earth. The graph depicts stream flow on a specific date in Boulder Creek, Colorado. This line, similar to a heartbeat, can sometimes flatline as a stream dries up and dies. (Photo: Basia Irland)
"In the desert, water in any amount is a tincture, so holy that it will burn through your heart when you see it." —Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water
If there is magic in water, there is also significant danger in its disappearance. Water scarcity is projected to affect at least 40 percent of the global population by 2030, according to the World Bank.
Drought plays a central role in Irland's work.
"I am fascinated by the notion of anhydrobiosis, which is essentially dehydrated life," Irland explained. "Certain aquatic desert organisms cope with very long periods of drought, even up to a hundred years, by shriveling up until there is no water left in them."
In so doing, their internal structures become crystalline. They become virtually dead -- but can come back to life whenever a small amount of moisture falls on their bodies. This phenomenon has been compared to long-dormant seeds that, when finally planted in moist soil, begin to sprout.
"Oh, that we humans could do the same," Irland said. "Drought, then, would not have the dire consequences on us. Dehydration, death and drought go together."
She noted how in literature, drought is often used as a symbol of death, such as in T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" and in John Steinbeck's book The Grapes of Wrath.
Irland points out that storing and utilizing moisture that has fallen from the sky is an ancient tradition that is gaining renewed respect during this millennium in various locations around the globe. Collection systems dating back 4,000 years have been found in the Negev Desert of Israel. Rainwater harvesting entails the capture, diversion and/or storage of rain for irrigation or personal uses such as cleaning, or as a possible source of potable water.
"The projects I create redirect water from the roof through gravity-fed methods for xeriscape (low-water-use) gardens," Irland explained. "Most of New Mexico, where I live, only receives about eight to ten inches of rain per year, and the groundwater levels have dramatically declined in some areas."
Thus, the state's rivers are running low because of excessive withdrawals that have depleted connected aquifers.
Some years the Río Grande becomes a river of sand, with all the upstream water being diverted and overused. This year, in 2017, it is flowing at the highest rate in decades due to record amounts of snowmelt coming from the upper mountain ranges. (Photo: Basia Irland)Some years the Río Grande becomes a river of sand, with all the upstream water being diverted and overused. In 2017, it was flowing at the highest rate in decades due to record amounts of snowmelt coming from the upper mountain ranges. (Photo: Basia Irland)
Irland discussed the need to utilize harvested precipitation both for humans and plants and reminded us that any household anywhere can collect water simply by placing a large container underneath a gutter downspout.
"Rainwater harvesting methods are not widespread in America, but in some countries, such as Australia and the Middle East, rain collection is common," she said. "Sometimes with our modern technology, a hesitancy to revert to traditional ways exists, even though time-tested methods can provide adequate solutions."
Irland believes that as the global water crisis continues to worsen, if every new building were designed to redirect runoff toward gardens, and existing structures were retrofitted with simple rain catchment systems, we could conserve a lot of moisture.

The mountain glaciers that give birth to streams and creeks are drastically receding, and a lot of them will disappear altogether.

However, Irland is quick to add that it is important to design harvest systems that only momentarily hold the runoff, or redirect it, allowing the moisture to seep into the ground, where it will eventually make it back to the river system via shallow groundwater. In this way, the natural cycle of water is respected.

Sky Juice

Irland is also fascinated by the way languages from diverse cultures shed light on what water means to them.
One example she gives is how on certain Caribbean islands, rain is called "sky juice."
"Just thinking about this phrase helps us look at rain in a new way," she said. "People's connection to the language of their place is important, so some of my rainwater project sites incorporate indigenous and international words for water."
For her, these words are one way to ground each of us in the reality that water is a worldwide necessity, and its degradation, scarcity, or overabundance, as in the case of floods and tsunamis, can be problematic or disastrous for us all, wherever we live.
Conservation by way of the installation and use of low-flow showers and toilets, taking fewer showers, flushing only when necessary and turning off the tap when we brush our teeth are tactics that Irland hopes everyone will employ. Others include designing region-appropriate landscaping and gardening, and education via water fairs for communities, with a focus on children, whom she points out, are "the next generation to care for the waters of the world."
In this way, according to Irland, people can become "intimately familiar with bodies of water in [their] area, and practice reverence and respect for all who share these waters."
She pointed to many examples of water conservation that one can utilize. Vacuum toilets, similar to the ones in airplanes, use little water: wastes are kept in tanks and composted to produce bio-gas for fuel. Instead of paving our ground with impervious cement, porous roads and parking lots allow rainwater to recharge the aquifer. And because water is used in manufacturing consumer products, purchasing only what is necessary cuts down on water consumption.
You can use the Waterfootprintcalculator.org to see how much water is used in your sandwich, your clothes, or your gadgets.

Knowledge about and reverence for water has never been as important as it is today.

Irland has produced several projects that relate directly to drought. One of her short video pieces is entitled "Book of Drought: A Water Memory." The liner notes for the CD cover read: "In many places around the world the memory of water is more tangible than the physicality of water itself. The implications of this are enormous, including a loss of crops, lack of clean water, and a huge increase in environmental refugees."
Book of Drought. Carved wooden book, dried mud, matte medium. (Photo: Basia Irland)"Book of Drought." Carved wooden book, dried mud, matte medium. (Photo: Basia Irland)
The video begins with a quote from "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot. Next, the camera pans across mud cracks on the surface of an open sculptural book and we hear: "This book is constructed of parched field notes dry with dehydrated paragraphs preserving an arid script charting fluctuating droughts through past, present and future generations. The pages are chapped, brittle and sunbaked."
Then the narrator goes on to list the devastating loss of crops across large swatches of Australia, Eastern Cuba, Nicaragua, the American Southwest, the Middle East, Central Africa, Asia and Haiti. Amazingly, 28,000 of China's more than 50,000 rivers have gone dry due to over consumption. With ACD, the mountain glaciers that give birth to streams and creeks are drastically receding, and a lot of them will disappear altogether.
"Can we imagine a world with no rivers?" Irland asked.

A Biographer of Water

"Water needs many biographers, because in truth it is not a personality but more like a culture to itself, with laws, arts and a unique history and geography." —Philip Ball, H2O: A Biography of Water
Irland has addressed drought through her art in many ways. For example, she has constructed small-scale rainwater harvesting systems. She was commissioned by the Albuquerque Museum to create a fountain, but she refused because it would have required using potable ground water. After a month, she called the museum director back and asked if she could put a stock tank on the roof of the museum. Much to her surprise, he said yes. The water flows from the tank to a set of cast bronze arms, modeled after her own arms, so the water drips from one hand to the next and then outside the museum to water plants. The only time this fountain works is when there has been moisture, thereby making the ecosystem where she lives visible. (See lead photo)
In another project, the University of New Mexico Student Union Building (SUB) was in the initial stages of being renovated. Irland met with the architect and asked him where the rain would be collected to feed xeric plants (plants whose habitat is very dry) on campus.
He told her they had not thought of this aspect of the building, and that all the roof water would automatically go into a storm drain system.
"We located a place at the northwest corner of the SUB where a drain could be installed on the roof to funnel any precipitation down to the ground level, thus watering a small garden," she explained. "This water exits into an underground drip hose. If there is too much rain, it circumambulates the garden in a gravel swale, and then enters a drain that goes directly to the river."
Thus, the pattern reminds people of the hydrologic cycle: Water comes down as rain, is utilized to feed the plants, flows to the river and on to the sea, evaporates to form clouds, and then the cycle begins again. An etched tile plaque at the site reads: "Harvested on the roof, scarce rainfall flows to a subterranean drip system. Overflow circles the xeric fragrance garden in a stone swale, and then drains to the Río Grande."
Surrounding the garden is a wall of ceramic tiles with words for "water" in 63 languages, such as Wai, Nero, Agua, Eau, Pani, Amanzi, Paahu, Maji, Maille, Uisge, Akvo, Vann, Thuk, Bishan, Voda, Su.
In 2008 US hydrologists were warning that drought across the American Southwest had already become a "quasi-permanent condition." By then, there was already a 50 percent chance that Lake Mead, the water supply to what amounts to the fifth-largest economy in the world (when you combine the economies of California, Nevada and Arizona), could run dry by 2021.
And it's happening across the world as ACD and human development progress. Rivers are drying up. A 2009 study looking at stream flows on 925 of the world's largest rivers from 1948 to 2004 found that twice as many of them were falling as rising. "During the life span of the study, fresh water discharge into the Pacific Ocean fell by about 6 percent, or roughly the annual volume of the Mississippi," it reported, according to the Guardian.
Knowledge about and reverence for water has never been as important as it is today.
Irland's art beautifully weaves in the critical threads of conservation and education, along with her reverence for water and its role in life and on Earth. Her work has set her apart as one of the liquid realm's most eloquent biographers.
Perhaps each of us can contribute to the biography of water, becoming more conscious of its significance -- and thereby dedicating ourselves to its conservation.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

DAHR JAMAIL

Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.
His third book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co-written with William Rivers Pitt, is available now on Amazon.
Dahr Jamail is also the author of the book, The End of Ice, forthcoming from The New Press. He lives and works in Washington State.
For his Truthout work on climate change and militarism, Dahr Jamail is a 2018 winner of the Izzy Award for excellence in independent journalism.
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We calculated how much money trees save for your city

 
Megacities are on the rise. There are currently 47 such areas around the globe, each housing more than 10 million residents.
More than half the global population now lives in urban areas, comprising about 3 percent of the Earth. The ecological footprint of this growth is vast and there’s far more that can be done to improve life for urban residents around the world.
When it comes to natural spaces, trees are keystone species in the urban ecosystem, providing a number of services that benefit people. My research team has calculated just how much a tree matters for many urban areas, particularly megacities. Trees clean the air and water, reduce stormwater floods, improve building energy use and mitigate climate change, among other things.
For every dollar invested in planting, cities see an average US$2.25 returnon their investment each year.

Measuring trees

Our team, led by Dr. David Nowak of the USDA Forest Service and Scott Maco of Davey Institute, develops the tree benefits software i-Tree Tools.
These tools simulate the relationship between trees and ecosystem services they provide. These services can include food, clean air and water, climate and flood control, pollination, recreation and noise damping. We currently don’t simulate many services, so our calculations actually underestimate the value of urban trees.
Our software can simulate how a tree’s structure – such as height, canopy size and leaf area – affects the services it provides. It can estimate how trees will reduce water flooding; or explore how trees will affect air quality, building energy use and air pollution levels in their community. It can also allow users to inventory trees in their own area.
Our systematic aerial surveys of 35 megacities suggest that 20 percent of the average megacity’s urban core is covered by forest canopy. But this can vary greatly. Trees cover just 1 percent of Lima, Peru, versus 36 percent in New York City.
We wanted to determine how much trees contribute to human well-being in the places where humans are most concentrated, and nature perhaps most distant. In addition, we wanted to calculate how many additional trees could be planted in each megacity to improve the quality of life.

How tree density affects a city

We looked in detail at 10 megacities around the world, including Beijing, Cairo, Mexico City, Los Angeles and London. These megacities are distributed across five continents and represent different natural habitats. Cairo was the smallest, at 1173 square kilometers, while Tokyo measured in at a whopping 18,720.
For most cities, we looked at Google Maps aerial imagery, randomly selecting 500 points and classifying each as tree canopy, grass, shrub and so on.
We calculated that tree cover was linked to significant cost savings. Each square kilometer saved about $0.93 million in air pollution health care costs, $20,000 by capturing water runoff, and $478,000 in building energy heating and cooling savings.
What’s more, the median annual value of carbon dioxide sequestered by megacity tree cover was $7.9 million. That comes out to about $17,000 per square kilometer. The total CO2 stored was valued at $242 million, using a measure called the social cost of carbon.
The sum of all annual services provided by the megacity trees had a median annual value of $505 million. That provides a median value of $967,000 per square kilometer of tree cover.

Trees in your city

An entire urban forest can provide services for a good life.
All of the cities we studied had the potential to add additional trees, with about 18 percent of the metropolitan area on average available. Potential spots included areas with sidewalks, parking lots and plaza areas. The tree’s canopy could extend above the human-occupied area, with the trunk positioned to allow for pedestrian passage or parking.
Want to conserve forests and plant more trees in your area? Everyone can take action. City and regional planners can continue to incorporate the planning for urban forests. Those who are elected to office can continue to share a vision that the urban forest is an important part of the community, and they can advocate and support groups that are looking to increase it.
Individuals who cannot plant a tree might add a potted shrub, which is smaller than a tree but has a leafy canopy that can contribute similar benefits. For the property owner wanting to take charge, our i-Tree software can assist with selecting a tree type and location. A local arborist or urban forester could also help.
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Clear signs of global warming will hit poorer countries first

Quirin Schiermeier,20 APRIL 2018
New climate-inequality tool quantifies how quickly the weather will veer beyond normal in different regions.
Floording in Bangladesh
Flooding in Bangladesh could become more common as global temperatures rise.Credit: Mamunur Rashid/NurPhoto/Getty
Nations such as Bangladesh and Egypt have long known that they will suffer more from climate change than will richer countries, but now researchers have devised a stark way to quantify the inequalities of future threats.
A map of "equivalent impacts", revealed at the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) this month in Vienna, shows that global temperatures would have to rise by a whopping 3 °C before most people in wealthy nations would feel departures from familiar climate conditions equal to those that residents of poorer nations will suffer under moderate warming.
The Paris climate agreement, adopted by 195 countries in 2015, aims to limit the rise in global mean temperature to 1.5–2 °C above pre-industrial levels. The world has already warmed by one degree or so — and since 1900, the mean number of record-dry and record-wet months each year has also increased.
But the effects of global warming are uneven, and poor regions in the tropics and subtropics are thought to be most vulnerable, for several reasons. They have limited financial resources with which to prepare for shifts in temperature and precipitation, and they are expected to face bigger changes in climate than countries in the mid-latitudes. Researchers have had difficulty quantifying those inequalities because the impacts of climate change depend on many factors, such as future economic growth and technological progress, which are hard to forecast.
Physical effects
Luke Harrington, a climate researcher at the University of Oxford, UK, took a different approach by developing the concept of ‘equivalent impacts’, which doesn’t specify societal consequences. Instead, it focuses on quantifying the uneven distribution of extreme weather around the globe.
Harrington looked at changing patterns of extreme daily heat and rainfall in global climate projections based on fast-rising greenhouse-gas emissions. He then determined how much warming was required for a clear climate-change signal — such as extreme temperatures or precipitation — to emerge from the ‘noise’ of natural climate variability at each spot on the globe. The resulting maps show how quickly regional changes in weather extremes will manifest in response to different levels of global warming.
“I wanted to wrap numbers around the unevenness of impacts,” he says. “Climate-mitigation policies focus on a global threshold — but global mean temperature isn’t a very meaningful metric to assess what climate change might mean in specific parts of the world.”
For changes in regional heat extremes, the pattern is particularly stark. Africa, large parts of India and most of South America are likely to experience changes clearly attributable to climate warming early on, after a 1.5-degree increase in global temperatures. But mid-latitude regions — where most greenhouse gases are produced — won’t see such pronounced changes until the global temperature rise hits 3 degrees or so.
Global inequalities
“This is an elegant way to tie global climate targets and regional impacts,” says Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, who was not involved in the study. But he says that the model would need to be adapted to include metrics of specific climate-change impacts, such as those on human health and food security, for it to be useful for planning adaptation efforts or for informing international climate-finance programmes. Some proposed schemes would compensate poor countries for climate-change-related harm.
The equivalent-impacts index, says Fischer, could help quantify how climate change will affect different countries, because it focuses on identifying when they will start to face weather outside their natural variability.
"Our study provides a framework," say Harrington. “We want to know what information others care about most, then we can start to look at metrics of more specific climate impacts.”
Nature 556, 415-416 (2018)

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What's solar-powered, green, and eats climate pollution for breakfast?

Environmental Defense Fund
What’s solar-powered, green, and eats climate pollution for breakfast?
Trees, of course!

Celebrate Arbor Day by becoming an Angel Investor in EDF’s MethaneSAT before tonight’s midnight deadline.

Climate change is leaving trees behind—literally.


A less than 2 degree Celsius increase in global average temperature will shift the suitable ranges of our North American tree species northward at a rate of two miles per year—and unlike people and animals, trees can’t just pick up and move.

More than 129 million trees have died in California alone since 2014, thanks to warmer, drier conditions that have sparked more wildfires and exploded populations of bark beetles that attack and kill stressed trees.

The fastest, cheapest thing we can do right now to fight climate change is to slash industrial methane pollution.

A 45% reduction in methane pollution from the global oil and gas industry by 2025 would deliver the same climate benefits over 20 years as closing 1 in 3 of the world’s coal-fired power plants.

That’s why we’re building a satellite to measure methane emissions from man-made sources virtually anywhere on Earth, starting with the oil and gas industry.

By providing reliable, fully transparent data on a worldwide scale, MethaneSAT will help transform a serious climate threat into a crucial opportunity.

In honor of our anticipated 2021 launch date, we’re seeking 2,021 Angel Investors to donate $5 or more by midnight tonight to get MethaneSAT off the ground.

Together, we can begin to reverse the global trend of rising temperatures that is putting us and the trees which clean our air at risk.

Thank you for being a part this historic undertaking,

Emily Stevenson
Manager, Online Membership
Donate today
P.S. As a MethaneSAT Angel Investor, you’ll receive a limited-edition, numbered Angel Investor certificate suitable for framing. As we get closer to our launch date, you’ll also be invited to attend interactive webinars and conference calls with EDF staff who will provide updates on your donation at work. Donate to MethaneSAT before midnight tonight to secure your Angel Investor status. 
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