May 2021: 3 Significant environmental news I want to share

Most Significantly, on Apr 3, 2021, The Economist wrote that Carbon dioxide is not the only cause of global warming. About a quarter of the effect is a consequence of methane. And the methane problem looks a lot more tractable in the short term than does the carbon dioxide one.

Over the 20 years after its emission, a tonne of methane causes 86 times more warming than does a tonne of CO2. Also, it does not hang around. It has a half-life in the atmosphere of about a decade, so what is released soon vanishes. By contrast, CO2 lingers for hundreds, or even thousands, of years.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change envisages a 35% drop in methane emissions below 2010 levels by 2050. The IEA's numbers suggest that 14% of this is possible in the oil and gas sector alone, at no net cost.

SCIENCEFOCUS.COM, published on Apr 30, 2021, Scientists have found that only 43 percent of the cells that make up our physical form are human; the majority of what counts as “us” comprises bacteria, fungi, and other microbes. For every human gene in our bodies, there are 360 microbial genes. It’s enough to inspire an identity crisis. Your body isn’t just you.

Ask someone what a fungus eats, and perhaps they’ll guess manure, or rotting fruit, or houses, each of which counts as a correct answer. Considering what a wide variety of things fungi consume or can eat, it’s hard to guess wrong. But ask a stranger how fungi eat, and it’s a good bet you’ll stump them.

Yet many details of fungal biology, their evolutionary history, and their ecological roles in soils, plants, and the human remain a mystery.

And, PHYS.ORG, printed on May 19, 2021, A new study reveals far greater extinctions among the snakes and lizards of Guadeloupe following European colonization than previously believed. The team studied an extraordinary 43,000 individual bone remains from fossil and archaeological assemblages on six islands, ultimately revealing that 50% to 70% of Guadeloupe's squamate species went extinct after the arrival of European colonialists.

This study shows that Indigenous populations co-existed with the islands' snakes and lizards for thousands of years. The biodiversity of Guadeloupe's snakes and lizards increased during the long history of Indigenous habitation with no recorded extinctions. Yet the Guadeloupe data clearly show that Indigenous lifeways were supportive of snake and lizard biodiversity.