Unfortunately for facts everywhere, your relatives are not living in separate universes. The reason a lot of people now disagree about reality is because the internet and TV news are full of biased information, conspiracy theories, and flat-out lies, and it is getting harder and harder to tell them from the facts.

So, assuming you want all of us to live in one shared reality, how can you tell the difference between facts, lies, biased information, and conspiracy theories?

First, let’s define what they are.

Facts

Facts are statements of information that describe something that happened, or that describe something that happens over and over so regularly that you can depend on it happening again. For example, it is a fact that John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence. Anyone can see his signature on the document and a bunch of witnesses watched him sign it and they left records. It is also a fact that cardinals (the birds, not the baseball players) eat seeds. Anyone with a birdfeeder can see they do this and can depend on the cardinals coming back to the feeder to eat again, as long as the feeder is full of seeds.

Lies

Everyone knows what a lie is. It is a statement of made-up information that the speaker knows is false but tries to convince you is true. People typically lie to:

• Get out of trouble.

• Get you to do something that benefits the liar, but probably doesn’t benefit you.

• Make you think the liar is cooler or more important than they actually are.

• Mess with your mind because they think that is fun.

Biased Information

Biased information is when someone shares a few handpicked facts but leaves crucial facts out that you need to get the whole story. For example, let’s say that, for some bizarre reason, I decided I wanted to get everyone to hate dogs. So, I started a 24-hour news channel where I only reported stories of dogs being bad. My channel shows videos of dogs biting people, dogs chewing holes through walls, and dogs pooping all over the place, followed by commentators implying or telling you that dogs are pure evil. My channel, called CAT News (“CAT” stands for “Canines Are Terrible”), never reported any of the stories of dogs excitedly greeting their family every time they came home, or dogs making people laugh by chasing their tail, or any of the other ways that dogs make people’s lives better. That would be biased information because CAT News is only showing you the part of the picture that makes you hate dogs.

News sources, politicians, and people you know who give you biased information typically do so because:

• They really believe something is true and they don’t want you to hear any facts that might make you (or them) realize their belief might not be true.

• Like liars, they are hiding that they, or someone they are in cahoots with, is doing something wrong.

• Also like liars, they want you to believe something that will benefit them in some way and don’t want you to realize it might not benefit you.

• They realize that most people don’t want to know how complicated the world is, so they tell their audience only the things their audience wants to hear and never say anything that challenges their audience’s worldview. This makes their audience more likely to like the source of biased information, because the source doesn’t make them feel uncomfortable. Then, hopefully, the audience will vote for the source of biased information (if the source is a politician) or stick around to watch the commercials (if the source is a 24/7 cable news channel).

Conspiracy Theories

Like lies, conspiracy theories are made-up stories. Unlike liars, the people who spread conspiracy theories believe that the made-up things that they are telling you are true. Conspiracy theories tend to be much more elaborate than your average lie because they’re mainly an attempt to explain something that is happening in the world for those people who don’t want to believe the real explanation.

Conspiracy theories are not that hard to recognize if you know what to look for. Here’s some things that will help you identify them.

Conspiracy theories tell you that something everyone thinks is true is actually not true.

For example, we think the Earth is round, but conspiracy theory believers say it’s flat. Or we think beloved actor Tom Hanks is a nice human being, but conspiracy theory believers say he’s actually an evil vampire.

Conspiracy theories tend to blame everything on the actions of secretive evil groups.

For example, according to some conspiracy theories, the Illuminati is a secretive evil group who, apparently, have been running the world for centuries without any of us knowing about it.

Not all conspiracy theory secret evil groups have fun names like the Illuminati. Some of them are groups of people everyone has heard of. We just didn’t know they are secretly doing evil. For example, there are the scientists who conspiracy theorists say are secretly evil and making up climate change for fun and profit. (For a debunking of what conspiracy theorists say about climate change, read this blogpost that I wrote.)

Conspiracy theories are usually based on at least a couple of real facts, while conveniently ignoring all the other facts that show the conspiracy theory is ridiculous.

For example, conspiracy theorists who claim that vaccines cause autism will point to facts like how the rise in the number of people who have been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum coincides with the increased use of vaccines, or how the drug thalidomide that was used in the 1950s was proven to cause serious birth defects, which shows that medical products can have devastatingly harmful side effects. For these conspiracy theorists, these two actual facts prove that all vaccines must be bad.

But they completely ignore or deny other facts like:

• The reason there have been so many autism spectrum diagnoses in the last 30 years is because, before the 1990s, autism was not recognized as having a spectrum of conditions, and so before then, most doctors did not know how to recognize when a child had autism.

• Thalidomide was a drug that was not properly tested in the 1950s, while today all vaccines have to be rigorously tested before being released to the public.

• Numerous scientific studies show no link between vaccines and autism.

• Vaccines have saved millions of lives.

Conspiracy theorists tend to like secret codes.

The proof for some conspiracy theories is the result of someone decoding a secret message. These secret messages may be found by looking at random numbers found in a document, by symbolic images in paintings, by writing down the 3rd letter of every other word in a document, or some other convoluted method. For example, let’s say the secret code is uncovered by writing down the 3rd letter of every word in the sentence: “Now, log all your hours, please, you slacking Instagram star.” The secret code letters end up being “wgluuauasa.” That of course means nothing. But then the conspiracy theorist decides that those letters actually stand for other letters. They come up with another code that shows that “wgluuauasa” is actually two words “wgluu auasa,” which stand for “smell alpaca.” And that obviously means the Illuminati is planning to make us all smell like alpacas! Thank goodness we figured out the secret code.

A recent real example of using secret codes to prove a conspiracy theory comes from the most ridiculous conspiracy theory I’ve heard of so far, the QAnon conspiracy theory. Basically, this theory says that a bunch of well-known politicians and Hollywood celebrities are all members of a satanic cult who eat children for energy because cheeseburgers and Twix bars just don’t do it for them. The theory also says that the only person currently fighting these people is Donald Trump. Some of the people who believe this theory say Trump was communicating about the conspiracy to the public by purposely misspelling words in his Tweets. The misspelled words are actually a secret code (see the footnote below for a source for this). For example, a famous misspelled word in a Trump tweet is “covfefe.” What does “covfefe” mean? It means “smell alpaca” (Just kidding. What “covfefe” really means is Donald Trump did not proofread his tweets before he posted them.).

Of course, if the QAnon conspiracy was really real, Trump could have just told everyone all the horrible things the celebrity vampires were doing and then we would all know about it and could work together to stop them (because who in their right mind wants vampires running our country and winning Oscars?), but that would spoil all the conspiracy theory fun (I’ll explain the “fun” part a little later in this blog post). 

Conspiracy theories act like it is possible for a small group of humans to have a perfectly thought-out and executed plan that changes the entire world. And also that all those people are capable of keeping a secret.

For conspiracy theories to work, the secretive evil groups that are in charge have to be amazingly competent. They have to come up with a plan that foresees every obstacle and complication and includes steps to overcome each of these problems, and then everyone on the team from the leaders to the janitors has to perfectly execute the plan. All conspiracy team members also have to be really good at keeping secrets so that no one outside the group ever learns about the conspiracy.

Anyone who has ever worked with an actual group of people knows its really hard for a group of people to completely agree on anything, much less come up with a plan that predicts everything random chance throws their way. It’s also really hard to get a group of people to keep a secret (or even one person, for that matter). A good indication that something is a conspiracy theory is that it’s obvious that it has to be run by superhumans in orders to work.

So, conspiracy theories are ridiculous in more way than one. This is not to say that conspiracies do not happen.

They do. For example, in the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon secretly had his cronies break into the Watergate Apartment building to steal documents they hoped to use to damage the Democratic party. Nixon’s team did such a crummy job of it, though, that everyone knew about the conspiracy within a couple years. The good news for us about real conspiracies is that humans are too imperfect to be able to pull them off for very long without the rest of us finding out

If conspiracy theories are so obviously ridiculous, why do so many people believe in them?

Here are a couple thoughts on that.

Conspiracy theories are fun.

As someone who has read more than his share of superhero comics, I get some of the appeal of conspiracy theories. The QAnon conspiracy and the Illuminati definitely have something in common with the band of supervillains in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants secretly mind-controlling Jean Grey so they can destroy the X-Men and then take over the universe. Superhero stories and conspiracy theories both create fantastical worlds of good vs. evil, where the good (in a conspiracy theory’s case, the good are the people who believe in the conspiracy theory) fight the evil supervillains to save the world. Conspiracy theory people think that the simple worlds that exist in comic books and movies exist in the real world too, except they don’t. It’s much more complicated in the real world.

Conspiracy theories give you someone else to blame for your problems.

For almost every human on the planet, life is simultaneously an obstacle course, a maze, and a competition. It’s hard for most people to reach their dreams and that can make people feel bad about themselves. No one likes to feel bad. Conspiracy theories give people the opportunity to believe that “The reason I never got on American Idol is because the government faked the Moon landing.” If you can convince yourself of something like that, you no longer have to feel like your life situation is your fault.

Conspiracy theories also make people feel justified in hating the people they already hate. A lot of people hate other groups of people for looking different or having different opinions from the haters. People don’t want to feel bad about their unjustified hatred, though. Conspiracy theories tell believers that the people they hate are pure evil. This allows conspiracy theory believers to enjoy their hatred guilt-free.

Conspiracy theories even make believers feel superior to other people. “I may not be able to get a job or a date, but at least I know the government is spreading mind-control drugs through the contrails of commercial jets. That makes me smarter than everyone else.” Believing nonsense is another way to build self-esteem without too much effort.

Ultimately, conspiracy theories fulfill some basic human needs.

Conspiracy theories make believers feel like they matter, which is harder and harder to do when each of us is one drop in an ocean of about 8 billion people.  Conspiracy theories also make people feel there is a way to change the world that will make it a better place. In a way, conspiracy theories are kind of hopeful, because you get to believe that, if we just get rid of the Illuminati, the world will be great!

Why should we even worry about conspiracy theories? Shouldn’t we just get to believe whatever we want to believe?

Conspiracy theories are not true and the people who believe conspiracy theories are not living in reality. But, so what? Aren’t conspiracy theorists just harming themselves and no one else?

Unfortunately, no. These believers end up making decisions that harm everyone.

For example, there are a lot of people in the United States who believe conspiracy theories about Covid-19. Some think that the numbers of cases and deaths that have been reported are greatly exaggerated. Some think the entire thing is a hoax and that, apparently, all the world’s governments, medical professionals, and the majority of its people have conspired together to pretend that a global pandemic is killing a lot of people all over the world, because we all have nothing better to do. Because these American conspiracy theorists do not believe that Covid-19 is a disease to be taken seriously, they refused to take the basic precautions that prevent the further spread of Covid, like wearing a piece of cloth over their nose and mouth when they’re grocery shopping or getting a vaccine that would help end the pandemic. The result has been that the United States had almost 600,000 people die from Covid in one year. So much needless suffering could have been prevented if more people believed that experts have been telling the truth about the pandemic.

So, knowing the difference between facts and nonsense can be a matter of life and death. But even when it’s not a matter of life or death, it’s still important. If we don’t all agree on the facts, we can’t do anything as a society to improve things. We waste all of our time arguing whether a problem exists, rather than working on solutions to fix the problem.

So how can we keep people from believing lies, biased information, and conspiracy theories?

Unfortunately, it won’t be easy. It would probably require rebuilding our society into one that values all people, so everyone feels like they matter. We would also need to help every person acquire the courage, self-respect, honesty, and knowledge to be able to face reality. Everyone would also need to learn how to accept that the world is complicated, and that bad things can happen to people for no good reason, so we don’t have such a desperate need to blame other people for our problems. You and I alone aren’t going to be able to pull any of that off, so what can individuals do to detect and avoid lies, biased information, and conspiracy theories?

It’s not an exact science, but here is what I do.

Don’t get your news from TV news channels or TV news shows that have commercials.

This may sound like a surprising suggestion. After all, TV is the way most Americans (or at least most older Americans) get their news. But hear me out. The main purpose of most TV news is not to tell you the news. It is to get you to watch the commercials, because that is how the TV channel make its money. TV news doesn’t want to tell you anything which might be boring or hard to understand, because you might turn to a different channel. Most of the big things happening in the world involve information and ideas that are outside our common knowledge, meaning we need to put some mental effort into understanding them. TV news avoids sharing that kind of complicated information because it’s not entertaining enough.  They are more likely to report how a bunch of bystanders feel about something that happened than they are to help us understand the context and nuances behind this news event.

TV news also tries to avoid making their audience feel uncomfortable (which is not the same thing as making people angry. TV news loves making people angry, because anger is exciting, and it keeps you watching). They don’t want to tell their audience things that might challenge the audience’s beliefs. Instead, they make sure their audience only hears things they agree with. For example, if most of the audience for a news channel believes that vaccines are bad, the news channel will be sure to never report anything that might show this belief is wrong.

This is not to say that TV news doesn’t ever report real news. They do. It’s just not worth wading through all the blather and one-sided views to get those snippets of accurate information.

Don’t get information from social media.

In the early 2000s, we didn’t have millions of people believing in conspiracy theories. That’s because Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, SnapChat, TikTok, Reddit, and other social media platforms didn’t exist yet to spread conspiracy theories around. Before social media, people who believed in conspiracy theories were like that bearded guy Murray on Stranger Things. There was about one conspiracy theory guy per town and pretty much nobody took them seriously (though real Murrays rarely helped save entire towns from inter-dimensional monsters). Then the internet came along, and all those lonely conspiracy theory guys found each other online and ganged up.  And then social media came along and made it easier for conspiracy guys to recruit other people to believe their wacky theories (for an explanation of how the algorithms of social media platforms favors conspiracy theories over accurate information, watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix).  People do share real news stories on social media, but, like TV news, you aren’t getting enough accurate or unbiased information there to make it worth your while to trust what is shared.

Be careful about which websites you read and which YouTube videos you watch.

The internet allows pretty much anyone to write anything they want on it anonymously. Unfortunately, a lot of the people writing on the internet have no idea what they are talking about it. The result is the internet is filled with wrong information. It’s basically about as trustworthy and as well-spelled as the graffiti in a public bathroom.

That last sentence is a bit of an exaggeration. There are trustworthy sites on the internet. To find them, you need to look at who made the website or the video first, as that will help you decide if you can trust it. I trust information from organizations that follow the traditional rules of accuracy and fairness. The websites and YouTube videos I look at are made by colleges and universities, scientists, nationally respected museums like the Smithsonian, government agencies like NASA, and respected magazines and newspapers like National Geographic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. These organizations base their reputations on sharing facts, so there is more at stake for them if they tell us something wrong. They’re not always perfect. They’re run by humans, so they do sometimes make mistakes and sometimes show bias in their reporting, but, overall, they are trustworthy.

Read more than one source of information.

Since even the most trustworthy news organization in the world can sometimes make mistakes and/or be biased, it’s a good idea to see how other news sources are reporting the topic. If there are differences in what they are saying, then you know that you may not be getting the entire story from one or both of them. The good news is, if one reporter makes a mistake or purposely misleads people, other reporters will figure it out and make sure the mistake is corrected. This ecosystem of truth keeps us from being lied to for too long (though, sometimes, the “too long” can take years). And it works, because the vast majority of human beings want to do the right thing (though, that gets complicated too because we don’t all agree what the “right things” are. Also, the same capacity for denial that exists within the human brain that allows people to believe that UFOs regularly abduct people and the government covers it up, also allows some people who do horrible things to believe they are doing the right thing).

Unfortunately, if your uncle believes the world is flat, climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic are hoaxes, and Tom Hanks eats children for breakfast, if you provide a synopsis of this blog post to him, there’s a good chance he will tell you that you are the one who has been lied to and/or brainwashed (because he really doesn’t want to come to terms with the fact that these things he believes are about as likely to be true as this story that I heard in high school that Mikey, this kid in a cereal commercial that was on TV when I was a kid, had blown up because he ate Pop-Rocks while drinking soda). But if more people who are reasonable do these things, it can prevent our society from further moving into the Land of Make-Believe.

I wanted to wrap-up with a memorable slogan, like “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute” or “Loose Lips Sink Ships”, that could remind everyone to seek facts and avoid misinformation. Unfortunately, these were the best I came up with:

• Demand facts, so truth doesn’t fall though the cracks.

• Spreading bunk means your brain has probably shrunk.

• Only turds repeat untruthful words.

I’ll leave it up to you if you ever dare utter one of these slogans to another human being or not.

If you would like to learn more about how to avoid misinformation and disinformation, here are some other places to check-out who are much less flippant than me (and some of them have teaching resources for educators):

• The New Literacy Project

• The Center for New Literacy

• Ithaca College’s Project Look Sharp

• Taft College Library Guide: Bias

• Science Friday: How to Spot a Conspiracy Theory

• The Open University: How to spot a conspiracy theory when you see one

(Also, here’s that footnote) So click here to see a clip from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah about people who say Trump’s misspelled tweets are a secret code about the QAnon conspiracy. Unfortunately, it’s not the most kid appropriate thing I’ve linked to on here.

We humans are diurnal animals, meaning we are mostly active during the day.

Both bats and humans have the same five senses, but, because we are active at different times, we don’t use them all the same way.

If someone throws a kickball at you in the daytime, only one of your five senses is going to prevent it from hitting you in the face. You can’t taste or smell how far away a kickball is. You can’t hear one coming toward you either. You may feel the kickball when it bounces off your head, but you won’t feel it before that happens.

We use our sense of sight to avoid hurtling kickballs. Our eyes work with our brain to turn light into pictures. This gives us a 3D map of what is around us.

If someone throws a kickball at you in the middle of the woods on a cloudy night, you won’t be able to see it coming. There is not enough light. No light, no sight.

If someone throws a kickball at a bat during the day, it will also use its sense of sight to tell how far away the ball is and get out of its way.

If someone throws a kickball at a bat at night, it won’t be able to see the kickball coming toward it either. They also can’t see without light. Unlike us, though, a bat will know to get out of the kickball’s way. This is because at night, bats get a 3D map of their surroundings using sound.

Like dolphins, bats “see” using echolocation. Echolocation allows animals to tell what is around them by listening to echoes. It works because sound travels from its source as invisible waves through the air.

Sound waves can travel through air, but they bounce off of anything that is solid. That is how you get an echo. If you’ve ever been in your school gym when your P.E. teacher wasn’t there and you started yelling something because you wanted to hear an echo (a popular and creative way to hear an echo of your voice is to yell the word “Echo!”), what happened was the sound waves that traveled out of your mouth bounced off the gym walls and then came back to your ears.

The echoes that bats hear are the sound of their own voices. The bats create these echoes by being really, really noisy all the time.

Here’s what bats sound like, kind of.

This video isn’t 100% how bats actually sound. One reason it’s a little misleading is because bats are really loud. They constantly make noise at about 120 to 160 decibels. That makes each bat about as loud as being in the front row at a Motorhead concert.

Bats are about as loud as these guys.

The reason that bats, unlike Motorhead, have never given you tinnitus is because bats make sounds at a higher frequency than we can hear (just like a dog whistle does). A bunch of bats could be flying over you each as loud as Lemmy Kilmister and you would have no idea. (The reason you could listen to bat sounds in the video above is because the sounds were slowed down to a frequency that is in our hearing range.)

Another reason bats are also able to do echolocation is because they have really big ears. The parts of their (and our) ears that stick out are basically like catcher’s mitts for sound. The bigger the outer ears, the more sound waves they catch.

Sound waves bounce off the outer ear into the inner ear, where they get turned into information the brain can hear. Bats have amazing brains when it comes to processing sound waves. Depending on how long it takes the sounds they make to bounce back to their ears, they can figure out where the objects are around them and create a 3D map of their surroundings. For example, they can use echoes tp tell where the tree branches are around them so they don’t fly into them.

Bats come out at night, because they are on a mission to find food. Most bats eat small insects like moths and mosquitoes. The reason bats don’t have deep voices like Barry White is because the deeper a sound is, the lower the frequency and the bigger the sound’s wavelength will be. If the sound wavelengths are too big, they are likely to go right around the tiny insects they are looking for.

Bats make high frequency sounds with tiny wavelengths because those wavelengths are guaranteed to hit a mosquito and echo back. When a bat is hunting, they make about ten high-pitched chirps a second. This is basically like radar, just seeing what is out there. When their brain hears echoes that sound like the body of a mosquito, the bat begins chirping at much faster rate, up to 200 chirps per second. The rapid chirps keep echoing off the mosquito allowing the bat to pinpoint exactly where the mosquito is. The bat can then grab and eat the mosquito in midair.

Bats freak some people out (that’s why Batman became Bat-man, instead of say, Hummingbird-man), but they are actually amazing animals with incredible adaptations. They’re an animal that should become your new best friend. Unless, of course, you really like being bitten by mosquitoes.

To learn more about bats, read my book A Day in a Forested Wetland.

Online references and resources

Current Biology. “Echolocation.”
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(05)00686-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS096098220500686X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Field Museum. “Do All Bats Echolocate?”
https://www.fieldmuseum.org/blog/do-all-bats-echolocate
In Our Time podcast. “Echolocation.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b6hrl3
National Parks Service. “Bats: Echolocation.”
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bats/echolocation.htm
National Science Foundation. “Batlab studies echolocation to learn how animals "see" with sound.”
https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/batbrains.jsp
Scientific American. “How do bats echolocate and how are they adapted to this activity?”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-bats-echolocate-an/
Smithsonian Magazine. “Here's What Bat Echolocation Sounds Like, Slowed Down.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/science/what-bat-echolocation-sounds-like/
STAC Climate Control. “Noise Levels dBA/Decibels.”
http://www.stac-uk.com/downloads/Noise%20Levels.pdf
Weizmann Institute of Science. “Echolocation in Bats.”
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/neurobiology/labs/ulanovsky/sites/neurobiology.labs.ulanovsky/files/uploads/behavneurosci_lecture6_ulanovsky_bat_echolocation_22dec2009.pdf

Photos and Images

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources. If it isn’t linked to anything, than Kevin Kurtz or Sarah Zakalik must have taken it.

Flowers are found on all sorts of plants, but not all plants have them. Moss, ferns, and pine trees, for example, don’t have flowers, but a lot of plants do.

Plants have flowers because they need to make seeds. In order to make seeds, pretty much all plants first need to get pollen from another plant of the same species. A plant can’t just walk over to another plant and say, "Hey! Give me some pollen!"  Instead, they have to get their pollen delivered.

They don’t all get their pollen delivered the same way, though.

Pine trees, which don’t have flowers, use the wind as their delivery service. They make pollen in their pine cones and then dump tons of it into the air. The trees depend on the wind to spread their pollen all over the place, in hopes that some of the pollen will land on the pine cone of another tree of the same species, so that tree can then make some seeds.

Wind is not the most precise way to deliver pollen. It’s kind of like inviting your friends to your birthday party by having a plane drop a bunch of invitations all over your town in hopes that some of the invitations hit your friends in the head. Wind delivery works for pine trees because they make so much pollen that it ends up covering pretty much everything. If you live in a state that has a lot of pine trees, like I did when I used to live in South Carolina, you may have noticed that everything, particularly your car and mud puddles, turns yellowish in the spring. That yellow stuff is all pine tree pollen that missed the pine cones.

Plants with flowers have a different delivery service, one that does not cover your entire town with pollen. Flowering plants pay animals to deliver their pollen. They do this through their flowers.

A flower is a free all-you-can-eat buffet for animals like bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. Many flowers are full of nectar, which is basically just a lot of sugar in water (in other words, juice). Flowers with nectar are kind of like a juice box, except the hummingbirds and bugs bring their own straw. Nectar provides the bugs and hummingbirds that drink it with a lot of energy. Some pollinators, such as bees, also eat the pollen in flowers, because pollen is a good source of protein.

The plants are happy for these animals to eat the nectar and pollen they make, because as the pollinator eats, the flower dumps some pollen on the pollinator’s head and body. Then, when the pollinator flies to another flower to eat, some of the pollen will fall into that flower and then: mission accomplished. The pollen is delivered and seeds can be made.

Flowers smell nice and are brightly colored because they are trying desperately to get pollinators’ attention. The colors and smells of flowers are basically advertisements that let birds and bees know that if they stick their head in the flower, they will get free food. Then they get tricked into becoming a pollen delivery-person.

Flowers are made to get attention, but their ability to get human attention is just a byproduct. The attention flowers really want is from bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and some other small animals. Plants with flowers can’t live without these animals. And these animals can’t live without flowers.

To learn more about flowers and pollinators, read my book A Day on the Mountain.

Online references and resources

National Park Service. "Pine Pollen Season."
      https://www.nps.gov/romo/pine_pollen.htm
Scientific American. "Why do flowers have scents?"
      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-flowers-have-scent/
USDA. "What is pollination?"
      https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/pollinators/What_is_Pollination/index.shtml

Photos and Images

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources.

That may be disappointing to you (it definitely is when I tell elementary school kids that, though they’re more disappointed by them not being vampires, than not being squid). If you are disappointed with that knowledge, but you still feel a glimmer of hope that has you thinking, “They’ve got to at least suck blood, right? I mean what self-respecting, name-giving person would name something “vampire” if it doesn’t suck blood?”, prepare for more disappointment, because vampire squid don’t suck blood.  What they do eat is horrifying, but not in the run screaming in the night way.  It is horrifying more in the run screaming to find a barf bag way, because vampire squid eat poop.

Just in case you think that was a typo, I’ll write it again.

Vampire squid eat poop.

Vampire squid live mainly in the Midnight Zone  (aka the Bathypelagic Zone) of the ocean. This environment, thousands of feet below the sea surface, is a difficult place to live. The water pressure there is crushingly intense. For an animal 3,500 feet (1,066 meters) below sea level, the pressure is so intense that it is like having a cow sitting on each square inch of its body.

Not only that, but there is also very little oxygen in the Midnight Zone. There is so little oxygen that another name scientists have for this part of the ocean is the oxygen minimum zone. Since all animals need oxygen to survive and most living things aren’t built to survive having cows sitting all over them, not many animals can live in the Midnight Zone.

The lack of animals in the Midnight Zone makes it hard for the animals that do live there, because most ocean animals eat other ocean animals to get the food they need. Prey is scarce in the deep sea. To make matters worse, sunlight does not reach that deep. Predators that live there have to to find dinner in complete darkness.

Vampire squid have solved all the problems of the Midnight Zone. They can handle extreme pressure and they don’t need that much oxygen to survive. And, instead of trying to find and catch other animals to eat, they get their food from a source that is fairly abundant in the deep sea.

If you were able to hangout deep in the ocean, you would notice that there were white flakes of stuff falling all around you. Though these white flakes look like snow (and are actually called "marine snow"), they are not crystals of ice like the stuff that covered my yard just a month ago (I live in Rochester, NY). They’re more like the fish food flakes you may have shaken into your home aquarium, except these flakes are not coming from someone shaking a giant can over the ocean. Marine snow flakes come from the bodies of fish, squid, sea turtles, plankton, and other living things near the surface.

Like you, ocean animals poop. Some of them also die every day, like when they get eaten. When an animal gets bitten, sometimes parts of it don’t quite make it into the predator’s mouth and fall out as crumbs. These bits of poop and dead stuff get pulled by gravity towards the bottom of the ocean, creating a blizzard of gently falling flakes of disgustingness that scientists call marine snow. “Disgustingness” is a human’s opinion, though, because poop and dead stuff contain calories and nutrients, which are what all living things need from their food. For a vampire squid, marine snow is super-abundant and nutritious free food that a vampire squid can snack on anytime it is hungry. It is basically like manna from heaven, if manna was poop and dead stuff.

It wasn’t until 2012 that scientists figured out that vampire squid eat marine snow (which was a year after I finished writing A Day in the Deep). Vampire squid do not have feeding tentacles that true squid use to catch prey. Instead, vampire squid have these long stringy things that come out of their bodies, called filaments.

Scientists weren’t sure what these filaments were used for until they started watching videos of vampire squid taken by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Research Institute’s remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). ROVs are basically small submarine robots.

The scientists observed that some of the vampire squid appeared to be using the filaments to collect marine snow. The scientists came up with a hypothesis that the vampire squid were catching marine snow to eat it (a hypothesis is a guess based on facts that explains a mystery). They tested this hypothesis by looking at what was in the stomachs of recently dead vampire squid (as well as doing a few other experiments; you can read the description of everything they did here). They discovered vampire squid had indeed been eating “the remains of gelatinous zooplankton, discarded larvacean houses, crustacean remains, diatoms and faecal pellets.” “Faecal pellets” is a more polite and scientific way of saying “poop.” Also, “faecal” is the British spelling. The American spelling is “fecal” as in “feces”. “Remains” is a polite way to say “dead stuff.” In other words, they were definitely eating marine snow.

So we now know vampire squid eat poop. Should we change their name to "poop squid"? From a marketing perspective, poop squid would probably get as much attention for them as vampire squid, so it’s a tough call. I say we compromise and call them “vampire poop squid.”

To learn more about vampire squid, read my book A Day in the Deep.

Also here's a video on vampire squid eating habits:

Online references and resources

California Academy of Sciences. "Vampire Squid Diet."
      https://www.calacademy.org/explore-science/vampire-squid-diet
National Geographic. "Vampire Squid's Surprising Diet Revealed."
      https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/pictures/120929-vampire-squid-deep-ocean-animals-science-monterey/
The New York Times. "When It Needs to Feast, Vampire Squid Is a Softy."
      https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/science/when-it-needs-to-feast-vampire-squid-is-a-softy.html
SciNews. "Eating Habits of Mysterious Vampire Squid Vampyroteuthis Infernalis Revealed."
      http://www.sci-news.com/biology/article00623.html
Smithsonian. "Poop Eating Vampire Squids Aren’t Actually Squids at All."
      https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-long-lived-poop-eating-vampire-squid-make-good-parents-180955149/#wGUHz3jQLAk8A2Oe.99

Photos and Images

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources.

Bacteria and viruses are both microscopic in size. At least some viruses and bacteria invade living things and cause diseases. Beyond that, though, bacteria and viruses don’t have a lot in common. For one thing, one of them is a living thing. The other one breaks almost all of the rules of what makes something a living thing.

Bacteria are definitely living things. Like us, they need water, energy, and nutrients from their environment in order to keep their bodies going (We call the activity inside a living thing’s body that keeps it going its metabolism.). Like us, bacteria grow during their lifetime. They also reproduce, but not the way we do, because no person splits in two to form an exact replica of themselves, except in some comic books I have read. Bacteria split in two to make new bacteria all the time.

Viruses don’t need water, energy, or nutrients to keep their metabolism going, because they don’t have a metabolism. Without a metabolism, they can’t grow. They also can potentially be around forever because they don’t have a metabolism to stop, which means they don’t die in the same way living things do. Also, viruses can’t reproduce by splitting apart or having babies or laying eggs or making spores or seeds or any other way that living things reproduce.

So in this checklist of characteristics I included in my book Living Things and Nonliving Things to figure out if something is a living thing or not:

• Breathe.

• Drink water.

• Take energy and nutrients from its environment.

• Reproduce

• Grow and Change.

Viruses don’t do any of those things (with one exception, kind of).

And that’s not all. Living things tend to have complex structures. This means each living thing has a lot of different parts that do different things. All the parts have to work together to keep the organism alive. This is true of even single-celled bacteria. A bacterium’s cell has different parts with names like fimbriae, ribosomes, and vacuoles (“Fimbriae” sounds like it could be the name of some kid born in the 21st Century. Please don’t ever name a kid “Vacuole,” though. I foresee terrible nicknames in that kid’s future). These parts work together to keep the bacterium alive.

A virus is not complex. It is basically just DNA in a box (though the box is made of protein and not cardboard).

With all those things against it, most scientists agree viruses aren’t living things. But some scientists argue that viruses should be considered living things.

There are a few reasons it’s easy to be wishy-washy about the living thing status of viruses.

The bodies of viruses pretty much have nothing in common with living things, except they contain DNA. DNA molecules are teeny-tiny strands of different chemicals found in the cells of living things. DNA is kind of like the computer code for a living thing’s body. It tells each cell what to be when it grows up as well as what to do on a daily basis to stay alive.

Viruses also have DNA, except most of the time the DNA doesn’t do anything. A virus doesn’t have a metabolism and it doesn’t grow or change, so it doesn’t need DNA to tell it how to do either of those things. Despite the fact that some viruses look like cool robot spiders from outer space, viruses can’t move on their own, so the DNA is not there for that.

The DNA just sits in the virus’s protein case, possibly forever.

But many times, not forever. Even though viruses can’t reproduce on their own, they really want to reproduce themselves. They can only do this when they get carried to or bump into the cell of whichever living thing they are built for. Once that happens the virus attaches to the cell and then it dumps its DNA into the cell. The DNA goes into action by taking over the cell. It commands the cell to create more viruses. The cell makes and releases a bunch of copies of the virus. All those new viruses may then invade other nearby cells, take them over, and make them make even more virus copies. And so the infection spreads.

The fact that viruses reproduce themselves, even though they can’t do it on their own, is another thing that puts them into a living thing/nonliving thing gray area.

These, and some other more complicated similarities, make some scientists think that viruses should be considered living things. These scientists aren’t saying viruses are eating, drinking, and growing. They’re not the Flat Earthers of biologists. They’re saying that maybe we need to redefine what makes something a living thing. The more we explore nature, the more we are discovering how diverse it is and how it does not all fit into the neat little categories we keep hoping will describe everything. But that’s part of the fun too. Even in the 21st Century, the universe still regularly takes us by surprise.

To learn more about the differences between living things and nonliving things and the diversity of nature, read my book Living Things and Nonliving Things. To learn more about microbes, read my book Where Wild Microbes Grow.

Online references and resources

Arizona State University. Ask A Biologist: Are viruses alive?
      https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/are-viruses-alive
Santa Barbara Independent. "Viruses, Part I: Origins"
      https://www.independent.com/news/2010/oct/02/viruses-part-i-origins/
Scientific American. "Are Viruses Alive?"
      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-viruses-alive-2004/
University of California, Santa Barbara. ScienceLine How is it that viruses are not living things?
      http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=3316

Also this:

The Vital Question: Why is Life the Way It is? by Nick Lane

Photos and Images

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources.

Except it doesn’t have to.

There is a lot we can still do to slow down climate change and make sure we continue to have a stable and secure planet for ourselves and for the other living things that share our planet with us.  Many people are already trying to do something to slow climate change. But not enough, yet. Hopefully these posts will convince even more of Earth's inhabitants to take action on climate change. At this point, it isn’t just a nice thing to do. It’s absolutely necessary.

You may be thinking to yourself, “How can the small things I do fix the entire planet?” It’s true that if you were the only one doing these things, it will not stop climate change. But if you are one of billions doing this, that can have a major impact. The more people who are doing something about climate change, the better off we all will be. Each person taking action brings us that much closer to the total number of people we need.

Here are actions anyone, even a kid, can take to help slow climate change.

Demand facts.

Unfortunately, since the Internet came into existence, it has become really easy to find really wrong information about pretty much everything. In the face of a disaster like climate change, this is particularly serious, as it is really difficult to make good decisions when a lot of the information you hear may be coming from the Land of Make-Believe. The more people who demand facts, even painful ones, the more likely we are to get the facts we need to make good decisions that will allow us to safeguard our future.

A way to check the accuracy of climate change information is through the website Climate Feedback. Scientists use this website to review the things that public figures say about climate change.  The scientists then provide feedback about what the speakers and writers got right about the science and what they got wrong. Using this website to fact check climate change reporting allows us to be sure that the information we are hearing and reading is accurate. (I’m guessing these blog posts I’m writing about climate change are too far under the radar to be reviewed on Climate Feedback, but that would be cool if they were.)

We also get a lot of wrong information about climate change from some of our friends and family, like our Uncle Steve. How do you fact check Uncle Steve? I would ask him two questions. First ask: “Can you show me your hard evidence that supports what you say and shows why it conclusively proves that thousands of scientists around the world are wrong?” (If he shows you an article online, look it up on the Climate Feedback website to see if what it says is true). You can also ask: “Are you so sure that you are right about climate change that you are willing to bet my entire future on it?”

Burn less fossil fuel.

As I wrote in an earlier post, the main way we are adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is by burning fossil fuels. Though very few of us will ever see a fossil fuel fire in person, pretty much everyone in the modern world is burning fossil fuels via all the energy we are using in our homes and vehicles. The less energy we use, the less fossil fuels we burn, the less carbon dioxide each of us adds to the atmosphere, the better it will be for our climate.

Here’s some ways to burn less fossil fuels (many of these actions can also save your family money $$).

• Don’t waste food. It takes energy to grow, harvest, transport, and refrigerate the food we eat. Unfortunately, one-third of the food produced around the world each year is thrown away. The United States alone throws away around 120,000,000,000 pounds (that’s 120 billion pounds) of food each year. On average each family of four in the United States throws away $640 worth of the food they buy each year. If we stop throwing away the food we buy, we won’t need to grow as much, which will save a lot of energy and prevent a lot of greenhouse pollution.

• Walk, ride your bike, or take the bus to school (or anywhere else, for that matter). I have visited a lot of elementary schools in multiple states over the past few years, and have noticed that apparently every school in America has a line of 40 or 50 cars every morning and afternoon as parents drop-off and pick-up their kids. These cars are burning a lot of energy and releasing a lot of carbon dioxide, when they likely don’t really have to be making that twice-daily trip. Unless your parents are already heading in the direction of the school, if you walk, ride your bike, or take the bus to school, you will save gas, save the atmosphere from receiving more carbon dioxide, and save your parents some time and gas money too.

• Turn off the light when you leave a room. Lights use electricity that likely was made by burning fossil fuels, so turn off the lights when you leave a room, and don’t turn them on during the day when the sun can provide pollution-free and cost-free light.

• Unplug chargers. As long as a charger is plugged into a socket, it is still using energy, even if it is not currently charging anything. (This is called “phantom power.”)

• Take quicker showers. A lot of energy is used to heat water in our homes, so the quicker you shower, the less hot water you use.

• Don’t buy new things if the old stuff is still good. It takes energy to manufacture stuff and to ship it so you can buy it. You can burn fewer fossil fuels by using the stuff you already have that still works instead of constantly buying new stuff.

• Go outside to play. There’s a lot of fun to be had that doesn’t involve energy-using electronics.

• Talk some adults into burning less fossil fuel. If you are a kid, then chances are you are not the one making decisions about your family’s or your school’s energy bill (or that you want to spend the money you’ve saved over the few years you’ve been alive to buy your family a new energy efficient washing machine). But if you can convince the adults who make these decisions to make your home and/or school more energy efficient, that can have a huge impact on reducing the amount of greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere. Here’s some things that you can tell the adults in your life to do that can help slow climate change:

  • Switch to renewable energy. Many power companies allow people to decide where their energy comes from. Your parents or school can ask their power company to switch their electricity from coal or natural gas sources to wind or solar sources. They just need to call the local power company or look on the power company’s website to see what is available. (They could also look into getting solar panels. For many buildings, the sunlight on the roof can produce all the energy the building needs without making pollution.)

  • Turn down the heat and air conditioning. If you drop the temperature in the house a degree or two in the winter and raise it a degree or two in the summer, that can make a difference. You should also have everything on a thermostat timer that automatically makes the temperature comfortable when people are awake and hanging out in your home or school, but then lowers the temperature in the winter and raises it in the summer when people are away or sleeping.

  • Turn down the hot water heater. As I mentioned earlier, it takes a lot of energy to heat water in your home. If your faucet water can get hot enough to be painful, that is too hot. Have your parents turn it down so it is hot, but comfortable, and that will save energy.

  • Switch to energy efficient appliances. So this contradicts what I said above, but if your home or school has a refrigerator, washing machine, or other large appliance over twenty years old, then chances are it was not built that great and it is wasting a lot of energy and making a lot of unnecessary greenhouse gas pollution. If your family or school can afford new appliances with high energy efficiency ratings, buy those, get rid of the old crummy ones, and help to prevent more climate change (which will also save money on the energy bill.)

  • Switch to LED light bulbs. LED Light bulbs are the most energy efficient out there, then fluorescent bulbs. Incandescent light bulbs are the worst. You can tell if something is not energy efficient by seeing if it gets hot when its purpose is not to be a heater. That heat is wasted energy. Incandescent light bulbs, whose purpose is to make light, get so hot they can burn your fingers. Replacing them with LED bulbs will save a lot of energy.

  • Get rid of the other refrigerator. If you have a second refrigerator in your garage or basement that currently has just five cans of Mr. Pibb in it, then ask your family if you can rid of it. That second refrigerator is using a lot of energy that is helping to cause climate change. If all that second refrigerator is doing is keeping a few cans of soda cold that no one wants and once in awhile storing some leftovers, then you don’t really need it. (Your local power company may even pay you to get rid of the second refrigerator! Look into it.)

  • Put the entertainment center on a power strip. Not just chargers use phantom power. TVs, stereo receivers, and other entertainment devices waste a lot of energy when they are turned off. To prevent this, plug them all into a power strip and turn the power strip off whenever they aren’t being used.

  • Get an energy assessment and insulate the house where needed. Another way to waste energy is to have a poorly insulated house or school building that allows the warm air in winter and the cool air in summer to easily escape outside. Your family or school can see if this is happening by getting an energy assessment (also called an “energy audit”). Many companies will do these for free. If you find a problem spot, and it is affordable, insulate the places that are letting heat in or out and you will save on energy.

  • Don’t sit in a car that is not moving and let the engine idle. If you are sitting in a parking lot or your driveway with the car running and you know you are not going anywhere in the next two minutes, turn the car off. As the engine idles, it is still producing carbon dioxide gas.

  • Get a car with better gas mileage. If you can afford to get an electric car or a car that gets over 50 miles per gallon, that can be a huge help.

Eat less beef.

After humans, the species that is contributing most to climate change are cows.

Yes, cows.

One reason cows cause climate change is because they need a lot of space to move around in and also a lot of space to grow crops to feed them. Their pastures and cropland takes away natural habitats like forests that store carbon and prevent it from going into the atmosphere.

The main reason cows cause climate change, though, and I’m not making this up, is because cows burp, a lot. Burps and farts are ways animal bodies release methane gas. Methane is a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide. There are currently about one billion cows around the world being kept to feed people. Each of those cows is burping methane on a daily basis. They are releasing enough methane through burping that cows are a major cause of current climate change.

If we all eat less beef and dairy, that will result in less demand for cows, which will result in fewer people wanting to own cows, which will result in fewer cow burps adding methane to the atmosphere. I can’t really say eat more chicken or pork instead, because, unfortunately chickens and pork are also contributing to climate change, though not as much as cows. I know the average kid doesn’t want to hear this, but the more vegetables you eat, the less greenhouse gases you will be adding to the atmosphere.

Write, call, or visit your elected officials to talk to them about climate change.

We need entire towns, entire states, entire countries, and pretty much the entire planet doing everything they can to slow the climate change global crisis. To do this is going to require the government to make laws to make sure we all are doing what we can. You can help convince your elected officials to work on fighting climate change by calling them, writing them letters or emails, or visiting their local offices or town hall meetings. Even though you may be too young to vote, it is their job listen to you and to do what they can to protect your future. You can find out who your elected officials are and how to contact them here or here.

Help a nonprofit group fight climate change.

There are large, successful nonprofit groups that are working hard to do what they can to curb climate change. They are able to do a lot of good because a lot of people support them. They use the donations they receive to take big actions, often at the or national level. Here are a few I can recommend to check out and see if you might want to help them.

• The Union of Concerned Scientists

• The Sierra Club

• The National Resources Defense Council

• The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions

• 350

• The Environmental Defense Fund

Find some climate change friends.

If you can find people around you who also want to fight climate change, together you can accomplish a lot more than you can alone (Also, it’s good to have other people to encourage you, particularly if you have a lot of Uncle Steve's in your life). If you find enough kids at your school, and hopefully a teacher or two who want to help, you could even start a “green team” club that works to do what you can to reduce energy waste in your school and community, and to educate other people about what they can do to fight climate change.

Can we really come together to fix this serious global problem?

Yes.

It has happened in the past. In the 1960s when many birds were dying because of the use of the pesticide DDT, and at the same time rivers were catching on fire because they were so polluted, the United States came together to pass legislation like the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act to reduce pollution and protect endangered species. Since then, no rivers have caught on fire (at least in the United States) and species like the bald eagle and brown pelican, which many people in the 1960s thought were on the verge of extinction, have made big comebacks.

We’ve been able to come together to solve environmental problems on a global scale too. In the 1980s we realized there was a hole in the ozone layer that, because of pollution, kept getting and bigger and bigger. The ozone layer blocks radiation from space, so the bigger the hole became, the more dangerous it would be to us. The countries of the world realized this was a global problem that required a global solution. In 1987, a number of countries signed the Montreal Protocol, which stopped the use of many of the pollutants that were destroying the ozone layer. By taking this action thirty years ago, they took responsibility for what was happening and saved those of us alive today from dealing with a dangerous global crisis.

We can do that today with climate change. The human race is already taking steps in the right direction. Every country on Earth, except one, has signed onto the Paris Climate Agreement, meaning they have agreed to take steps to reduce greenhouse gases and slow climate change (I keep using the word “slow” because, at this point we can’t stop climate change. There is already too much carbon dioxide and methane in the air. We can stop it from getting a lot worse, though).

Unfortunately, the one country that has now signed off the Paris Climate Agreement is the one I happen to live in. Even though the United States is out, 196 other countries, representing over seven billion people, are in.

Even the United States is not completely out. We were in it until last year and, when we originally signed up, we made an agreement that means we cannot completely get out of it until 2020. And even though one person in the United States decided we are getting out of the Paris Climate Agreement, many states, cities, businesses, and individual citizens still want in, and they are continuing to do things necessary to fight climate change.

That one powerful person in the United States who keeps making a lot of bad decisions about climate change doesn’t get to keep his job forever. The majority of Americans want us to do something about climate change, so, I’m assuming, once he’s gone, we will be back on track. Unfortunately, scientists agree that the Paris Climate Agreement isn’t enough to stop the worst of climate change. We all have to do a lot more. The momentum to fight climate change is on our side, though. Each year as the natural disasters caused by climate change get worse, more and more people are going to demand we take stronger action to fight it.

So please do everything you can to fight climate change. The future of you, me, and every living thing on the planet depends on it.

Our future if we do nothing about climate change.

Since I assume as I write these that kids in the age range of 10 to 14 might be reading them, I didn’t want to go to big into the doom and gloom of how awful it's likely to get. Kids and teenagers should not be burdened with solving the problems caused by adults because too many of the adults don’t know or don’t care that they are causing huge problems for their children and grandchildren. At the same time, as a nonfiction children’s author, it’s basically my job to be honest to kids. So if you want to know, I have listed below some articles that provide information on what is likely to happen because of climate change. It’s not good.

Dangerous storms

NASA. “The Impact of Climate Change on Natural Disasters.”
      https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/RisingCost/rising_cost5.php

The Los Angeles Times. “Fires, droughts and hurricanes: What's the link between climate change and natural disasters?”
      http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-climate-change-natural-disasters-20170907-htmlstory.html

The New York Times. “From Heat Waves to Hurricanes: What We Know About Extreme Weather and Climate Change.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/15/climate/does-climate-change-cause-hurricanes-drought.html?_r=0

The New York Times. “How Global Warming Fueled Five Extreme Weather Events.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/climate/climate-extreme-weather-attribution.html

ScienceDaily. “"Why storms are becoming more dangerous as the climate warms: Analyses of energy cycle offer a new explanation of climate change."  
      www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170124111330.htm

Droughts

EOS. “Humans to Blame for Higher Drought Risk in Some Regions.”
      https://eos.org/research-spotlights/humans-to-blame-for-higher-drought-risk-in-some-regions

The Los Angeles Times. “Climate scientists see alarming new threat to California.”
      http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-climate-california-20171205-htmlstory.html

MIT News. “Climate change to worsen drought, diminish corn yields in Africa.”
      http://news.mit.edu/2017/climate-change-drought-corn-yields-africa-0316

NASA. “Study finds drought recoveries taking longer.”
      https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2617/study-finds-drought-recoveries-taking-longer/

University of Birmingham. “Europe's drought trends match climate change projections.”
      https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2017/10/drought-trends-climate-change-projections.aspx

Food shortages

Anthropocene Magazine. “Climate change will bring us less nutritious crops–and rising global protein deficiency.”
      http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2017/08/climate-change-will-bring-us-less-nutritious-crops-and-rising-global-protein-deficiency/

The Independent.  “World 'faces food shortages and mass migration' caused by global warming.”
      http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-world-faces-food-shortages-and-mass-migration-caused-by-global-warming-a6784911.html

The New York Times. "Hotter, Drier, Hungrier: How Global Warming Punishes the World’s Poorest."
      https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/climate/kenya-drought.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_clim_20180314&nl=&nl_art=3&nlid=79666233&ref=headline&te=1

Scientific American. “World Hunger Is Increasing, Thanks to Wars and Climate Change.”
      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/world-hunger-is-increasing-thanks-to-wars-and-climate-change/

The Washington Post. “A climate chain reaction: Major Greenland melting could devastate crops in Africa.”  
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/06/06/a-climate-chain-reaction-major-greenland-melting-could-devastate-crops-in-africa/?utm_term=.38200eff7fc6

The Washington Post. “Food scarcity caused by climate change could cause 500,000 deaths by 2050, study suggests.”
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/03/02/food-scarcity-caused-by-climate-change-could-cause-500000-deaths-by-2050-study-suggests/?utm_term=.c340fe1ef081

Health problems

National Geographic. “Climate Change: Health Risks.”
      https://www.nationalgeographic.com/climate-change/how-to-live-with-it/health.html

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “Health Impacts: Climate and Human Health.”
      https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/climatechange/health_impacts/index.cfm

NPR. “How Climate Change Is Already Affecting Health, Spreading Disease.”
      https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/31/561041342/scientists-from-around-the-world-report-on-health-effects-from-climate-change

Time Magazine.  “Study: Climate Change Is Damaging the Health of Millions of People.”
      http://time.com/4999425/climate-change-health-2/

Heat waves

The Chicago Tribune. “Study shows deadly heat waves are becoming more frequent.”
      http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/science/ct-heat-wave-climate-change-study-20170619-story.html

National Geographic. “By 2100, Deadly Heat May Threaten Majority of Humankind.”
      https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/06/heatwaves-climate-change-global-warming/

The New York Times. “95-Degree Days: How Extreme Heat Could Spread Across the World.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/22/climate/95-degree-day-maps.html?_r=0

The New York Times. “As Climate Changes, Southern States Will Suffer More Than Others”
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/29/climate/southern-states-worse-climate-effects.html?_r=0

The New York Times. “In Sweltering South, Climate Change Is Now a Workplace Hazard.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/us/politics/climate-change-trump-working-poor-activists.html

High economic costs

Anthropocene Magazine. “Climate inaction will leave our kids a trillion dollar debt.”
     http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2017/08/climate-inaction-will-make-our-kids-pay-hundreds-of-trillions-of-dollars/

Business Insider. “Severe weather has cost the US government $350 billion since 2007 — and climate change could make it much worse.”
     http://www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-costs-rising-rapidly-gao-report-says-2017-10

The Independent.  “The cost of climate change: World's economy will lose $12tn unless greenhouse gases are tackled.”
      http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/global-warming-climate-change-world-economy-gdp-smaller-12-trillion-a7421106.html

National Geographic. “Hidden Costs of Climate Change Running Hundreds of Billions a Year.”
      http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/climate-change-costs-us-economy-billions-report.html

Science. “Here’s how much climate change is going to cost your county.”
      http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/here-s-how-much-climate-change-going-cost-your-county

Loss of oxygen in the ocean

Oceanbites. “As far as the eye can(‘t) see: climate change may impact vision.”
      https://oceanbites.org/as-far-as-the-eye-cant-see/

Oceanbites. “Take my breath away: Decline in oceanic oxygen levels fifty years in the making.”
      https://oceanbites.org/take-my-breath-away-decline-in-oceanic-oxygen-levels-fifty-years-in-the-making/

The Washington Post.  “Scientists have just detected a major change to the Earth’s oceans linked to a warming climate.”
       https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/02/15/its-official-the-oceans-are-losing-oxygen-posing-growing-threats-to-marine-life/?utm_term=.b4eab2d27df1

More global conflicts and refugees

The Guardian. “Climate change 'will create world's biggest refugee crisis'.”
      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/02/climate-change-will-create-worlds-biggest-refugee-crisis

National Geographic. “Climate Change and Water Woes Drove ISIS Recruiting in Iraq.”  
      https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/climate-change-drought-drove-isis-terrorist-recruiting-iraq/

Scientific American. “Once Again, Climate Change Cited as Trigger for Conflict.”
      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/once-again-climate-change-cited-as-trigger-for-war/

Vox. “How climate change could lead to more wars in the 21st century.”
      https://www.vox.com/world/2017/11/14/16589878/global-climate-change-conflict-environment

The Washington Post.  “A proposal in New Zealand could trigger the era of ‘climate change refugees’”
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/10/31/a-proposal-in-new-zealand-could-trigger-the-era-of-climate-change-refugees/?utm_term=.23345dd90cd4

Weather, Climate, and Society journal. “Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria.”
      http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/WCAS-D-13-00059.1

More wildfires

The Atlantic. “Has Climate Change Intensified 2017’s Western Wildfires?”
      https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/why-is-2017-so-bad-for-wildfires-climate-change/539130/

The New Yorker. “Oregon’s Eagle Creek Fire and the New Reality of Life in the Smoke-Filled American West .”
      https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/oregons-eagle-creek-fire-and-the-new-reality-of-life-in-the-smoke-filled-american-west

The New York Times. “In a Warming California, a Future of More Fire.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/climate/california-fires-warming.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_clim_20171213&nl=&nl_art=1&nlid=79666233&ref=headline&te=1&_r=0

Ocean acidification

Australian Academy of Science. “More than just temperature—climate change and ocean acidification.”
      https://www.science.org.au/curious/earth-environment/ocean-acidification

National Geographic. “Ocean Acidification.”
      https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/oceans/critical-issues-ocean-acidification/

NOAA. “What is Ocean Acidification?”
      https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification%3F

Oceanbites. “Ocean Acidification: No Longer Confined to the Sea Surface.”
      https://oceanbites.org/ocean-acidification-no-longer-confined-to-the-sea-surface/

Scientific American. “Rising Acidity in the Ocean: The Other CO2 Problem.”
      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rising-acidity-in-the-ocean/

Power outages

Anthropocene Magazine. “America may not have the power to deal with future hot days.”
      www.anthropocenemagazine.org /2017/02/america-may-not-have-the-power-to-deal-with-future-hot-days/

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. “Climate change is projected to have severe impacts on the frequency and intensity of peak electricity demand across the United States.”
      http://www.pnas.org/content/114/8/1886.full

Scientific American. “Major U.S. Cities Face More Blackouts under Climate Change.”
      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/major-u-s-cities-face-more-blackouts-under-climate-change/

Rising sea levels

Anthropocene Magazine. “Scientists can’t tell whether sea-level rise will be bad or catastrophic.”
      http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2017/12/scientists-cant-tell-whether-sea-level-rise-will-be-bad-or-catastrophic/

The New York Times. “Jakarta Is Sinking So Fast, It Could End Up Underwater.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/21/world/asia/jakarta-sinking-climate.html?emc=edit_clim_20171221&nl=&nlid=79666233&te=1&_r=0

The New York Times. “The Sea Level Did, in Fact, Rise Faster in the Southeast U.S.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/09/climate/the-sea-level-did-in-fact-rise-faster-in-the-southeast-us.html

The Washington Post. “New science suggests the ocean could rise more — and faster — than we thought .”
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/10/26/new-science-suggests-the-ocean-could-rise-more-and-faster-than-we-thought/?utm_term=.1b7a154104c0

Spreading diseases and parasites

The Atlantic. “The Link Between Zika and Climate Change.”
      https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/02/zika-and-climate-change/470643/

National Geographic. “Climate Change Pushing Tropical Diseases Toward Arctic.”
      https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/06/vibrio-zika-west-nile-malaria-diseases-spreading-climate-change/

The New York Times. “Tree-Eating Beetles Set to March Northward as Winters Warm.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/climate/southern-pine-beetles-killing-trees-as-temperatures-rise.html

NPR. “Will Climate Change Help Ticks And Mosquitoes Spread Disease?”
      https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/04/21/523066394/-curiousgoat-will-climate-change-help-ticks-and-mosquitoes-spread-disease

Wildlife extinctions and ecosystem disruptions

The Atlantic. “Coral Reefs Are Bleaching Too Frequently to Recover.”
      https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/the-global-scourge-on-coral-reefs/549713/

EOS. “Threatened Sea Turtles in Hawaii Losing Ground to Rising Oceans.”
      https://eos.org/articles/threatened-sea-turtles-in-hawaii-losing-ground-to-rising-oceans

National Geographic. “Half of All Species Are on the Move—And We're Feeling It.”
      https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/climate-change-species-migration-disease/

The New York Times. “With Climate Change, Tree Die-Offs May Spread in the West.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/science/trees-climate-die-offs-west.html?_r=0

Science. “Just 1°C of ocean warming can upend marine ecosystems.”
      http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/just-1-c-ocean-warming-can-upend-marine-ecosystems

Smithsonian. “How Climate Change is Messing with Bees.”
      https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-climate-change-messing-bees-ability-pollinate-180956523/#GGckYLhAgJgRiv7v.99
 

General awfulness

The Atlantic. “The Ghost of Climate- Change Future.”
      https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/the-ghost-of-climate-change-future/528471/

EOS. “How Will Climate Change Affect the United States in Decades to Come?”
      https://eos.org/features/how-will-climate-change-affect-the-united-states-in-decades-to-come

Fortune. “How Climate Change Will Transform the Way We Live.”
      http://fortune.com/2017/06/25/climate-change-heat-waves/

Oceanbites. “Oceanic Outlook in the New Government Climate Report.”
      https://oceanbites.org/oceanic-outlook-in-the-new-government-climate-report/

The Washington Post.  “Thousands of scientists issue bleak ‘second notice’ to humanity.”
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/13/thousands-of-scientists-issue-bleak-second-notice-to-humanity/?utm_term=.28706ad57df5

Here’s some other articles that provide more tips on things you can do to fight climate change. These are also my Online References and Resources:

Anthropocene Magazine. “It’s time to double down on humankind’s methane emissions.”
      www.anthropocenemagazine.org /2016/12/its-time-to-double-down-on-humankinds-methane-emissions/

Anthropocene Magazine. “Switching beans for beef could get the US 75% of the way to emissions reduction targets.”
      http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2017/06/switching-beans-for-beef-could-get-the-us-75-of-the-way-to-emissions-reduction-targets/

Anthropocene Magazine. “U.S. Wind and Solar Prevented Thousands of Deaths and Billions of Dollars.”
      http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2017/08/u-s-wind-and-solar-prevented-thousands-of-deaths-and-billions-of-dollars/

The Atlantic. “What If Everyone Ate Beans Instead of Beef?” video.
      https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/540765/beans-instead-of-beef-methane/?utm_source=nl-atlantic-daily-092517&silverid=MzQ0MjYwMzUzNDU0S0

EOS. “The Power of Water, Wind, and Solar (and Nothing Else).”  
      https://eos.org/research-spotlights/the-power-of-water-wind-and-solar-and-nothing-else

Greater Good Magazine. "How to Overcome "Apocalypse Fatigue" Around Climate Change."
      https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_overcome_apocalypse_fatigue_around_climate_change?utm_source=Greater+Good+Science+Center&utm_campaign=79457432eb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_GG_Newsletter_Feb+28+2018&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5ae73e326e-79457432eb-62551147

The New York Times. “Climate Change Is Complex. We’ve Got Answers to Your Questions.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/climate/what-is-climate-change.html?emc=edit_clim_20170919&nl=&nlid=79666233&te=1

The New York Times. “Here’s How Far the World Is From Meeting Its Climate Goals.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/06/climate/world-emissions-goals-far-off course.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_clim_20171106&nl=&nlid=79666233&ref=headline&te=1

The New York Times. “How Americans Think About Climate Change, in Six Maps.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/21/climate/100000004989313.mobile.html?_r=0

The New York Times. “How Much Do You Know About Solving Global Warming?”
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/09/climate/drawdown-climate-solutions-quiz.html?emc=edit_clim_20170613&nl=&nlid=79666233&te=1

The New York Times. “If You Fix This, You Fix a Big Piece of the Climate Puzzle.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/13/climate/climate-change-make-a-difference-quiz.html

The New York Times. "A Secret Superpower, Right in Your Backyard."
      https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/climate/yard-garden-global-warming.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_clim_20180307&nl=&nl_art=2&nlid=79666233&ref=headline&te=1

The New York Times. “Three New Year’s Resolutions That Can Help Fight Climate Change.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/climate/climate-change-resolutions.html

The New York Times. “The world is projected to emit this much CO2 by 2100, exceeding our carbon budget three times over.”
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/29/opinion/climate-change-carbon-budget.html?em_pos=medium&emc=edit_sc_20170912&nl=science-times&nl_art=13&nlid=79666233&ref=headline&te=1&_r=0

World Watch. “Livestock and climate change: what if the key actors in climate change are... cows, pigs, and chickens?”
      http://templatelab.com/livestock-and-climate-change/

You can keep up with the latest positive developments related to climate change by subscribing to the online
Anthropocene Magazine.

Also, if you want a scientific ranking of which actions are the most effective to fight climate change, check out this book:
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming
Edited by Paul Hawken

You can take your own poll about climate change, and possibly ruin Thanksgiving in the process, at this year’s Thanksgiving dinner.  As soon as the cranberry sauce slides out of the can, ask everybody at the table what they think about climate change. Chances are at least someone in your family, probably your Uncle Steve, doesn’t think the scientists know what they’re talking about when it comes to climate change.  Someone else will offer a counterpoint to Uncle Steve and you can then eat your stuffing while watching adults yell at each other like you and your older brother do every time you both want to use the iPad at the same time.

If I were at your Thanksgiving dinner when you asked a question about climate change, who would I agree with: 97% of scientists or your Uncle Steve?

As you probably have already guessed if you have read any of my other blog posts, I trust the scientists and feel pretty much 100% confident that climate change is happening now and people are the cause of it. This isn’t just blind faith.  My opinion is based on my own personal experiences with scientists and with the weather.

I trust scientists because I know from personal experience that scientific research can be so thorough as to be mind-numbingly tedious.

I used to think science was a process where really smart people suddenly have amazing inspirations that explain something, and those inspirations then become facts that high school students have to memorize.  I assumed this because of stories I had heard about scientific discoveries, like:

Archimedes takes a bath and suddenly he understands how to measure volume through water displacement.

Isaac Newton gets hit with an apple and suddenly he understands gravity.

Einstein was bored for weeks in a patent office and suddenly he understands the universe.

Because of stories like these, which aren't always 100% true, I think a lot of people tend to think that scientific knowledge comes from geniuses having brilliant ideas during a brainstorm. It turns out that notion is not accurate. I realized science doesn't work that way about twenty years ago when I got hired to spend 37.5 hours a week staring at plankton under a microscope.

I got this job at a marine biology research lab. The plankton samples I was looking at were collected by scientists from estuaries at a variety of locations and depths, during a variety of times of day and tidal levels. The scientists preserved the samples they collected in carefully labeled jars and brought them to the lab. They then hired people like me to look at every tiny animal in every jar to see which samples had the most baby shrimp (baby shrimp start off life as microscopic plankton).

The reason the scientists were doing this research project is because baby shrimp turn into adult shrimp. If you want to catch and/or eat adult shrimp indefinitely, you need to know where the baby shrimp are likely to be so you can protect those places and the baby shrimp that live there.

I was not the only person whose job was to find and count baby shrimp. There were five other people with me in the plankton lab spending 7.5 hours a day looking at plankton under a microscope.

As you might imagine, spending 37.5 hours a week staring at plankton for months on end was tedious work. It was so tedious that every few weeks one of my coworkers would suddenly stand up and run out of the lab building yelling “I CAN”T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!” and then there was a good chance we would never see them again. We called this “going plankton.” Someone else was then hired to take their place. Because almost everyone who worked there went plankton at some point (usually about three months in), a lot of people ended up sorting through those plankton samples over a couple of years.

This tedious work was important because if we plankton-pickers had just spent an hour sorting through one sample and then said “That’s good enough. Let’s play Fortnite!” we would not have had enough information to figure out where baby shrimp are most likely to be in an estuary. We needed to look through hundreds of samples from different locations and times. This provided the scientists with enough data to find patterns and come to conclusions that would help anyone predict where baby shrimp are most likely to be in an estuary. (You can read the scientific paper for this research project with their results here.)

Eventually I went plankton and left that job, but since then I have seen this painstaking process occur with every other scientific research project I’ve been involved with.

Inspiration does play a very important role in science, but the ideas would not be worth much without the long hours of observations, measurements, and calculations that provide evidence for the idea and make sure it matches reality.

What does all this have to do with climate change? Every climate scientist is following the same tedious process I did when I was staring at plankton all week. So, when scientists tell us anything about climate change, there are years of data collection and piles of evidence to back up their claims.

I also trust scientists because a big part of a scientist’s job is to tell other scientists they’re wrong.

I learned this because scientists would often give presentations about their research at the marine biology lab where I worked. At the end of the presentations, the scientists would always ask if anyone had any questions. At first, I assumed people in the audience would ask the presenter easy questions that would make everyone feel comfortable, like “Was it fun tagging diamondback terrapins?” or “What is your favorite kind of plankton?” but that never happened. Instead the scientists in the audience always asked really tough questions, like “What is the threshold concentration of calcium carbonate that is needed to induce the avoidance behavior in Litopenaeus setiferus? How did you determine that number?” (except the scientist would ask questions that weren’t essentially nonsense, like the one I just used as an example, because I couldn’t remember any of the real questions. That’s about what they sounded like, though).

As someone who used to avoid public speaking like it was a continental breakfast where everything was made out of liver, this kind of tough questioning was pretty much my worst nightmare. But the scientists on stage took it in stride, and I quickly realized the scientists in the audience were not asking tough questions because they are all really mean. Scientists question other scientists’ results to make sure the other scientists have their facts right, which helps Science (with a capital “S”) maintain its integrity and makes sure it continues to provide us with an accurate explanation and understanding of the world we live in.

Scientists don’t just questions results during public presentations. They also question results published by other scientists. They will read what the scientists did and provide criticism if they see a flaw in the research. Scientists may also conduct their own experiments to see if they get the same results. (For an example of this kind of scrutiny, read this article.)

So scientists don’t just automatically agree with another scientist just because she’s a scientist. They’re actually more likely to assume other scientists sharing a new explanation for something are wrong. Only after long periods of discussion, data analysis, experiments, discoveries, and research that all back up the new explanation will the other scientists start becoming convinced that the new explanation may actually be right. 

For us non-scientists, a rule of thumb you can follow to figure out if a scientific explanation is valid is to see how long ago the explanation was first proposed and then figure out how many scientists currently agree that the explanation makes sense. The longer ago the explanation was first suggested without being shot down, and the more scientists who now agree with it, the more likely it is true. So, for example, if a scientific explanation, say human-caused climate change, was first proposed over 120 years ago and not only did the idea not disappear, but today 97% of scientists agree that the explanation accurately describes the world we live in, then that explanation is pretty much true.

I also trust scientists because I know a lot of scientists and they’re really nice.

I’m not a scientist. I wasn’t even a science major in college. I was an English major, so when other students were finding out about how cellular respiration converts nutrients into ATP, I was finding out whether or not the fictional character Elizabeth Bennett was going to marry Mr. Darcy.

Since college, I’ve gotten to meet, work with, and become friends with a lot of scientists, and the thing I’ve found regardless of what kind of scientist they are is that the vast majority of them are smart, creative, and nice people who genuinely want to help make the world a better place.

I've actually known one of the scientists who specifically does research on climate change since I was like three years old, and, though this person once slammed a car door on my eight-year-old ankle, I completely trust this person and know it would be deeply important to her to always tell the truth about her research.

Not every scientist is super-nice or even super-honest. They are human beings after all. But most of the ones I have met are very nice, and I’d be really surprised if any of them, much less all of them, would purposely want to mislead the public.

Sharing wrong information not only goes against the character of most of the scientists I know, it also goes against the job description of being a scientist. Their job is to help us accurately understand the world we live in. Misleading the public is so contrary to what a scientist is supposed to do that being told made-up information by a bunch of scientists is kind of like having your razor scooter stolen by a bunch of police officers.

I also think climate change is happening now because I have seen weather patterns change over my lifetime.

When I first started hearing about global warming in the 1980s and 1990s, I trusted that it was going to happen because I trusted scientists. Like many people under the age of 30 who have had relatively lucky lives, though, I thought that bad things only happened to other people. I assumed the negative impacts of climate change would happen someday, but not in my lifetime.

That assumption changed when I went to Glacier National Park in 2000. I arrived excited to see glaciers and then was quickly disappointed because the glaciers there were remarkably underwhelming. The glaciers were so not spectacular that this is the only photo I could find that I took during that trip that might have a glacier in it (and I took a lot of photos).

The visitor center there had photos of how spectacular the glaciers used to be one hundred years ago. I learned the glaciers in Glacier National Park have been melting away over the past century and likely would be completely gone by 2025.

That experience made me realize that the negative effects of climate change were not going to wait until 2071 to start (which is when I would be 100 years old). They were already happening now.

Since then, I have seen that weather patterns are changing pretty much everywhere.  Over the last few years we seem to be having two or three “storms of the century” a year, when by definition we are supposed to have them once a century (just think about the last few months with Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, as well as the huge forest fires in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California, which are also climate-related).

I’ve even seen changes in my local climate. In 2011, I moved back to upstate New York, where I had grown up, after being gone from that state for seventeen years. A lot of people thought I was nuts to move back here, mainly because the area is known for having very cold, very snowy winters (which was actually one of the reasons I moved away from New York in 1994, because at the time I didn’t want to have to deal anymore with snow on the ground and bleak cloudy days that lasted pretty much from Thanksgiving until St. Patrick’s Day or sometimes until Easter).

The winters in upstate New York are a lot different from what they used to be. Over the last five years, the pattern here has been a week of cold weather and snow, followed by a week of unusually warm weather when it is sunny and the snow pretty much melts away, followed by a week of cold weather and snow, followed by a week of warm weather, and back and forth for three or four months. Also, the snow has not really been starting until January. (The new wishy-washy winters of upstate New York are because the Jet Stream has been thrown out of whack by climate change. It would take another excessively long blog post to explain how that works, but you can learn how by watching this video.)

This is not like the winters when I was a kid, when we didn’t have temperatures like this on Christmas Eve:

Summers are different too. It’s way hotter than it used to be. As a kid, I remember we had a window air-conditioner in our kitchen to deal with the hot days. We basically turned it on for a sum total of about one week a year. That window unit was all we needed to cool down the entire house. Now in my upstate New York house, we need central air conditioning running pretty much continuously from the end of June through September to not sweat to death.

Fall is different as well.

I remember our garden in the 1980s dying around mid-September because that’s when the first frost would come and kill all the plants. Now in the 2010s, I can grow tomatoes and eggplants well into October (this year they made it into November), because the frosts sometimes don’t happen until almost Halloween.

Not just temperature has changed in upstate New York. The way it rains has changed too. I remember thirty years ago, the rain tended to be slow and steady.

Now, pretty much anytime it rains, particularly in the summer, it pours. Just about every storm now drops massive amounts of water for a couple hours and then goes away. So when I look at my weather app on a rainy day, it almost always looks like these (the reds are the heaviest rains, then the yellows. The greens are the lightest rains.).

In the 1980s, if we had weather apps, smartphones, and children's authors taking screenshots of them, I'm pretty sure you would have seen mainly green on these weather maps.

If I was telling you that climate change is happening just based on my own observations about weather, and nothing else, then I would say don't worry about it. I made these conclusions about climate change in my local area without having recorded weather data there for forty years. Instead, my conclusions were based on my possibly bad memory. Also, there is a good chance I am exhibiting what scientists call "confirmation bias." This is what they call it when someone has something to prove and they end up handpicking the data that makes it sound like their story is true and ignore all the data that shows it is false.

But I don't think I just did that, at least not completely. I think I gave at least an accurate caricature of how climate has changed in upstate New York in my lifetime.

The main point I want to make with my personal weather anecdotes is you do not need to be a scientist to tell the climate is changing. You just need to be paying attention (though it helps if you have more years of life experience paying attention to the weather than the average kid.)

So, based on my own experiences, and the scientific evidence I wrote about in my other blog posts, I think it is indisputable that climate change is happening now.

Yet climate deniers like Uncle Steve continue to dispute it. Why? Here are some of the reasons they give (and also why I think these reasons are wrong).

Climate Denier Reason #1: Climate change is a hoax.

Some climate deniers think that scientists are just pretending that climate change is happening. I’ve heard a few different versions of this hoax story. The first story is that the scientists started the climate change hoax because they needed something to do to make money. The second is that China started the climate change hoax to cause the United States economy to go down the toilet. The third story is that certain political groups in the U.S. started the hoax because they want to be able to tell other people what to do.

Here’s why those stories aren’t exactly based on facts.

Scientists don’t need to make stuff up to have something to do. There’s a lot we still don’t know about ourselves and our universe (which is one of the reasons I like to talk to scientists and hear what they are investigating; it makes me even more aware of how much of our world is still a mystery and unexplored). We’ve basically just recently developed the technology to explore and understand the universe and our planet and even our own bodies, so there’s no shortage of questions that haven’t been answered. For example:

• How many species are alive on Earth today?

• How does gravity work?

• How does our brain store memories?

• What is happening inside the Earth that is causing “hot spot” volcanoes like the one that formed the Hawaiian Islands?

• What is the invisible “dark matter” that we can't see, but we know makes up a substantial part of the mass of our universe?

• What are all the microbe species in our bodies and how do they help us?

• What causes ice ages?

And so on.

If scientists are looking for a problem specifically to make a lot of money, there are a lot of opportunities for that too. For example, if a scientist could find a cure for cancer or male pattern baldness, they would become very, very rich.

The thing is, most scientists aren’t in it for the money. Out of the couple hundred or so scientists I have met, only one of them has ever talked to me about becoming a scientist to make money (his plan was to get some research experience and then try to get a job as a scientist working for the fossil fuel industry). Like teachers and children’s authors, the majority of scientists choose their job because they want to do what they love and that’s more important to them than making enough money to buy a Tesla.

You can see this is true by looking at the typical salaries of scientists. Most scientists doing climate change research are working at colleges and universities. University scientists make somewhere between $46,000 and $118,000 a year, with an average salary of about $88,000.

This is a decent salary range, but not enough to make them a millionaire.

Those same scientists could get a job with the fossil fuel industry and get a job that pays an average salary of $139,000, which is over $50,000 more than the average salary of a university scientist (so, ironically, scientists could make more money helping to cause climate change than they could by trying to understand it).

To get a scientist job at a university, or the $139,000+ a year scientist job with the fossil fuel industry, scientists need to get a Ph.D. To do that, scientists need to go to school for at least 23 years of their life, including ten years in college (at least four years as an undergraduate student and at least six years as a graduate student). Ten years of college is not cheap. A graduate student can’t have a job that makes much money while working on their degree. Many of them have to take out loans that could put them hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt by the time they get their Ph.D.  Then even after a scientist gets their Ph.D. they may not be making a lot of money for a while because many of them first have to work as underpaid postdocs. So scientists may be in their 30’s before they land a job that allows them to make a decent salary. Then they get to start paying off their student debt.

If money was the motivation, these scientists could become a pharmacist.  They would only need to go to college for four years to get a pharmacy degree, they would accumulate a lot less debt, join the workforce and start making money much sooner, and then make a salary between $73,000 to $133,00 a year, which is about the same they would make as the best paid research scientists.

Or, since you have to be really smart to get a Ph.D. in science, anyone who can get into a Ph.D. program could easily get a job with high tech industries or other big businesses and potentially make millions of dollars.

Not only is it unlikely that money would motivate every scientist on Earth to become a liar, but scientists are also trained and expected to be as accurate as possible. So spreading misinformation is a quick way to get fired.

Let’s say that all scientists are actually greedy and conniving and they did start this whole climate change thing as a hoax. That means the hoax may have started in 1896 when Svante Arrhenius first proposed the hypothesis that burning fossil fuels could change the world’s climate. Or it could have started in 1938 when G.S. Callendar first found evidence that our climate was changing because of human activity. Or the hoax could have started in the 1970s when scientists like Carl Sagan started warning the public that human-caused climate change was happening and needed to be taken seriously.

Let’s be conservative and assume this hoax started in the 1970s. For this hoax to have worked since then, every scientist in every country around the world, both the old, experienced scientists and all the new ones who got their Ph.Ds in the last five decades at hundreds of universities around the world, would have had to agree to go along with this hoax and not tell anyone. If this is what happened, then apparently the scientists all did this because once they heard about the hoax, they thought, “This climate change hoax sounds great! I’d love to do this because going to school for 23 years of my life and accumulating tons of debt so I can get a job paying $88,000 dollars a year where I will be lying to the public my entire life sounds like a great way to make money!!!”

Also, if this hoax is real, then somehow over four decades not one scientist around the world has spilled the beans about it. If you think that is possible, try telling a couple people a secret about yourself, like what your embarrassing middle name is. Make them promise not to reveal your secret to anyone. Then see how long it takes before everyone in school knows that your middle name is “Wendell.”

The China version of the hoax story is also ridiculous for the reasons I just gave, but also, if China is paying scientists to get them to lie to everyone that climate change is happening so China can ruin the economies of other nations, then that means that every climate scientist in 195 nations around the world agreed to become a traitor to their own country to make a little extra cash. Not only that, but why would China want to ruin the U.S. economy? We are paying China to make the products we buy, so if they ruin our economy, we won’t be able to buy as many products from them, which will ruin their economy too.

The political group version of the hoax, that certain people in the U.S. started the climate change hoax because they have some desperate need to force other people not to drive Hummers or use incandescent light bulbs, is also ridiculous for the reasons above. Though if this version is true, then the political groups convinced all the scientists in every other country on Earth to fake climate change, and the scientists all went along because they thought it would to be fun to spend their entire lives inconveniencing everyone else in their country.

Climate Denier Reason #2: Sure climate change is happening now, but it’s also happened throughout Earth’s history, so what’s happening now is totally natural and not being caused by people.

Climate change has happened throughout Earth’s history. There were times when the climate was so cold it is likely the entire planet was covered by ice. There are also times it has been so much warmer than now that the North and South Poles may have been ice free.

We also know that over 10,000 years ago we were in a glacial period of an Ice Age, meaning the climate around the world has warmed up naturally quite a bit since then.

No one denies that climate change happens naturally. That’s just not what is happening this time. The temperature has risen unusually and alarmingly quickly in the last 150 years. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which causes climate change, has also risen unusually and alarmingly quickly during that time period.

We know extra carbon dioxide makes the world warmer. We know through observation that pretty much all of this extra carbon dioxide is coming from people burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. Which means the climate change shoe fits and people are wearing it.

Even if the climate change happening now has some natural causes because, maybe, there is a volcano somewhere on Earth releasing a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we somehow haven’t noticed yet, or the sun is somehow getting warmer in a way that we can’t measure, the fact is billions of people around the world are still burning fossil fuels and adding a lot of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That is still going to affect our climate. If a volcano throws a blanket over you, the sun throws a blanket over you, and people burning fossil fuels throw a blanket over you, the blanket from the people burning fossil fuels is still a major reason you feel warmer.

Climate Denier Reason #3: How can there be climate change if it’s cold today?

This is something I’ve heard a lot of climate deniers say. The thing they’re not realizing is that “climate change” does not mean that every day from now on is going to be warmer than the day before. Climate change refers to changes in average temperatures over a long period of time, and not the temperature outside during any given second.  The temperature is still going to rise and fall from day to day. The Earth is also still tilting on its axis, so we still will experience colder temperatures in the winter.

Because climate change is based on average temperatures, it doesn’t even matter if one or two entire months in a year are colder than you’re used to, if the other ten or eleven months of that year are warmer than you’re used to. In that scenario, the average temperature is still rising even if you’re freezing for a couple months.

It’s even possible to live in a place right now where the average temperature isn’t rising. That still doesn’t mean climate change isn’t happening, because pretty much everywhere else on Earth is experiencing higher temperatures. The planet’s average temperature is still rising even if your town’s average temperature is not.

As an example of this, a few years ago a bunch of my friends on the East Coast were complaining on social media about how cold the winter was that year. Some of them were convinced that the cold winter proved climate change wasn’t happening. At the same time they were posting this, I was living in Oregon on the West Coast where we were experiencing a much warmer winter than what was normal for there. I wanted to post back to my East Coast climate denier friends: “It’s called “Global Warming,” not “East Coast Warming.” You might want to check the temperatures in other places around the world before you decide climate change isn’t happening” (I didn’t actually do this though, because I try not to yell at people on social media. Instead, I waited eight years and then wrote a lengthy blog post about it).

We all need to consider temperatures around the world when trying to understand climate change and not just base our opinions on how cold it feels when we walk from our house to our car today.

Climate Denier Reason #4: Scientists don’t actually agree that climate change is happening; therefore it’s fake science.

97% of scientists agree that human-caused climate change is happening.  That means 32 out of every 33 climate scientists agree that climate change is happening. Only 1 in 33 does not. Those are not evenly matched teams.

Unfortunately, when 24-hour news channels talk about climate change, they usually dig up one of the scientists from the 3% who think climate change isn’t happening so that person can come on TV and argue with one of the scientists from the much more abundant 97% of scientists who agree that climate change is happening. This makes the opposing viewpoints seem like they are evenly distributed among scientists when they are decidedly not. Pretty much all scientists agree climate change is happening with the exception of a few outliers.

Cable news channels do this because they are in competition with shows like Duck Dynasty and The Price is Right for viewers, so they need to make “news” as entertaining as possible to get people to watch their channel. Unfortunately, the easiest and cheapest way they have found to do be entertaining is to get two people who disagree with each other to come on the show and yell at each other, which may be fun to watch but it isn’t exactly the best way to actually learn something useful.

Saying that 3% of scientists is a significant enough percentage to doubt the truth of climate change is kind of like going to 33 doctors and having 32 of them tell you that you have cancer and one of them tells you that you don’t have cancer and then you decide you don’t have cancer because 1 doctor out of 33 says you don’t. It’s obvious why people would want to believe the one who is telling them that they don’t have cancer. That is what they want to hear. But, personally, I would rather get the bad news that I have cancer so I could start doing anything I could to prevent it from ruining my life. If I listen to the one doctor who tells me I don’t have cancer, who is most likely wrong since 32 other doctors say I do have cancer, then I won’t be treating the cancer and increasing my chances of dying quickly from it.

It’s the same thing with climate change. Personally, I’d much rather climate change was not happening and I was wrong about all of this. But the evidence is so massive and so many scientists are in agreement about it, that it is indisputable that climate change is happening now and we are causing it.

The good news is there is still time to do something about climate change and stop it from completely ruining our lives. I will tell you how we can do that in my next (and final) blog post in this series on climate change.

Online References and Resources:

Gallup News. "Global Warming Concern at Three-Decade High in U.S."
      http://news.gallup.com/poll/206030/global-warming-concern-three-decade-high.aspx
NASA. "Scientific consensus: Earth's climate is warming,"
      https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
The New York Times. "Where Are America’s Winters Warming the Most? In Cold Places."
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/16/climate/us-winter-warming.html
PayScale. "Research Scientist Salary."
      https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Research_Scientist/Salary
Science. "What Don't We Know?"
      http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/misc/webfeat/125th/
Slate. "Criticizing a Scientist’s Work Isn’t Bullying. It’s Science."
       http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/10/criticizing_a_scientist_s_work_isn_t_bullying.html
The Washington Post. "Much of Northeast notches warmest October in recorded history."
     https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/11/01/much-of-northeast-notches-warmest-october-in-recorded-history/?utm_term=.51c378df4439

Photos and Images:

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources. If they don't click anywhere I, or someone I know, took them, possibly as a screenshot on my iPhone.

It is not because too many of us are forgetting to turn off our kitchen stoves. It’s mainly because of what we are doing with carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide is a gas in our atmosphere that traps heat. It acts like a blanket around the Earth and is the main thing keeping living things cozy and warm and from freezing to death (if you want to know how carbon dioxide traps heat, read this post I wrote).

For carbon dioxide to be able to keep everything on Earth warm, you may think the atmosphere must be full of it, but you would be wrong. Only 0.04% of the atmosphere is made of carbon dioxide, which means 99.96% of the atmosphere is not carbon dioxide. Most of the atmosphere is nitrogen (about 78%), then oxygen (about 21%), then argon (about 0.9%), and then carbon dioxide (0.04%) (and then a bunch of other gases in even smaller amounts than carbon dioxide).

Scientists measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in “parts per million.” As I write this at the beginning of September 2017, there are 406.69 carbon dioxide parts per million in Earth’s atmosphere. What 406.69 parts per million means is for every million pounds of stuff in our atmosphere, about four hundred of those pounds will be carbon dioxide (406.69 pounds to be precise), and over 999,500 pounds of it will not be carbon dioxide (999,593.31 pounds to also be precise).

In other words, look again at this GIF of Elaine Benes dancing.

Let’s say the dancing Elaine is a carbon dioxide molecule and the other people around her are the other types of gases in the dance party that is the atmosphere. “406.56 parts per million of carbon dioxide” means for every dancing carbon dioxide Elaine in the atmosphere there will be about 2,500 other gas people, mostly nitrogen and oxygen gas people, standing around watching her.

There are many more than one carbon dioxide Elaine in the atmosphere. There are gazillions of them around Earth, but each dancing carbon dioxide Elaine is surrounded by about 2,500 oxygen and nitrogen wallflowers. So compared to the rest of the gas molecules in the atmosphere, there are hardly any carbon dioxide molecules. But, those relatively rare dancing carbon dioxide Elaines are the main things holding onto the sun’s heat and keeping us warm.

So, you do not need that much carbon dioxide to warm the Earth. And there is the problem. Humans have been adding a lot of extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere over the last 200 years or so.

Scientists can measure how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, not just now, but also from thousands of years ago. They can do this because gas molecules from the atmosphere get caught every year in things like glacier ice and the shells of ocean organisms. By studying layer after layer of glacier ice and seafloor fossils, scientists have been able to figure out how much carbon dioxide has been in the atmosphere for over the past 400,000 years or so. When they graph the amount of carbon dioxide over that length of time, this is what it looks like:

The amount of carbon dioxide goes up and down periodically during this time period (it’s down when Earth had past ice ages), but it stays under a certain line. That is until just recently when it goes crazy and gets much higher than it has been in at least 500,000 years.

This big change happens during the Nineteenth Century. In 1850, the carbon dioxide level was about 285 parts per million, but it has been rising ever since and now it’s over 406 parts per million (and still rising).

What happened in the 1800s that caused carbon dioxide levels to rise so rapidly? Humans figured out they could get rich by burning prehistoric plant and animal remains to run machines.

The rise in carbon dioxide happened at the same time as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution is what we call the period in history when businessmen and inventors figured out they could make products cheaper and faster with machines than they could by hand. This was exciting because the faster and cheaper they made stuff they could sell, the more money they could make.

These machines needed a source of energy in order to be able to run. The cheapest and easiest ways to get a lot of energy back around 1800 was to burn coal, a black rock found buried in the ground that is different from most other rocks because you can set it on fire.

The new factories built during the Industrial Revolution created a huge demand for coal, which led to more people digging it up to ship it to the factories.

Once the Industrial Revolution kicked into gear it created a desire for more new technologies to allow factories to make products even cheaper and faster, as well as new technologies that could be turned into products that people would want to buy. This led to many of the inventions that make our lives more comfortable, convenient, and secure to this day, like light bulbs, telephones, and cars.

All of these new machines also needed energy to run. This increased the demand for coal, but also got people looking for other cheap forms of energy, such as oil (“oil” meaning the black liquid buried in the ground that is also called "petroleum," not the oil carnival vendors deep fry Oreos in). Petroleum oil can be turned into fuels like gasoline and kerosene that can be burned to provide energy to machines like car engines. This new source of fuel kicked the Industrial Revolution into even higher gear and more and more machines kept running by burning fossil fuels.

Burning all these fuels to power the Industrial Revolution has increased the well being of human beings as a species. One indication of that is there are a lot more people now than there were at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In 1800 there were estimated to be around 1 billion people alive on Earth. Today in September of 2017, there are estimated to be over 7.4 billion people alive, and a big reason for that huge jump in human population size is because the Industrial Revolution allowed more people to meet their habitat needs for food, water, and shelter, as well as to get much better health care than they were able to back when things like leeches were considered advanced medical technology.

The Industrial Revolution has had some big costs, though. Some people benefited a lot from it while other peoples’ lives may have become worse. What may turn out to be the biggest cost of the Industrial Revolution, though, is it put a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

As I mentioned earlier, many of the machines that drove the Industrial Revolution were running on either coal, oil products like gasoline and kerosene, or natural gas (which is also found in the ground, but is different from gasoline). These sources of energy are called “fossil fuels.” Fossil fuels are literally fuels from fossils. Every time your mom pours gas into the Toyota, she is basically pouring dead prehistoric plankton juice into the car.

Fossil fuels were formed millions of years ago from the remains of living things. Though "fossil" probably makes you think of dinosaurs and, admittedly, it sounds way cooler to think of your mom’s Toyota running on T. Rex remains, fossil fuels pretty much all come from dead plankton in the ocean or dead plants on land.

Fossil fuels formed in places where decomposers weren’t able to eat the dead plankton and dead plants that were piling up. Over hundreds of thousands of years, pressure and heat changed these piles of dead stuff into oil (if it was plankton) or coal and natural gas (if it was plants). The fossil fuels then remained buried underground for millions of years.

Because oil and coal come from plants and plankton, they are full of carbon, which (as you may have already guessed) is one of the key ingredients in carbon dioxide.

If you have ever watched a science fiction show from the 1960’s, then you may have heard a guy with pointy ears use the phrase “carbon-based lifeforms.” All Earthlings, from microbes to cactus to your Aunt Stephanie, are carbon-based lifeforms, meaning all living things on Earth contain a lot of carbon. The carbon in your body makes up about 18% of your weight.

We get most of the carbon in our bodies from plants. Plants (and the types of plankton that act like plants, like algae) get their carbon by pulling carbon dioxide out of their environment. They use the carbon dioxide to make sugars through a process called photosynthesis. The sugars then store carbon and energy.

If plants and plankton die and nothing eats them, the carbon stays in their remains. If the dead plants and plankton over time turn into oil or coal, their carbon goes into the oil and coal too. If we then dig the fossil fuels up and burn them, we release the carbon that has been trapped in the oil and coal for millions of years. Once the carbon is free, it combines with oxygen to make carbon dioxide, which then goes into the atmosphere. When you see smoke coming out of a coal-fueled factory or exhaust coming out of the tailpipe of the car, a lot of the stuff rising in the air is escaping carbon dioxide.

This adds extra carbon dioxide to what is already cycling in and out of the atmosphere.

Scientists can measure how much carbon dioxide we have been releasing over time. From 1757, just before the Industrial Revolution, to 2014, humans have released about 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (1,480,000,000,000 tons to be a little more precise). If all that carbon dioxide stood on your bathroom scale, it would weigh almost three quadrillion pounds (2,960,000,000,000,000 pounds to also be more precise), about the same weight as roughly 42 trillion ten-year old kids. That’s a lot of extra carbon dioxide that has been added to the atmosphere.

That creates a problem because, since carbon dioxide is like a blanket, as we keep adding extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, we are basically putting more blankets around the Earth. The more blankets we put around the Earth, the warmer it gets.

As I wrote in my last post, scientists have observed that the Earth has been getting warmer over the last 150 years or so. This graph shows the change in average global temperatures and the change in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Notice they move in pretty much the same direction as one would expect since carbon dioxide traps heat.

You might be wondering, “How can people have produced 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide, particularly since I have never personally started a coal fire?” Even if you don’t burn fossil fuels in your house, you are still burning fossil fuels, just not in your house (though if your furnace or kitchen stove run on natural gas, like my furnace does, then you are burning fossil fuels in your house).

• Every electronic device in your house is running on electricity. Though the electricity may come from renewable or nuclear energy sources, most likely it comes from natural gas or coal. In 2016, over 64% of electricity used in the United States came from fossil fuels (33.8% of it from natural gas and the other 30.4% of it from coal).
• You are also using electricity when you go to school, work, a store, a restaurant, an arcade, or pretty much any other building, since the lights, screens, air-conditioners, heaters, etc. all run on energy that you are at least partially using. Even outdoor public spaces have electronic devices like street lights and traffic signals that are there for everyone's use.
• Every time you ride in a car, bus, or plane, you are burning petroleum fuels like gasoline.
• Every product in your home, including the materials that make-up your home, required energy to manufacture and get shipped from the factory to you. Most of that energy came from fossil fuels.
• All the food you eat also required energy to grow, harvest, keep cold, ship to you, and cook.

So we are each burning a lot of fossil fuels to live, even if most of those fossil fuels aren't burning where we can see them.

Just to give you some actual numbers, according to the World Bank, in 2013 (the latest I could find data) on average, each person on Earth released 5.0 metric tons of carbon dioxide that year, which is about 11,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per person. If that same average amount per person happens this year, then that means about 7.5 billion people are each going to add around 11,000 pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2017 (82,500,000,000 pounds total).

And that's the world average. Some countries produce a lot more carbon dioxide than others, like, for instance, the United States, where I live. In 2013, we released 16.4 metric tons (36,156 pounds) of carbon dioxide per person. That's more than three times the world average.

So that’s why scientists think people are causing climate change. They know carbon dioxide makes the atmosphere warmer. They know people are burning a lot of fossil fuels. They know burning fossil fuels adds a lot of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. They know the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising. And they know the Earth keeps getting warmer as the carbon dioxide levels keep rising.

So that’s what scientists think. What do I think about their findings about climate change? I will tell you in my next blog post.

PS. There are other ways scientists have determined we cause climate change, like removing forests, and by releasing methane, which is another powerful greenhouse gas, but because I only have so much time, you’ll have to look up how they contribute to climate change yourself. Sorry!

If you want to learn more about how scientists learn the things they do, read my free eBooks Uncovering Earth's Secrets and Where Wild Microbes Grow.

Online References and Resources:

The Atlantic. "The Hockey Stick: The Most Controversial Chart in Science, Explained."
      https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-hockey-stick-the-most-controversial-chart-in-science-explained/275753/
EOS. "Current Carbon Emissions Unprecedented in 66 Million Years."
      https://eos.org/articles/current-carbon-emissions-unprecedented-in-66-million-years
NASA. "The Human Factor: Understanding the Sources of Rising Carbon Dioxide."
      https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco/news/oco-20090113.html
NOAA. "Carbon dioxide levels rose at record pace for 2nd straight year."
      http://www.noaa.gov/news/carbon-dioxide-levels-rose-at-record-pace-for-2nd-straight-year
Popular Science. "How we know that climate change is happening—and that humans are causing it."
       http://www.popsci.com/how-we-know-that-climate-change-is-happening
Popular Science. "Six irrefutable pieces of evidence that prove climate change is real."
      http://www.popsci.com/evidence-climate-change-is-real
Scientific American. "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Hits Record Levels."
      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-hits-record-levels/
Scientific American. "The Crazy Scale of Human Carbon Emission."
      https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/the-crazy-scale-of-human-carbon-emission/
Scientific American. "If carbon dioxide makes up only a minute portion of the atmosphere, how can global warming be traced to it? And how can such a tiny amount of change produce such large effects?"
      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/if-carbon-dioxide-makes-u/
University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems. "Carbon Footprint Factsheet."
      http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet

Photos and Images:

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources (except the first photo, which was taken by my dad about thirty years ago).

Why would pretty much all the world’s scientists think such a thing? Mainly because they have been collecting decades and decades of evidence that show this is happening.

Some of the evidence is that Earth’s average annual temperature has been rising. Scientists have been measuring and recording temperatures around the Earth for about 135 years. At the end of each year, they look at all those temperature records for the year and figure out the average temperature for the entire planet. This means we now have about 135 years of average temperature records. When you graph these average temperatures, it looks like this (except, not necessarily with a sunset in the background):

As you look at this graph from left to right, you are seeing the average temperatures for each year from 1885 to 2015. If the climate was not changing, the average temperatures would change from year to year (because weather is never perfectly consistent), but the center of the jagged line would stay pretty much in the same place. That is not what you see on the actual graph, though. The jagged line takes a dramatic turn upwards as you look to the right, meaning the average temperature keeps getting higher as you approach our present time, meaning the Earth is getting warmer, meaning our climate is changing.

Even if scientists hadn’t been recording temperatures around the world for 135 years, there is other evidence they have observed that show our planet is getting warmer. Here are a few examples:

Glacier National Park is running out of glaciers.

Glacier National Park did not get its name because the first European guy to discover it was named Zebulon Glacier. It has that name because it is a national park that once was full of glaciers (over 150 glaciers were in the park when it was founded in 1910). Glacier National Park is now down to only 25 glaciers and those glaciers that are left are all a lot smaller than they used to be.

Here’s how just one of Glacier National Park’s glaciers has changed over the last century:

Why are the glaciers disappearing? Because Glacier National Park has kept getting warmer since 1910.

If the warming continues (which, unfortunately, it will) the glaciers in Glacier National Park will all be gone in your lifetime, and this national park will have to be called The National Park Formerly Known as Glacier.

You can learn more about how much glaciers have melted in Glacier National Park by going here.

Frozen mammoths in Siberia are thawing out.

Note: Thawed mammoths are already dead, so they won't be attacking your town anytime soon.

Mammoths used to live in Siberia until they started going extinct around 10,000 years ago. The remains of many of these dead animals have been preserved by the Siberian permafrost ever since then. “Permafrost” is the name for places where the ground remains frozen for years at a time. You find permafrost in the tundra near the polar regions as well as on the top of many tall mountains, or at least you used to. The permafrost in Siberia (and many other places) is no longer “perma.” Much of it is melting into mud. This has led to a Siberia Tusk Rush. The newly unfrozen permafrost makes it much easier to find and collect pieces of dead mammoths. This makes Siberia Tusk Rushers excited because you can sell mammoth tusks for the ivory in them and make lots of money.

Why are frozen mammoths thawing out? Because it is much warmer in Siberia than it used to be.

You can learn more about the melting permafrost and the Siberia Tusk Rush by going here.

People can now sail through the Arctic Ocean.

That is a big deal because, until just five years ago, there was too much ice to allow anyone to travel by boat through the Arctic Ocean. This did not stop people from trying. For hundreds of years European sailors looked for a “Northwest Passage” through the Arctic Ocean, but they weren’t successful because of the massive amounts of ice in their way. Many of them died trying.

It is normal for some of the polar ice to melt in the warmer summer months and then come back in the cold winter, but it never used to melt enough in the summertime to allow anyone to sail north of Alaska, Canada, or Russia without large and dangerous chunks of ice stopping them.

It’s a different story now as this video shows...

The ice cap has melted so much that in the summer of 2016, for the first time ever, a cruise ship was able to sail through the Arctic Ocean. So an ocean journey that once killed people can now be done leisurely while overeating at a nonstop buffet.  

Why is the Arctic polar ice cap melting? Because it is warmer in the Arctic Ocean than it used to be.

You can learn more about the melting Arctic ice cap and the way it opening up new shipping routes by going here.

Some Pacific islands are disappearing underwater.

As of just recently, five of the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean are now completely below the ocean surface. These weren’t huge islands. The biggest one now underwater was about the size of nine football fields, but still.

The Solomon Islands are not the only ones disappearing below the ocean. The island nation of Kiribati in the Pacific is worried enough about rising sea level that it is currently buying land in another country so its people have a place to go once their islands homes are underwater.

Why are islands in the Pacific starting to disappear? Because the Pacific Ocean is warmer than it used to be.

All things expand when they get warmer, so as the ocean gets warmer, the water in it keeps spreading out. Since the only way ocean water can spread out is by going up, this results in rising sea level.

Sea level is also rising because as the air gets warmer around the world, it melts glaciers (like, the ones in Glacier National Park) and the water from those melted glaciers often makes it to the ocean.

Scientists have been measuring sea level since at least 1870 and it has risen over ten inches so far. If it continues to rise (and unfortunately it will) islands like this one will be in big trouble:

You can learn more about the disappearing Solomon Islands by going here.

Antarctica is turning green.

Simple plants called mosses can briefly grow along the northern edges of Antarctica during the warmer summer months. This only happens on less than 1% of Antarctica surface, though. The other 99%-plus of Antarctica remains covered in ice all year long. Well, at least until recently. Scientists are finding moss growing in more places and quicker than it ever used to.

Why is Antarctica turning greener? Because it’s warmer there than it used to be there.

You can learn more about the greening of Antarctica by going here.

The Great Barrier Reef is bleaching.

“Bleaching” does not mean the Great Barrier Reef is dyeing its hair blonde. That would be awesome. It means the reef is dying (“dying” without the “e” in the middle).

The reason coral reefs are bleaching has to do with the fact that corals live together with algae (corals and algae have what scientists call a “symbiotic relationship”). Corals want to be roommates with algae because algae can make their own food from sunlight through photosynthesis. The corals mooch off the algae and that way the corals get enough food to eat. In return, the corals gives the algae a safe place to live.

This arrangement changes when the temperatures get too high. When it's hot,  the corals kick out their algae roommates. Scientists are not 100% sure why this happens. It may be because the algae never do the dishes, but a more reasonable theory is because the heat changes the algae's ability to share food with the corals and, since they can't help each other anymore, they go their separate ways. When this happens, the corals not only lose their main food source, but also their color (all the colors in corals come from their algae roommates), thus the name "bleaching" because the reef suddenly turns white.

Without the algae, the corals eventually start dying, which takes away food and shelter from all the other animals who hang around the reef, so all those animals have to move out too. You end up with a reef that looks something like this:

When a healthy coral reef should look something like this:

If things cool off in a month or so, the corals can recover, and the reef springs back to life. If it stays unusually warm for too long, though, the corals starve to death and the entire reef stops working as a habitat for other animals, who all have to move out and hopefully find another place where they can survive.

This is what is happening in the Great Barrier Reef north of Australia. The Great Barrier Reef is a coral reef that is 1,400 miles long, which is about the same distance as my house in Rochester, New York to Miami, Florida.  It is so big that astronauts can see it from space (the reef, not my house).

Unfortunately, the 2016-2017 summer (remember, Australia is in the southern Hemisphere, so they have summer at the same time people in North America and Europe have winter) is the second year in a row that the Great Barrier Reef has experienced massive bleaching, and the scientists who study it are seeing that much of it is not coming back.

Why is the Great Barrier Reef bleaching now? Because the ocean north of Australia is much warmer than it used to be.

You can learn more about the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef here.

I could actually keep going and list other examples that show evidence for how the world is getting warmer, like how spring flowers keep opening up earlier each year and they’re now out of whack with the pollinators who migrate to feed off them. Or how invasive species from warm places, like fire ants, keep spreading farther north. Or how pikas are disappearing because mountain tops where they live are now too warm for pikas to survive there. And so on. But I'm already pushing the limits of how long anyone will read a blog post, so I will move on.

If the only story I had to share was about the glaciers in Glacier National Park melting, then the only thing we could say is something weird is happening in Glacier National Park. But if you look at all the places I just mentioned when they are displayed on a map:

There’s something weird happening across the entire planet.

And all we talked about was how temperature is changing. Other types of weather events are regularly becoming more extreme, which is also an example of climate change. More areas around the world are experiencing droughts and/or intense storms than ever before.

This is because heat is energy, so the warmer the atmosphere is, the more energy it has, and the more energy there is bouncing around in the atmosphere, the crazier the weather gets.

So it is definitely a fact that climate change is happening in our lifetimes.

But that still leaves the question: Why do scientists think people are causing climate change? Climate change has happened many times in the past when we weren’t even around. Why is now different?

I’ll write about that in my next post.

So far I don't have any books specifically about climate change, but the subjects of all of them are connected to climate change is some way (except maybe my sports gear book). You can learn more about all my books here.

Online References and Resources:

The Atlantic. "Earth's Oceans Are Steadily Warming."
      https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/make-no-mistake-earths-oceans-are-steadily-warming/512189/
The Atlantic. "When Will The North Pole Melt?" video.
      https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/548441/when-will-the-north-pole-melt/
BBC News. "Five Pacific islands disappear as sea levels rise."
      http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36255749
Bloomberg. "Apocalypse Tourism? Cruising the Melting Arctic Ocean."
      https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-crystal-serenity-northwest-passage-cruise/
The Conversation. "Great Barrier Reef bleaching event: what happens next?"
      http://theconversation.com/great-barrier-reef-bleaching-event-what-happens-next-56664
EOS. "How Does Changing Climate Bring More Extreme Events?"
      https://eos.org/editors-vox/how-does-changing-climate-bring-more-extreme-events
The Guardian. "American pika vanishing from western US as 'habitat lost to climate change'."
       https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/26/american-pika-vanishing-from-western-us-as-habitat-lost-to-climate-change
The Guardian. ""Arctic ice melt 'already affecting weather patterns where you live right now'."
      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/19/arctic-ice-melt-already-affecting-weather-patterns-where-you-live-right-now
The Guardian. "Besieged by the rising tides of climate change, Kiribati buys land in Fiji."
      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/01/kiribati-climate-change-fiji-vanua-levu
The Guardian. "Climate change is disrupting flower pollination, research shows."
      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/06/climate-change-is-disrupting-flower-pollination-research-shows
The Guardian. "Global warming is causing more extreme storms."
      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/feb/09/global-warming-is-causing-more-extreme-storms
LiveScience. "New Clues Emerge On How Corals Bleach."
      https://www.livescience.com/39439-coral-bleaching-mystery.html
NASA. "Global Climate Change: Global Temperature."
      https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
NASA. "Global Climate Change: Sea Level."
      https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
NASA. "Ramp-up in Antarctic ice loss speeds sea level rise."
      https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2749/ramp-up-in-antarctic-ice-loss-speeds-sea-level-rise/
NASA. "The scientific method and climate change: How scientists know."
      https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2743/the-scientific-method-and-climate-change-how-scientists-know/
National Geographic. "These Maps Show the Epic Quest for a Northwest Passage."
      http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/10/northwest-passage-map-history/
National Geographic. "Tracking Mammoths."
      http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/04/125-mammoth-tusks/larmer-text
The New York Times. "As Arctic Ice Vanishes, New Shipping Routes Open."
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/03/science/earth/arctic-shipping.html
The New York Times. "California Drought Is Made Worse by Global Warming, Scientists Say."
      https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/21/science/climate-change-intensifies-california-drought-scientists-say.html
The New York Times. "How 2016 Became Earth’s Hottest Year on Record."
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/science/earth/2016-hottest-year-on-record.html?emc=edit_clim_20170601&nl=&nlid=79666233&te=1
The New York Times. "It’s Not Your Imagination. Summers Are Getting Hotter."
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/28/climate/more-frequent-extreme-summer-heat.html?_r=0
The New York Times. "Large Sections of Australia’s Great Reef Are Now Dead, Scientists Find."
      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/science/great-barrier-reef-coral-climate-change-dieoff.html?_r=0
The New York Times. "Mapping 50 Years of Melting Ice in Glacier National Park."
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/24/climate/mapping-50-years-of-ice-loss-in-glacier-national-park.html?_r=0
The New York Times. "A Remote Pacific Nation, Threatened by Rising Seas."
       https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/world/asia/climate-change-kiribati.html
NOAA. "How does climate change affect coral reefs?."
      https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coralreef-climate.html
NOAA. "U.S. Climate Extremes Index (CEI): Graph."
      https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei/graph/us/4/01-12
RadioFreeEurope. "The Mammoth Pirates."
       https://www.rferl.org/a/the-mammoth-pirates/27939865.html
Science Friday. "Antarctica Is Getting Greener."
      https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/antarctica-is-getting-greener/
Smithsonian. "Does Climate Change Cause Extreme Weather Events"
      http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/does-climate-change-cause-extreme-weather-events-180964506/
Smithsonian. "How Climate Change is Helping Invasive Species Take Over."
      http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-climate-change-is-helping-invasive-species-take-over-180947630/
USA Today. "The Arctic, Antarctic poles just set a terrifying new record for low levels of sea ice."
      https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2017/03/23/artic-antarctic-sea-ice-shrinks-record-low/99530332/
USGS. "Retreat of Glaciers in Glacier National Park."
      https://www.usgs.gov/centers/norock/science/retreat-glaciers-glacier-national-park
The Washington Post. "Thanks to global warming, Antarctica is beginning to turn green."
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/05/18/thanks-to-global-warming-antarctica-is-starting-to-turn-green/?utm_term=.feb870a483e0
The Washington Post. "Why some of the Solomon Islands have disappeared."
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/health-science/why-some-of-the-solomon-islands-have-disappeared/2016/05/09/4bb019ea-15d0-11e6-971a-dadf9ab18869_video.html
YaleEnvironment360. "A Close-Up Look at the Catastrophic Bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef."
      http://e360.yale.edu/features/inside-look-at-catastrophic-bleaching-of-the-great-barrier-reef-2017-hughes

Also this:

Chasing Coral, a documentary you can watch on Netflix.

Photos and Images:

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources.

If you have been to the Moon, then chances are you were probably dressed like this. There are many reasons you should wear a spacesuit on the Moon.  It will make sure you have oxygen to breathe.  It will protect you from getting knocked unconscious by minuscule meteorites (for realsies). And it will keep you from being roasted and/or frozen to death.

Unlike the Earth, it is very easy to be roasted and also frozen on the Moon, sometimes within seconds of each other. If you stood on the Moon in the sunlight while wearing shorts and a t-shirt, your temperature would quickly rise to 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius). That is more than hot enough to boil water. But walk over a few feet into the shade of a big rock and your temperature would drop to 120 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-84 degrees Celsius). That's a 370 degree Fahrenheit difference that happens by taking a few steps. Wearing a spacesuit would reflect the heat away during the times you’re in the sun and insulate you from the cold when you’re in the shadows so you could walk around on the Moon without quickly becoming dead.

The Earth and the Moon are both pretty much the same distance from the Sun...

...but there is nowhere on the surface of Earth where you will naturally experience 250 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures (well, except if you jump into a hot spring or an active volcano). And you would have to go to Antarctica on an abnormally cold day to experience 120 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

So, what gives? Isn’t the Sun providing the Earth with the same amount of heat as it does the Moon? Why aren’t Earthlings alternating between being broiled and frozen to death every time we walk in and out of a gazebo?

The Sun is providing the Earth and the Moon with pretty much the same amount of heat. The reason the Earth does not have ridiculously extreme temperature changes like the Moon does is because the Earth has its own built-in spacesuit. This spacesuit, which not only protects us from extreme temperatures, but also provides us with oxygen and protects us from being hit by minuscule meteorites, is called the atmosphere.

The atmosphere is the stuff around us we call the air. Even though you can’t see the air, smell the air, or taste the air (if you can see, smell, and taste the air, you may want to move to another town), the atmosphere is filled with gazillions of different molecules, which are little things so tiny you can’t see them even with a microscope. You can feel air molecules, though. If you wave your hand toward your head, the breeze you feel is a bunch of molecules smacking you in the face.

The molecules in Earth’s atmosphere are things such as nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide that are being gassy (a more accurate way to say that is: they are in their "gaseous state").

Some of these gaseous molecules, called “greenhouse gases,” are what keep the Earth’s atmosphere warm and its temperatures pretty much stable. Greenhouse gases do not warm the atmosphere by making heat, though. Instead, they trap heat from the sun.

The sun is sending heat to the Earth through its rays. Most of the sun's rays that pass through the atmosphere are in the form of ultraviolet waves (the radiation that sunblock protects you from) and visible light (the radiation that allows you to see). Ultraviolet and visible light waves can travel right through the atmosphere (though about half of these waves get blocked by clouds and other things in the atmosphere, which is a good thing for us). When sunlight waves reach the ground, the surfaces absorb their heat. As the ground warms up, that heat eventually will start rising back in the air (when you see a hawk or a vulture soaring around in a circle without flapping its wings, it is able to do so because it is riding rising hot air that was heated by the sun-baked ground). This heat is not released as ultraviolet light (you won’t get a sunburn from the ground) or visible light (you don’t need sunglasses to look at the ground). Instead, because some of the energy of the waves is lost during absorption, the heat from the ground is released as infrared radiation.

Though greenhouse gases cannot stop ultraviolet or visible light radiation, they can stop infrared radiation heat, at least for a little while. In doing so, greenhouse gases act kind of like a blanket. If you have ever gone to your Great-Grandmother’s house in the winter and had to sleep in the room that she doesn’t bother to heat because normally no one sleeps in there, then you know as you first tuck into that freezing cold bed that blankets are not naturally warm. Eventually, they warm up, though, thanks to the heat in your body. The inside of your body is about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit and that heat continuously leaves your body and warms the air trapped under the blanket. Eventually, that makes you feels nice and toasty under the blanket, and just your face freezes all night.

Greenhouse gases are like a blanket around the Earth. They trap heat in our atmosphere to keep us warm. * (That asterisk indicates there is a footnote at the bottom of this post you may want to read.)

We have known about the powers of greenhouse gases for over 150 years. Back in the mid-Nineteenth Century, scientists like Eunice Foote did experiments to see how different kinds of gases affect temperature. For her most famous experiment, Eunice put thermometers into bottles. She then used an air pump to remove all the air from the bottles . One bottle was left without any air in it. Another bottle was filled with just carbon dioxide, another one with just oxygen, and the fourth bottle with the regular air you are breathing right now. The bottles were tightly sealed and then left out in the sun all day. She kept checking the temperature inside each bottle. She observed again and again that the bottle with just carbon dioxide in it became much warmer than the other bottles filled with oxygen, regular air, or nothing, indicating that carbon dioxide was much better at holding onto heat than the other gases. (You can read the original description of her experiment here.)

Since Eunice published these findings, many other scientists have done experiments that confirm that carbon dioxide stays warm much longer than most other gases. These experiments helped scientists realize that the carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and one of the main reasons our atmosphere is as consistently warm as it is.

Not all gases are greenhouse gases, though. Oxygen and nitrogen, which are way more abundant in our atmosphere than carbon dioxide, are so bad at trapping heat that, if they were on show called "America’s Got Heat-Trapping Talent," they would be buzzed off the stage almost immediately.

Carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases, are better at holding heat than oxygen and nitrogen because carbon dioxide gas molecules have more parts than oxygen and nitrogen gas molecules do.

Here are simplified and creatively colored illustrations of what these three gas molecules look like.

The carbon dioxide molecule in this illustration has parts sticking out that almost look like arms (or like an Imperial TIE fighter). The oxygen and nitrogen molecules do not have parts that look like arms (they are actually in the unfortunate situation, at least in these illustrations, of looking kind of like a butt). The more parts a molecule has, the better it will be at trapping heat energy.

Heat is basically energy. The warmer something is, the more energy it has. When energy meets gas molecules, the energy makes the gas molecules vibrate, kind of like they are dancing. The gas molecules hold the energy as long as they keep vibrating.

Nitrogen and oxygen gas are simple molecules without many parts. When heat energy hits them, the best they can do is sway a tiny bit, kind of like a Weeble.

Carbon dioxide gas molecules are complex with more parts to them, so when heat energy hits them, they can vibrate around with crazy dance moves, kind of like Elaine Benes.

Because their extra parts allow them to do more dance moves than oxygen or nitrogen molecules can do, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas molecules hold the heat energy in the atmosphere longer than non-greenhouse gas molecules can. A molecule cannot hold the energy forever, though.  When the heat leaves a carbon dioxide molecule, it is usually trapped by another greenhouse gas molecule, which holds it a little while and then releases it to be caught by another greenhouse gas molecule. It’s kind of like a game of atmospheric Hot Potato, except the “hot potato” in this game is invisible, actually hot, and there are gazillions of these hot potatoes of heat energy being tossed around.

As the greenhouse gas molecules continuously play Hot Potato with heat energy, some of the heat escapes into space. That doesn't make us freeze because the lost heat is replaced everyday by the Sun.

Greenhouse gases keep passing the Sun's heat energy around the atmosphere, so we stay warm and the atmospheric temperature stays stable. Greenhouse gases bounce heat around even to places where there is no direct sunlight, so when you walk into shade, or day turns into night, the temperatures change a little, but not that much. Nowhere on Earth can you stand with half your body in sun and half in the shade and have half your body cooking while the other half is freezing. This could happen on our next door neighbor the Moon, though, because it has no greenhouse gases.

So we have carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to thank for us not having to wear spacesuits to protect us from extreme temperatures as we walk around the Earth. These gases keep our atmosphere warm and our temperatures stable. Without them, life as we know it on Earth would not exist.

You may now be wondering, if carbon dioxide keeps us alive, then why are we worried about adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere? You can find out the answer to that here (it's another blog post by me).

So far, I don't have any books about carbon dioxide, but if you want to check out some of my books anyways, go here.

Online References and Resources:

Alice Bell. "Climate histories. The oft-ignored story of Eunice Foote."
      https://tinyletter.com/climatestories/letters/climate-histories-the-oft-ignored-story-of-eunice-foote
EPA. "Overview of Greenhouse Gases."
      https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases
NPR. "It's All About Carbon, Episodes 1-5." Animated videos.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvphJO8VKlc&index=4&list=PL1LsUTp-9_dmq24waaoU_3uNTeEnWKYgz
PBS LearningMedia. "Extreme Temperatures on the Moon."
      https://ny.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/ess05.sci.ess.eiu.extemp/extreme-temperatures-on-the-moon/#.WR7_LjOZOnc

Also, this book:

An Ocean of Air by Gabrielle Walker

Photos and Images:

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources.

* (This is that footnote I told you about.) Well kind of. The actual blanket around the Earth is gravity. Gravity is what traps the air molecules in our atmosphere, and the air molecules are what hold the heat (just like blankets trap the air molecules heated by your body or a greenhouse traps air warmed by the sun). The analogy breaks down though because gravity isn’t something covering the atmosphere like a blanket. It is a force from the Earth that pulls everything towards it.

To know that, you first need to know the difference between “weather” and “climate”

If you just now thought to yourself, “You mean ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ aren’t the same thing?,” they aren’t, but don’t feel bad if you didn’t know that. A lot of adults don’t know the difference either, like, for instance, all the adults who made this shampoo commercial:

If the adults who made that commercial had known what “weather” and “climate” actually mean, they would have called that shampoo “Weather Control” and not “Climate Control” because “weather” is the word that actually means whatever is happening in the atmosphere right now than can mess up your hair.

Weather is stuff like wind, humidity, and all these things:

So if you go outside right now, however the air feels and any stuff that is falling on your head from the sky (unless the falling stuff is like a meteorite or an anvil) is what we call weather.  Weather is also the atmospheric phenomena that happened at any time or any place in the past, like whatever was happening in the air outside your Grandma’s place on March 13, 2009 at 8:30 in the morning.

“Climate” is the word we use to describe what the weather usually is like. It’s related to weather, but not the same thing.

Climate is kind of like the average weather for a place. Let’s say you decided to stand out in your backyard for an entire year and measure each day’s weather with instruments such as thermometers, barometers, and rain gauges. If you then took the averages of those measurements, you could figure out your backyard’s climate for that year.  Scientists do pretty much the same thing when they determine climate for an area, except they look at the averages from a much longer period of time (often decades or even centuries).

When scientists are done averaging weather data to determine climate, the climate report typically looks like this:

Or this:

Or this:

So what a true “Climate Control” shampoo would be protecting your hair from are graphs and statistical averages.

These graphs and statistics let us know how much it typically rains in an area during the year, how warm it typically gets in an area during the year, etc. Looking at a climate report for your region is not the best way to decide what to wear today  (you need the weather report for that). But looking at climate reports for different regions would be helpful when you are deciding what state you want to move to. For example, if you hate being cold, you will probably prefer the climate of Florida to the climate of Minnesota. Personally, I hate being hot and I like snow, so I live in upstate New York.

So back to our original question, “What is climate change?” As I'm assuming you already guessed, “climate change” is what we call it when a place’s climate changes.  Climate change does not mean today it is sunny and tomorrow it is raining. That’s the weather changing. Climate change means the weather in a region (or around the world) keeps being different from what is expected, until what used to be typical weather is no longer typical.

To give a more specific example of what “climate change” means, lets say that for the last 125 years, scientists have been carefully measuring temperature around the world and using that data to determine the average temperature for the entire planet for each year. The scientists then graph all 125 or so yearly average temperatures. If the climate is stable, it is normal for those temperatures to zigzag up and down on the graph from year to year, but as you look at them across the years, the temperatures will basically make a horizontal line.

If the graph looks like this, though…

…and the average annual temperature aren’t grouping around a horizontal line but instead have been trending upwards for the last hundred years, that means “climate change” is occurring, because the temperature is not consistent, but instead keeps rising over the decades. This, of course, isn't a hypothetical example. That's really what's been happening.

Normally, climate change is a natural thing. It has occurred throughout Earth’s history.

The Earth’s atmosphere has been much warmer in the past than it is now. If we had been around during the time of the dinosaurs, we would all be wearing t-shirts and shorts whenever T. Rex’s ate us, because the climate then was tropical around most of the planet.

The Earth’s atmosphere has also been much colder in the past than it is now. If I lived 15,000 years ago when the last Ice Age was happening, my hometown in upstate New York would have looked something like this all year round:

Usually when you hear people talk about “climate change,” they are not talking about climate change in the past. They are talking about climate change happening now. You may also hear the term “global warming” to talk about today’s climate change, but “climate change” seems to be the most commonly used term for what’s happening today.

One thing scientists have observed over and over again in both the past and today is that climate change is directly connected to a type of gas in the atmosphere that is also coming out of your nose right now. Scientists have found that when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere changes, the climate will change too.

How can an invisible gas change the climate? I’ll be writing about that in my next post.

To learn more about how scientists have learned about past climates, read my free eBook Uncovering Earth’s Secrets.

Online References and Resources:

American Geosciences Institute. "What is the difference between weather and climate?"
      https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/difference-between-weather-and-climate
EPA. "Climate Change: Basic Information"
      https://www.epa.gov/climatechange/climate-change-basic-information
NASA. "What is Climate Change?"
      https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/what-is-climate-change-k4.html
National Ocean Science Service. "What is the difference between weather and climate?"
      http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/weather_climate.html

Photos and Images:

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources.

All living things need to eat (or produce) food and to breathe oxygen to get the energy they need, except for some microbes. There are a bunch of microbe species that don’t need oxygen (and some microbes that don’t really need food; they basically eat electricity).

These microbes that make electricity without oxygen can power a battery. I know this because I have a microbe-powered battery in my house right now. It looks like this:

This is called a MudWatt battery. See that brown stuff in it? That is literally mud. The mud itself does not produce electricity. The microbes inside of it do. They can produce enough electricity to run a clock.

You may think in order for this battery to produce electricity, the MudWatt battery has to come with special microbe-filled mud, but…

…mud is not included in this battery. You have to  provide the mud and the microbes yourself.

Luckily, you can find the right kind of microbes pretty much anywhere you choose to stick in a shovel. To build our battery, my lab partner and I decided to get the muddiest mud we could find by going to a pond not too far from my house.

Then we hooked up the wires that would collect the electricity from the microbes.

Once you set-up the battery, the bulb does not light up right away, so don’t expect instant gratification. Because microbes are microscopic, a lot of them need to be living in the battery to produce enough electricity. By "a lot," I don't mean, like, 40. My battery currently has 291,666,673.185925 bacteria living inside of it (though I'm not sure what 0.185925 of a bacterium looks like).

So it will take a few days for the bacteria to reproduce until there are enough of them to get the light bulb flashing (It took a couple weeks for them to light up the bulb in my battery, and when that happened, I became much more excited than you might expect a 44-year old man to be).

So how do these microbes do this?

The microbes producing electricity in the battery (and in soils pretty much everywhere) are different species of Shewanella and Geobacter bacteria. If you were able to look at these types of bacteria with a high-powered microscope, they would look like this:

These bacteria usually live underground in places that do not have oxygen. Without oxygen, they need to breathe something else to turn their food into usable energy. For many Shewanella and Geobacter bacteria, the “something else” they breathe is metals, like iron.

Yes, Virginia, some bacteria breathe metal. That does not mean you can put a car in front of a Shewanella bacteria and then watch the car get breathed up the Shewanella’s nose. For one thing, bacteria don’t have noses. For another thing,  “breathe” is not the best word I could have used. We breathe oxygen because we need oxygen in our bodies for our cells to do respiration (respiration is the process I described in my last post where chemical reactions occur within cells to break down food and make the kind of energy the cells need). Shewanella and Geobacter do respiration outside their bodies, so they do not need to breathe anything in their bodies. Instead, they need to get in contact with something outside their body that is good at attracting electrons.

Shewanella and Geobacter bacteria use metal for respiration because, like oxygen, metals are electron magnets. These bacteria look for metal in the soil and rock where they live. When Shewanella and Geobacter bacteria find metal, they can connect to it for respiration in three ways.

1. Grow right on the metal
2. Grow filaments (long, living, string things) until they reach and attach to the metal. The filaments then act like living electrical wires. Scientists call them "nanowires.". (You can watch videos of bacteria growing nanowires here. You can also see nanowires on the photo of the Geobacter bacteria above.
3. Make some riboflavin. Riboflavin can pick up loose electrons from inside the bacteria and carry them to the metal like an electron shuttle bus. (You are (hopefully) eating riboflavin regularly, because riboflavin is also called Vitamin B2).

Each of these methods allow the metal to suck up the bacteria’s electrons like an electron vacuum cleaner and turn the bacteria's food into usable energy.

The MudWatt battery provide metal to the bacteria. When you set-up the battery, you put a wire with a disc attached to it in the mud. This part of the wire is called an anode. The anode puts a relatively large amount of metal in the mud that a multitude of microbes can then use for respiration. All that extra metal allows more bacteria to live there, so the bacteria keep reproducing and their population keeps growing until they are producing lots of electricity

The population would not be able to grow, though, if there is not enough food for them to eat (remember, respiration turns food into usable energy). These Shewanella and Geobacter bacteria get their food by eating sugars in the soil. All living things have sugars in them (as well some nonliving things, like Twinkies). Soils are full of decomposed bits of living things, including sugars. One of the reasons I got mud from the edge of a wetland pond for my battery is the soil in wetlands tends to be rich in organic materials, including lots of sugars. If I had used dirt from my backyard, which would not have as much organic stuff as the marsh mud, I would have added ketchup to the soil. That is actually what the MudWatt people recommend you do. You do not add ketchup to make the mud taste good to finicky bacteria, but because most store-bought ketchup is basically tomato-flavored sugar juice.

The ketchup adds sugar to the mud that the bacteria can then eat.

As the anode attracts electrons, it creates an electron party inside the anode that every electron wants to get out of because electrons have no interest in hanging out with each other. The wire from the mud to the circuit and the light bulb provides an escape route for all these anti-social electrons. As they travel away from each other through the wire, the electrons provide the electrical energy the light bulb needs.

Scientists are unsure whether these microbes will ever be able to produce electricity in a way that we can cheaply and directly use to power our homes, but the microbes have the potential to help us in a lot of other ways. Scientists feel confident that these microbes may be able to help us make powerful hydrogen fuel cells. We also may be able to use the nanowires in electronics as highly conductive, microscopic wires that do need to be manufactured in ways that produce pollution. And, since some of the bacteria can breakdown a variety of metals, they may be able to help clean-up pollution around the world. The discovery of these amazing microbes will benefit us in many ways beyond just lighting a bulb in my basement.

To learn more about metal-breathing, electricity-producing microbes, read my free eBook Where Wild Microbes Grow.

You can learn more about the MudWatt Battery and even buy your own kit at the MuddWatt website.

PS. Thank you to Keegan Cooke and Kevin Rand, the inventors of the MudWatt Battery, for providing me with two free MudWatt battery kits to play with. Also thanks to Ann Estes, who created the wonderful website Mostly Microbes, for introducing me to Keegan and Kevin.

Online references and resources

Mental_floss. "Create a Battery from Mud."
      http://mentalfloss.com/article/62021/create-battery-mud
MicrobeWiki. "Geobacter."
      https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Geobacter
MicrobeWiki. "Shewanella oneidensis MR-1: Background and Applications."
      https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Shewanella_oneidensis_MR-1:_Background_and_Applications
MuddWatt website.
      mudwatt.com
PBS Newshour. "Suffocating cells for science."
      http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/suffocating-cells-science/
PHYS.org. "Bacterial nanowires: Not what we thought they were."
      https://phys.org/news/2014-08-bacterial-nanowires-thought.html
PRI. "'Bacterial nanowires' may lead to breakthroughs in semiconductors, fuel cells and more."  
        https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-19/bacterial-nanowires-may-lead-breakthroughs-semiconductors-fuel-cells-and-more

Photos and Images

All the photos and the GIF were taken by me, except the two microscopic images of bacteria. Click those images to find their sources.

…but still, little electric currents are continuously happening inside of you, and that is keeping you alive.

All living things, from bacteria to blue whales, produce electricity to stay alive. You couldn’t stick a light bulb in a blue whale and have it light up either, but you can get bacteria to light up a light bulb. How do I know this? Because, right now, bacteria are making a light bulb flash in my basement. It looks like this:

You can get bacteria to do the same thing at your house. I will be writing about that in my next blog post.

In the meantime, what do I mean when I say you are generating electricity? Does this mean you are on your way to developing electric superpowers and soon you can start battling crime as a superhero named the Human Electric Outlet?

Sadly, no, but what is happening inside of you is still cool. Electricity is basically what happens when electrons escape their atomic prisons. Atoms are the ridiculously tiny things that make up the universe. As tiny as atoms are, they are made up of even tinier particles, some of which are called electrons. Electrons are the particles on the outer edge of an atom.

Atoms hold onto their electrons pretty tightly, but sometimes these electrons get loose. That’s when the phenomenon we call electricity occurs. If electrons escape and are just hanging around looking for something to do, we call that static electricity. You can make electrons escape to create static electricity right now (Well, you can if you have a balloon with you that you can rub on your head for a few seconds. The balloon will rub electrons off your hair, which will then make your hair stand on end.)

Escaped electrons usually don’t stay loose very long, because certain things naturally pull electrons towards them. When this happens, the electrons line up into a moving parade that we call an electric current. Every time you turn on a switch in your house, you are allowing a parade of electrons to flow through an electronic device. This electric current gives the device the energy it needs.

Your body also needs energy to do everything it does, from blinking to thinking to armpit stinking (that would have been more accurate if I had written “sweating,” but then it wouldn’t have rhymed). We would not get the energy we need to do this stuff if it was not for electrons flowing through our cells.

To get electrons to flow through our cells, we need to do two things: eat and breathe. One of the reasons we eat is because food contains stored energy, usually in the forms of sugars and fats. Your blood carries these sugars and fats to your cells.  Inside each of your cells, the sugars and fats are broken down through a series of chemical reactions until electrons are released. In order to get the electrons to produce energy in our cells and not just hang out there all the time, something has to make them move as a current. That something is oxygen. When oxygen shows up in a cell full of loose electrons, its kind of like the oxygen is Justin Bieber and electrons are a bunch of teenage fans in Oslo. The electrons all run towards the oxygen as fast as they can. When they do this, they create a current that completes the chemical reactions that give our cells the energy they need to do stuff (scientists call this type of energy ATP). This is the reason we need to inhale oxygen all the time. We need the oxygen in our bodies to act as a magnet to move and collect loose electrons so we can get the energy we need to survive. All multi-cellular organisms breathe oxygen for this purpose (yes, including plants).

Not all microbes do this, though. Some microbes live in places where there is no oxygen (like the seafloor), and they have to breathe other things, like, and I’m not making this up, rocks, to get the electrons moving in their cell so they can get the energy they need.

Because microbes are diverse in how they move electrons, scientists have figured out how to use some of these microbes as batteries, including microbes that you could collect outside your home right now. I will tell you how you can do this and how you can make your own battery with microbes in my next post.

P.S. Your nerves and muscles also produce electricity, but it is a different kind of electricity than what is happening in your cells, because it depends on producing charged ions instead of electrons. You can’t recharge your iPad with electricity from charged ions, but you can with electricity from flowing electrons.

To learn more about microbes and how they produce electricity, read my free eBook Where Wild Microbes Grow.

Online references and resources

Brightstorm. "Cell Functions and Processes." Videos.
      https://www.brightstorm.com/science/biology/cell-functions-and-processes/
The Medicine Journal. "How the Human Body Creates Electricity."
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-NA86aAMvY
PBS. "Suffocating cells for science."  
      http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/suffocating-cells-science/

Photos and Images

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources (Except the GIF. I took that).

The darkness of the deep sea creates some challenges for the animals that live there. For one thing, it is a lot harder to find something to eat when you can’t see anything. Also, total darkness makes it really hard to find a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Anglerfish have an interesting way to solve that problem.

Anglerfish are fish that look like this:

The anglerfish in those photos live in the deep sea, where they have to deal with challenge of how do you find a nice anglerfish boy or girl to settle down with when you live in total darkness. Unfortunately, anglerfish do not have online dating sites, or reality TV shows where they compete with a bunch of other anglerfish to marry someone they just met. Instead, they have their own bizarre and kind of disturbing method to find a mate.

When a male anglerfish is born, his number one goal, besides staying alive, is to find a female anglerfish. Since he can’t see anything in the deep sea, boy anglerfish find girl anglerfish using their sense of smell. The girl anglerfish helps the boy anglerfish out by producing a strong-smelling chemical called a pheromone. The boy anglerfish will follow the pheromone odor trail until he finds the girl anglerfish that is stinking up the place. (When you’re a teenager, you may also start releasing stinky pheromones (though you may not), but we as a society (at least in the U.S.) have decided that we don’t want to smell that stuff all the time, so you’re probably going to cover it up with deodorant.)

When boy anglerfish meets girl anglerfish, it is not much like a romantic comedy movie. For one thing, none of the anglerfish work in a bookstore. For another thing, the boy anglerfish looks like a baby fish and the girl anglerfish looks like a giant monster who may be forty times bigger than he is.

Though the girl anglerfish looks like she could easily eat the boy anglerfish, their relationship begins by the tiny boy biting the giant girl. The boy chews into her belly and then holds on until his mouth fuses with her body. Then he stays there the rest of his life and she drags him around everywhere she goes.

As weird as all that sounds, it gets even weirder. The attached male gets connected to the female’s digestive and circulatory system. Since he now gets all the food and blood he needs from her and he doesn’t need to move at all, a bunch of his body parts that he doesn’t use anymore start disappearing, like his eyes, fins and muscles.  Eventually he is just this blob hanging off her belly who is living off her like a parasite, except he can occasionally help her out because certain of his boy parts are still around and available whenever she is ready to make eggs.

Sometimes girl anglerfish will have two or three blobby boyfriends attached to their bellies. This weird-sounding thing that anglerfish do is actually an adaptation that allows certain anglerfish (not all anglerfish species do this) to survive as a species in the deep sea. By having a male or more than one male attached to her belly, female anglerfish do not ever have to ever worry about losing their boyfriends and then having to find a new one in the deep, dark sea. Their boyfriends are always with them so the females are guaranteed throughout their adult lives to be able to make eggs and produce new anglerfish whenever they need to.

PS. Make sure to tell your mom that male anglerfish attach to female anglerfish and spend their entire lives living off them like parasites. I guarantee she will think that is funny.

To learn more about anglerfish, read my book A Day in the Deep.

Online References and Resources:

Animals for Smart People YouTube channel. "Anglerfish Mating is Pretty Gross, Guys" video.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D6pZ2wUCGA
Encyclopedia of Life. "Deep-sea Anglerfishes."
      http://www.eol.org/pages/3016931/overview
Mental Floss. "The Horrors of Anglerfish Mating." 
      http://mentalfloss.com/article/57800/horrors-anglerfish-mating 
Water Encyclopedia. "Light Transmission in the Ocean."
      http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/La-Mi/Light-Transmission-in-the-Ocean.html
Why Evolution is True blog. "Sexual parasitism in anglerfish."
      https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/sexual-parasitism-in-anglerfish/

Photos and Images:

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources, except for the image of blackness, which is a photo of my pocket taken with my iPhone.

…except maybe not dressed in a tuxedo or while posing for a portrait.

If you have ever snuck your iPad into your bed without your parents knowing, and then stayed up until 3:00 in the morning because you were binge-watching Bob’s Burgers on a school night, you may have noticed the next day at school that you did not function very well. Sleep is necessary for the maintenance of our brains, but scientists are still gathering evidence to figure out why we need sleep and how it is able to help us.

For many animals, sleep is necessary, but also kind of dangerous. A sleeping animal is a lot less likely to notice that another animal is about to eat it than an animal whose eyes are open. Animals that are low on the food chain, like mice and antelope, tend to be very light sleepers. Predators that are not anyone else’s prey are usually deep sleepers, with at least one exception. Dolphins always sleep with one eye open.

As cute as bottlenose dolphins may seem to us, they are not cute to fish like mullets. Small fish see dolphins as giant monsters that want to eat them. Being a large predator means dolphins rarely get eaten themselves. When a dolphin sleeps with one eye open, it is not worrying about becoming someone else’s prey.  It is not even worrying about a gang of mullets beating it up to get revenge. A bottlenose dolphin’s main worry during sleep is breathing.

Dolphins spend the majority of their life underwater, but they cannot breathe underwater. Like us, they are mammals that must breathe oxygen from the atmosphere with their lungs.  If a dolphin tried to breathe underwater, it could drown.

Dolphins do not breathe the exact same way we do, though. For one thing, they don’t breathe through their nose. They breathe through a hole on top of their head, called a blowhole.

Another difference is humans are involuntary breathers (meaning we breathe all the time without thinking about it) and dolphins are not. You may have already noticed we breathe automatically if, like many 10-year olds, you have decided that you should learn how to meditate. You may remember the first thing your meditation teacher told you to do was to pay attention to your breathing. As you did this, you may have thought to yourself, “Wow! My breathing just keeps happening.” Then you probably thought to yourself, “It makes sense for us to keep taking breath after breath without thinking about it, because our noses are almost always in the atmosphere where we can safely take in oxygen… Also, who wants to go around telling yourself to breathe every 4 seconds?” And then as you kept paying attention to the breaths you took you probably thought about how “Every Breath You Take” by the band The Police is your mom’s all-time favorite song. That then made you think about how you want to be a police officer for Halloween this year, and that you better get more candy than last year when you were a giant banana. And then your meditation teacher became aware that you weren’t actually focusing on your breathing, and then you failed your meditation class.

Dolphins are voluntary breathers, meaning they have to tell their body when to breathe and also that dolphins can’t really begin meditating by focusing on their breathing because they already do that all the time. If a dolphin’s breathing was involuntary, like ours, and its brain automatically told its blowhole to breathe every few seconds, there is a good chance it would end up breathing underwater until it drowned. Dolphins are voluntary breathers to make sure they only breathe when they rise to the surface and their brain knows their blowhole is up in the air.

Because dolphins need to tell themselves when to breathe, they can never completely fall asleep. Instead, dolphins only let one half of the brain sleep at a time. Dolphins let the right side of their brain go to sleep while the left side stays awake to control the breathing. Then a little while later the right side wakes up and the left side falls asleep. Dolphins need about eight hours of sleep a day, but, unlike us, their brain sleeps in shifts. The right half gets four hours of sleep and the left half also gets four hours of sleep, just at different times.

The awake half of of a dolphin's brain not only helps keeps the dolphin breathing. It also keeps one eyeball working so the dolphin can continue to see what it going on around it while the other eyeball shuts down. The awake half of the brain can also keep the dolphin swimming. If you ever see a dolphin doing what the dolphin is doing in the GIF above, there is a chance that half of dolphin is sleeping while it swimming through the water.

And, yes, this whole sleeping thing I just described is an adaptation that allows dolphins to survive in ocean and estuary environments.

To learn more about dolphins, read my books Sharks and Dolphins: A Compare and Contrast Book and A Day in the Salt Marsh.

Online References and Resources:

LiveScience. "How Do Dolphins Sleep?"
       http://www.livescience.com/44822-how-do-dolphins-sleep.html
National Geographic. "Dolphins sleep with half their brain awake."
      http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2009/05/06/dolphins_sleep_with_half_their_brains/
PHYS.ORG. "What animals can tell us about sleeping,"
      http://phys.org/news/2016-06-animals.html
PLOS ONE. "Dolphins Can Maintain Vigilant Behavior through Echolocation for 15 Days without Interruption or Cognitive Impairment"
      http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0047478
RN. "How dolphins sleep and why we should care." (Audio interview with scientist Annie Aulsebrook).
      http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rnafternoons/how-dolphins-sleep-and-why- 
      we-should-care/7526868
Scientific American. "How do whales and dolphins sleep?"  
      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-whales-and-dolphin/

Photos and Images:

Click the photos, GIFs, and images used above to find their sources.

…you may notice that our neighbors in space look like they have a bad case of acne, while the Earth looks like it has been well supplied with Oxy-10.

Most of the acne-looking things you see on the Moon and Mars are impact craters created by asteroids and smaller meteorites that struck the Moon and Mars a long time ago.

Since the Moon is right next to us and Mars is pretty close to us too (well, not close enough that you can ride your bike to it, but close to us compared to everything else in space), why is the Earth not also covered with impact craters? Are we just the luckiest planet in the solar system and asteroids keep missing us?

We are lucky in many ways (for example, we are the only planet in the solar system where you can get ice cream), but we aren’t luckier than other planets when it comes to asteroids. It’s just harder to see the impact craters on our planet.

We actually aren’t completely without visible impact craters. If you go out in space and look down at the Earth, you can see a few, like the Manicouagan Crater in Quebec, Canada (It’s not too hard to find on a map, either).

There are even a couple impact craters that you can drive right up to and see from your car, like the Barringer Crater in Arizona (which is also called rather generically and somewhat inaccurately Meteor Crater).

But, for the most part, all of the Earth’s impact craters are either hidden, like the 110-mile wide Chicxulub Crater is, or long gone.

There are a few reasons why Earth is better at hiding its impact craters than the rocky planets and satellites around us.

One reason is that, unlike the Moon and Mars, the Earth has a lot of this:

There is so much liquid water on Earth that 71% of the planet is covered by it.  That means that an asteroid heading towards Earth has a really good chance (I would guess a 71% chance) of landing in water. An asteroid that crashes into the ocean leaves behind an impact crater that is underwater and thus much harder for us to find, much less see.

Impact craters in the seafloor are also hard to find because seafloor rock tends to be recycled every hundred to two hundred million years (which sounds like a long time to recycle something, but is actually not that long when you consider Earth’s entire history) Because of plate tectonic forces, almost all seafloor rock eventually sinks into the superhot interior of the Earth, where it then becomes gooey, superhot, molten rock (which eventually may come back-up to the surface through a volcano somewhere, and that’s how it gets recycled). You can see all this happening in the illustration below.

Since seafloor rock has been consistently melted and recycled for a few billion years, there are many impact craters that used to be in the seafloor, but they melted and disappeared long ago.

There is not evidence that plate tectonic activity has happened much in Mars’ past, or at all on the Moon, so the impact craters on the Moon and Mars do not get melted and recycled the way they do on Earth.

Not all asteroids that hit the Earth land in the ocean, though. Some do hit land. Even though land rock does not get recycled very often, impact craters on land are pretty hard to find too. 

One way that craters get hidden on land is by volcanoes erupting near them and covering them with lava rock. This does not just happen on Earth, though. Volcanoes have also erupted on the Moon and Mars and probably covered up a bunch of craters. Those dark splotches on the Moon that are called “seas” are actually lava flows.

And Mars has the biggest known volcano in our solar system, Olympus Mons.  It has spewed a bunch of crater-covering lava during its lifetime.

A reason craters get hidden on Earth, and not so much on the Moon or Mars, is again the abundance of liquid water on our planet. Over millions and billions of years, rain, streams, and rivers break tiny chunks of rock and sand off impact crater structures and then carry those broken bits away. (Wind actually does this too). This process is called erosion. Over that length of time, erosion can carry so much of an impact crater away that you will not even know that a crater was once there.

Since craters are basically bowls in the Earth, they can also be buried and hidden over time by things other than lava. That is what happened to the Chicxulub Crater. It is considered the best-preserved large impact crater on Earth, but you wouldn’t know it to look at it, because it is buried under a bunch of stuff.

Some of that stuff is dust or sand carried into the crater by the wind and water, but most of it comes from something else that we have a lot of on Earth, but these things are not found on the Moon or Mars (well, at least so far we haven’t found any of it there). I am talking about living things.

The Chicxulub Crater is partially at sea and partially on land (though the part at sea is on the continental shelf, so it technically is on land rock too). The crater’s size and location are indicated on the map below by the blue circle.

On the land-side of the crater, everything from bacteria to lichens to plants to animals eventually returned to the crater after the impact and were able to survive there. Except of course until they died. When that happens, their remains create soil by mixing with the sand and dust that is carried into the crater by wind and water. Over 66 million years, a lot of soil has built up in the land-side of the Chicxulub Crater, so much so that you can stand on the Crater and have no idea a crater is there.

The living plants currently growing over the crater are not making it obvious there is a crater there either. Besides blocking the view, they help hold the soil in place that is covering the rocks and making it very difficult to dig to the rocks (because of this, plants may actually be the archenemies of geologists).

On the sea-side of the crater, the remains of living things have also filled up the crater, except in the ocean, the filler is mainly fossilized plankton shells.  The ocean if filled with microscopic creatures that make their own shells, like these guys below who are called foraminifera:

These shelled plankton are so abundant that, when they die, they continuously cover the seafloor with piles of shells. In some places in the ocean, these piles of microscopic shells can be hundreds of feet deep. Over time, some of these piles of shells can form limestone rock.  This was what happened on the sea-side of the Chicxulub Crater. The rocks from the impact were covered with hundreds of feet of plankton fossils and limestone made-up of plankton fossils.

As good as the Earth is at hiding and destroying impact craters, scientists have found evidence of 188 of them on our planet, some of which are visible on the surface and some of which are buried, like the Chicxulub Crater. That nowhere near compares with the 300, 000 or so impact craters known to be on Mars or the literally millions of impact craters on the Moon. But scientists, including some on the Chixculub Crater team, are still looking on Earth for undiscovered impact craters, and they, or even you, have a good chance of finding more in the future.

To learn more about how scientists study the Earth, read my free eBook Uncovering Earth's Secrets.

Online References and Resources:

Center for Lunar Science and Exploration. Education resources page.
      http://www.lpi.usra.edu/exploration/training/resources/?view=illustrations
NASA SpacePlace. "Why is the Moon so scarred with craters?"
      http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/craters/en/
Science. "Earth's Colossal Crater Count Complete."
      http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/06/earths-colossal-crater-count-complete
Universe Today. "Impressive Craters on Earth."
      http://www.universetoday.com/19616/earths-10-most-impressive-impact-craters/
USGS. "This Dynamic Earth: The Story of Plate Tectonics."
      http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/dynamic.html

Photos and Images:

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources. If the photo does not link anywhere, it was taken by Kevin Kurtz. If the image is an illustration of plate tectonics, then it was drawn by the talented Alice Feagan, which is found in the eBook Uncovering Earth's Secrets that she and Kevin created together.

How did you get to be on that ship?

There’s no way this would have happened if I had not applied in 2009 to be one of the educators to participate in the School of Rock on the JOIDES Resolution. “School of Rock” is kind of like a summer camp for educators, except you’re living on a boat at sea and, instead of making wallets and hanging out in the infirmary because you got poison ivy, you make smear slides and hang out in the infirmary because you got seasick. School of Rock allows educators to learn from seafloor scientists about how scientists study the seafloor. They also get to use the same superfancy lab equipment the scientists use on the JOIDES Resolution.

I was lucky enough to be picked to be one of the participants in the 2009 School of Rock. I was fascinated by everything we learned and experienced and, ever since then, I have been teaching people about the JOIDES Resolution and its research. (I even wrote a couple of free eBooks about it).

The JOIDES Resolution is operated by the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP), which is a scientific organization that drills the seafloor to collect core samples to learn more about the Earth. The IODP is also in charge of the Chixculub Impact Crater expedition. When I heard scientists would be drilling into the Chixculub Impact Crater for the first time ever, I told the U.S. education and outreach program for the IODP that I would love to do outreach for the expedition. At the time I asked, I thought the likelihood of this happening was about the same as me becoming the star of a sitcom on the Disney Channel, but somehow it all worked out and I was able to be part of the expedition for a few days.

What did you have to do to prepare to join the expedition?

I had to wear an outfit like this...

...and jump into a swimming pool wearing it.  I’m not kidding.

The drilling of the Chicxulub Impact Crater was being done on the Liftboat Myrtle.

Before anyone can stay overnight on the Liftboat Myrtle, that person is required to be trained in personal sea survival. Basically, this training tells you the best ways to prevent your own death if the ship sank, which is a fun way to spend a couple days.

Since I live about five hours from the ocean, to take a class about surviving in the ocean, I had to go to a school near the ocean. So I flew to New York City to train at Maritime College in the Bronx.

For part of the training we got to watch encouraging videos like this:

We also went to a pool and put on survival suits. (Unfortunately, I don’t have any photos of me from the training, but if you want to see a video of me putting on a survival suit on the JOIDES Resolution and then, for some reason, doing the Robot, go here.)

Survival suits are also called “Gumby suits” because they make you look like the stop-motion animation character from the 1960s named “Gumby”...

...except you’re bright orange instead of green.

If you are ever stuck swimming in the middle of the ocean, wearing a survival suit will keep you relatively warm and dry and also make it easier to float. They’re not the easiest things to put on, though, so it helps to practice before your ship sinks.

At the training, once we had our survival suit on, we practiced how to jump into water wearing one.

We also practiced how to link together in the water to help each other survive in case there were no lifeboats or other floating objects around to hold onto.

We even practiced how to flip an upside-down, inflatable life raft right-side up.

I passed the survival course as well as a medical exam and was then able to join the expedition for a few days.

How did I get to the ship?

The expedition was drilling in the Gulf of Mexico right near the Yucatan Peninsula.

To get there, I flew to Merida, Mexico where I stayed in a hotel until I was able to board the ship. 

Merida is actually in the Chicxulub Crater, but the asteroid impact occurred so long ago that the crater is pretty much all filled in now. So instead of looking across from my hotel and seeing this:

I looked across from my hotel and saw this:

I was only on land for a little over a day. The drillsite was close enough to shore that they were able to send a boat out to it once or twice a week to bring supplies, reporters and the occasional outreach educator back and forth from the ship. I was able to board the transport boat shortly after arriving in Mexico.

You could not see the Liftboat Myrtle from shore, but when we got near enough to it on the boat, seeing this ship-on-stilts appear on the horizon was kind of like that scene in the original Star Wars (aka Chapter IV: A New Hope) when the Millennium Falcon jumps out of hyperspace and Luke, Han, Obi-Wan, and Chewbacca see the Death Star for the first time ever, except the Liftboat Myrtle had not recently blown up the planet Alderaan.

The deck of the Liftboat Myrtle is about 40 feet in the air. So to get up to it from our transport boat we had to be lifted by a crane in a basket (You can see a sped-up video of this happening here).

This basket's safety restraints are your ability to hold onto two cables that stretch from the floor to the top of the basket, as well as the crane operator’s ability not to jerk you all over the place. There are restraining nets on it, but those are for your luggage.

The first time I rode in the basket, I had a death grip on those cables and spent the entire time staring at the pole in the middle of the basket, because I was too nervous to look anywhere else. The second time I did it, I was able to relax a little more and actually enjoy the view it gave me.

What did you do on the ship?

First, I was issued this outfit:

...that I had to wear almost the entire time I was on the Liftboat Myrtle. For safety reasons we were each issued a hardhat, coveralls, and steel-toed boots to wear anytime we were in the drill floor area. That way if something fell on us or if we fell on something on the drill floor, we were less likely to need to be airlifted to a hospital. The drill floor was where all the action was, so I wore this outfit a lot. Unfortunately, I was on the ship in May and the drill site was not that far from the Equator, so this was a very sweat-inducing ensemble.

I was part of the expedition mainly to let the public know what the scientists were doing on the ship. One of the ways I did this was by giving live, interactive video tours to schools via the internet. That’s why I’m holding that laptop in the photo.

My stay on the ship was much too short.

I was there from just a Tuesday to a Friday, and I would have happily stayed longer. But I still managed to learn a great deal, meet some wonderful people from all over the world, and have an amazing experience I will never forget!

But, wait! What about the scientists? What were they doing on the ship?

I was also part of the Chicxulub Impact Crater to talk to the scientists so I could find out more about what they were hoping to learn about the Chicxulub impact and its aftermath and how they were going about learning it.

The scientists came from a lot of different places in the world, as you can see below from these signs they made one day when they were feeling extra creative. The signs show where each of the scientists came from.

The Liftboat Myrtle is not actually a drilling ship, much less a scientific drilling ship.  For the scientists to be able to use it, the ship had to be modified for this expedition. The drill was temporarily pinned and welded to the side of the ship.

So when the engineers and drillers were working the drill...

...they were standing on this platform with its clear ocean views:

There normally are not any lab spaces on the Liftboat Myrtle either, so these things below that look like Porta Potties...

...are containers that were put on the deck to act as temporary labs and offices for the scientists.

When the cores came up...

...the scientists did some initial observation and data recording, but they did not have all the lab equipment they needed to fully describe each core. So the cores were stored in a refrigerated container...

...and when the expedition was over, all the cores were shipped to Germany to be stored in a repository (kind of like a library for cores).

In September, the entire science team will come together to use lab equipment near the repository to cut all of the Chicxulub Crater cores in half and start observing and describing them in earnest.

And I will also be shipped off to Germany so I can join the scientists and again provide education and outreach about what they are doing! To see how you can follow along, visit my Chicxulub Impact Crater page .

To learn more about scientific ocean drilling, read my free eBook Uncovering Earth’s Secrets.

Online References and Resources:

ECORD. "Expedition 364 Chicxulub K-Pg Impact Crater."
      http://www.ecord.org/expedition364/
The JOIDES Resolution website. "Expedition 364: Chicxulub K-Pg Impact Crater"
      http://joidesresolution.org/node/4531
Kevin Kurtz website. "Chicxulub Impact Crater Expedition."  
      http://www.kevkurtz.com/dinosaur-crater-of-doom/

Photos and Images:

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources. If the photo does not link anywhere, it was taken by Kevin Kurtz, unless, of course, it has Kevin Kurtz in it. If the photo shows a bunch of people with the title "School of Rock," it was taken by Bill Crawford. If the photo shows Kevin in a Gumby suit, it was taken by Lisa Strong. If the photo shows Kevin holding a laptop and wearing coveralls, it was taken by Mary Mowat.

Even though today you are unlikely to ever see a diamondback terrapin stew food truck or McDiamondback Terrapin Stew on the menu board at McDonalds, diamondback terrapins are still not doing great. One of the problems diamondback terrapins continue to face is habitat loss. People like to build things like houses and seafood restaurants and roads right on or right next to salt marshes.

Building around salt marshes takes away habitat and nesting sites from diamondback terrapins, makes them more likely to be run over by cars and creates pollution that gets into the marsh waters where they live.

Though habitat loss is not helping diamondback terrapins at all, the bigger problem for diamondback terrapins today, at least in states like Maryland and South Carolina, is crab traps. You heard me.

Crab traps are traps that look like this:

Crab traps aren’t traps to catch grumpy people. Crab traps catch grumpy crabs. If you look at this photo, and can ignore that the trap appears to have a face, you can see there is an unhappy blue crab in the left corner of this trap (this kind of trap is actually called a crabpot). On the East Coast of the United States, people use traps like this to catch blue crabs in salt marshes and estuaries, because people on the East Coast of the United States really like to eat blue crabs as crab cakes, she-crab soup and soft shell crab.

Blue crabs are opportunistic scavengers, meaning if there is the opportunity to eat something dead, then a blue crab is probably going to take it. Blue crab fisherpeople catch blue crabs by putting chunks of dead meat, like pieces of raw chicken, fish or clams, inside the trap. The trap is then thrown into the water, like this:

The white float you see attached to the trap sits on the surface of the water and helps the fisherperson find the trap again. It also warns boaters, “There’s a crab trap here and you probably don’t want to hit it with your propeller because that will not be good for anyone.” (Despite the fact that I just put that in quotes, the crab trap floats do not actually say that out loud. It’s more implied).

Once the trap is in the water, blue crabs can smell the dead stuff inside it and will look for a way to enter the trap so they can eat some raw dead meat. A crab trap has openings (if you look at the photo of the crabpot again, the openings are the parts that looks like a mouth with orange lipstick). The openings allow blue crabs to get inside the trap. Once the crab is in the trap, it is really difficult for the crab to get back out. (You can learn more about how a crabpot keeps crabs inside the trap here.)

As you can see in this video of a blue crab inside a much simpler crab trap than a crabpot, a blue crab basically just chills in a trap, and may even enjoy a snack or, if the trap has a GoPro inside it, take selfies…

…until the fisherman collects the trap, and then its life becomes stressful.

The problem for diamondback terrapins is the bait in blue crab traps also attracts diamondback terrapins. Diamondback terrapins like to eat live animals like periwinkle snails and fiddler crabs, but they are also happy to eat dead stuff. Diamondback terrapins will enter blue crab traps to try to eat the dead stuff inside, but once they are inside the trap, they can’t get out either. Crab traps may be left underwater for hours before the fisherpeople collect them to see what they caught. Diamondback terrapins breathe with lungs, so, if they are underwater that long, they will drown. This happens often enough that crab traps are currently the #1 cause of death in diamondback terrapins.

Scientists realized crab traps were a problem for diamondback terrapins in the 1990s. After that, someone had the idea that we could help diamondback terrapins by using TEDs. This TED acronym has nothing to do with talks about Technology, Entertainment and Design. The crab trap TED acronym stands for Turtle Excluder Device. (By the way, I did a search and apparently no one has done a TED Talk about TEDs).

Diamondback terrapin TEDs are plastic contraptions that are attached to blue crab trap openings.

TEDs make the openings in the trap smaller so it is harder or hopefully impossible for a diamondback terrapin to enter the trap, but still easy for a blue crab. TEDs are effective enough that in some states, like Maryland, people who use blue crab traps are required by law to install TEDs on their traps. In other states, like South Carolina, blue crab fisherpeople can use TEDs, but only if they want to.

To get blue crab fisherpeople to voluntarily use TEDs, it is necessary to show them that TEDs can save diamondback terrapins without causing the crab trap to catch fewer blue crabs. Biologists at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources Marine Resources Research Institute have been collecting data to solve this problem for a few years now. One day while I was visiting South Carolina, I was able to help them with this research project.

The day I volunteered, I went out to a salt marsh tidal creek for about eight hours with the wildlife biologists Ellen Waldrop and Jeff Schwenter.

We traveled in a small boat and brought sixteen crab traps with us.

The sixteen crab traps consisted of four sets of traps with four crab traps each. Each set had three traps with TEDs on them, though each of those three traps had a different kind of TED with different sized openings. The trap without a TED was the control (if you’re not sure what a scientific control is, read this).

Each set of traps was put in the water at a predetermined site on the tidal creek. (That’s what Jeff is doing in those photos I pasted above where he is flinging a crab trap into the water).

After the traps sat out in the water for a little while, we collected them to see what each trap with its different opening had caught.

We did not catch any diamondback terrapins that day, but we did catch lots of blue crabs. We counted how many blue crabs were in each trap. We also carefully measured each crab.

Measurements would let us know exactly how big the crabs were in each trap. Blue crab fishermen generally prefer to catch bigger crabs. If the data showed that a certain kind of TED was only letting in tiny crabs, then blue crab fishermen would probably be less likely to use it.

The measurement data about the crabs was carefully recorded for each trap, along with the trap’s location in the salt marsh, the times the trap entered and left the water, and what the tides were like during that time.

Once all the data was recorded, we released the blue crabs back into the water. Before we did this, though, we painted them with nail polish. This was not because we wanted to make up for giving them a stressful experience by giving them a manicure. The nail polish is a nontoxic, waterproof way to mark the crabs. Each of them was given a dot on its back. That way the scientists could easily see if they were getting any repeat customers in their crab traps.

If the results of this entire project were based on our one day of data, then we could say that all three TED designs keep out diamondback terrapins and traps without TEDs keep out diamondback terrapins too, because we did not catch any diamondback terrapins. But that would be inaccurate, because there have been many instances seen by crab fisherpeople and scientists of diamondback terrapins being caught in crab traps. Ellen and Jeff and the other scientists on this project did not stop collecting data after one day, because all scientists know they have to collect lots and lots of data to find the best answers to their questions. During 2014 and 2015 the scientists on this project went out in the field to collect data almost 100 days, for a total of about 3100 hours. They put traps in the water over 700 times. By doing this over and over again they were able to collect a lot of data about which TED designs were best at keeping out diamondback turtles while letting in blue crabs.

So far, the data has shown that the width of the TED opening matters more than the height of the TED openings to keep diamondback terrapins out. This data has already been used to design a better TED, that you can see in action below.

This new TED design has been working so well that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has purchased a bunch of them to give out to crab fisherpeople.

You can learn about how the scientists came up with this new TED design here.

But the project hasn’t ended. This year they are putting crab traps in the water with underwater cameras so they can film what is happening when blue crabs try to enter a crab trap and then give up because of a TED. These videos may show what about the TEDs keeps the crabs from entering the trap. This data may help the scientists come up with even better designs that will allow more blue crabs to enter a trap, which will make blue crab fisherpeople more likely to use TEDs.

This research project shows how science can help to create a win-win situation for wildlife and people. By testing TED designs, the scientists can find the best TED to prevent diamondback terrapins from drowning, while also allowing blue crab fisherpeople to catch enough blue crabs to make a living.

As someone who loves science, it's exciting when I get to work with real scientists and I am grateful to Ellen Waldrop, Jeff Schwenter, and Mike Arendt for allowing me to have the experience!

2018 update:

The scientists who did this research have now published their findings. You can read about what they have learned here.

To learn more about diamondback terrapins, blue crabs and salt marshes, read my book A Day in the Salt Marsh.

Online References and Resources:

Blue Crab Info. "Crabbing for Hard Shell Crabs,"
      http://wetlandsinstitute.org/conservation/terrapin-conservation/terrapins-and-traps/
Diamondback Terrapin Working Group. "Research Bibliography."
      http://www.dtwg.org/Bibliography.htm
Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Diamondback Terrapin TED brochure.
      http://dnr2.maryland.gov/Wildlife/documents/terrapinbrochure.pdf
South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. "Diamondback Terrapin."
      http://www.dnr.sc.gov/wildlife/diamondbackterrapin/
South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. "Diamondback Terrapin Research - Fisheries Interactions and Bycatch Reduction"
      http://www.dnr.sc.gov/wildlife/diamondbackterrapin/research/fisheries.html
Wetlands Institute. "Terrapins and Traps."
      http://wetlandsinstitute.org/conservation/terrapin-conservation/terrapins-and-traps/

Photos and Images:

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources. If the photo does not link anywhere, it was taken by Kevin Kurtz, unless, of course, it has Kevin Kurtz in it. Then it was taken by Jeff Schwenter.

A turtle stuck its head out of the tidal creek flowing below me. (Though I didn’t actually get a photo of it. I found this photo on Wikimedia Commons).

I was 98% sure the turtle I saw was a diamondback terrapin, because they are pretty much the only kind of turtle you are going to see in a salt marsh on the east coast of the United States. Also, it looked like a diamondback terrapin.

I only saw the turtle for like a second and a half, but it was a big deal to me, because it was only the second time I have ever seen a diamondback terrapin in twenty years of visiting salt marshes. One reason it is hard to see diamondback terrapins is because they immediately dive underwater to hide whenever they see something they think might possibly want to eat them or catch them and make them live in an aquarium in an eight-year old’s bedroom. But an even bigger reason it is hard to see diamondback terrapins in the 21st century is because there just aren’t as many diamondback terrapins as there once were.

Two hundred years ago there were lots of diamondback terrapins in salt marshes. But in the late 19th century and early 20th century they started disappearing. This was mainly because diamondback terrapins had the unfortunate problem of tasting good in soup. So many people wanted to eat diamondback terrapin stew back then that by the end of the 19th century, it was estimated trappers were collecting 400,000 pounds of diamondback terrapins a year out of their salt marsh habitats. Unfortunately, this was faster than diamondback terrapins could have babies to replace the adults who were now in people’s stomachs. By the early 20th Century, it became harder and harder to find a diamondback terrapin.

Diamondback terrapins were probably on their way to extinction, except that didn't end up happening. Part of the reason they were saved was probably because it had become really hard for trappers to make a living catching an animal that by then was almost impossible to find. But part of the reason may also have been a 1920 Constitutional Amendment that made it illegal for people to buy or drink alcohol. I’m not kidding. This amendment started the period in American history called Prohibition. Prohibition may have saved diamondback terrapins because the recipe for terrapin stew (you can read a disturbing recipe for terrapin stew here) calls for sherry, which is an alcoholic drink. All alcoholic drinks were illegal in the United States during Prohibition.

Prohibition didn’t actually stop a lot of people from buying alcohol. But, if people were willing to break the law to buy sherry, they were probably more interested in drinking it themselves than pouring it on chunks of a turtle in a stew pot. Without one of the key ingredients, a lot fewer people were eating diamondback terrapin stew, meaning fewer diamondback terrapins were being taken out of salt marshes, meaning diamondback terrapins were now once again having babies faster than they were dying.

Prohibition didn’t quite work out the way people hoped it would, so it was ended in 1933. That might have meant that diamondback terrapins were in trouble again, except by that time another thing was happening that made life for Americans and diamondback terrapins very different from what it once was. This period of history was called the Great Depression. The Great Depression was a time when lots of Americans lost their jobs and did not have enough money to buy bread, much less expensive diamondback terrapin stew.

With very little demand for diamondback terrapins, the diamondback terrapin populations in salt marshes continued to grow.

By the time the Depression ended in 1945, it had been 25 years since people were regularly eating diamondback terrapins stew. People had basically forgotten about it and had no interest in bringing it back, especially when there were exciting new things to eat like Spam and frozen peas.

Today in 2016, diamondback terrapins are doing much better than they were doing in 1916, but not nearly as well as they were doing in 1816. Even though they rarely get eaten now (well at least in the United States) diamondback terrapins still have to deal with major problems, mainly from habitat loss and crab traps.

Hopefully you are now wondering how a crab trap could hurt a diamondback terrapin, because that’s what I’m going to write about in the next post, as well as tell you about a day I spent with scientists who are trying to solve the crab trap problem for diamondback terrapins.

To learn more about diamondback terrapins, read my book A Day in the Salt Marsh.

Online References and Resources:

Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection. "Northern Diamonback Terrapin."
      http://www.ct.gov/deep/cwp/view.asp?a=2723&q=326000
Encyclopedia of Life. "Malaclemys: Diamondback Terrapin."
      http://eol.org/pages/32239/overview
US Fish and Wildlife. "Diamondback Terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin)."    
      https://www.fws.gov/international/cites/cop16/diamondback-terrapin.html
Virginia Institute of Marine Science. "Diamondback Terrapins."
     http://www.vims.edu/research/units/legacy/sea_turtle/va_sea_turtles/terps.php

Also this:

If you want to watch an excellent documentary about Prohibition that doesn't mention diamondback terrapins at all, check out Ken Burns's and Lynn Novick's Prohibition.

Photos and Images:

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources.

The marmots of North America are found out west.  One of their favorite habitats is mountain meadows, which are places that look like the bottom half of this:

Marmots like mountain meadows because they eat plants like grass, flowers, and seeds. They can only do this for about four months out of the year, though, because for the other eight months, mountain meadows look like the bottom half of this:

Snow often covers the tops of mountains in the western United States from September until May. Though some mountain animals deal with the lack of food in winter by migrating to warmer places, you are never going to look up and see a flock of marmots flying south for the winter. Marmots are pretty much stuck on the mountain where they live.  Since marmots can’t leave, they have another strategy to survive the winter.  They get really, really fat.

Fat is not just something that makes adults watch exercise videos. Fat is a way that animals, including people, store energy.

Like all living things, animals need energy to live. You, for example, are using energy right now, even if you sitting as still as humanly possible. Try it! As you sit as still as humanly possible, your body is using energy to breathe, to pump blood, to see, to hear, to keep your body temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and even to think to yourself, “How long am I going to sit here and do this?”

All animals get their energy from food.  When a marmot eats a bunch of flowers, there is energy in the flowers. The marmot’s body will use this energy to power them through the day as they breathe, chew, drink water, scurry around, and pose on rocks for Glamour Shots. If a marmot eats more flower energy than it needs that day, then that extra energy gets turned into fat. The fat stores the energy so it can be used on a later day. Fat is basically like flabby batteries for animals.

Each marmot’s goal is to eat more energy then they use so they can be as fat as marmotly possible by the end of the summer. Being a big, fat marmot in September allows marmots to survive the winter when there's no food. Marmots can live off the energy stored in their fat.

Marmots do not have enough stored energy to be particularly active in the winter, though. You’re not going to see marmots skiing down the mountain or making snowmarmots. You’re probably not even going to see any of them awake.  The fat can only keep marmots alive if they hibernate all winter.

Hibernating is kind of like sleeping through the winter, except it's different. When marmots, or any other animal, hibernate, their inner body temperature cools down and their heartbeat, breathing, and everything else happening inside their body slows down. By doing this, they need less energy to survive.  If marmots just slept all winter, with normal heartbeats and body temperature, they would not have enough energy to make it to spring.

Marmots hibernate in holes in the ground, often with their entire family joining them. Scientists think marmots hibernate in groups to help them stay warm so they use up less energy (basically, a marmot’s hibernating family members act like big, fat blankets). As marmots hibernate, they keep getting thinner and thinner as they burn off their fat energy. They stop hibernating when it warms up and the plants start growing and there is food available again. By the time marmots wake-up, they are super-skinny. In September they look like a ham, but by April they look like a sausage.

As soon as marmots stop hibernating, they start eating as much as they can. Some of them will double their body weight over the summer in order to have enough energy to survive the next winter.

So, yes, fat is an adaptation that helps animals survive, with the exception, of course, of humans and their overfed pets. Someday, I may write about why, in the 21st Century, we're the only animals whose fat adaptation has become a problem.

To learn more about marmots, read my book A Day on the Mountain.

Online References and Resources:

The Alpine Marmot Foundation. "Hibernation."
      https://thealpinemarmotproject.org/learn-more-about-marmots/hibernation/
Animal Diversity Web. "Marmota flaviventris: yellow-bellied marmot."
      http://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Marmota_flaviventris/
BBC Animals. "Cute marmots waking up from hibernation" video.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9R3jVLXuxI
Encyclopedia of Life. "Marmota flaviventris: yellow-bellied marmot."
      http://eol.org/pages/327985/overview
UCLA. "What's the life of a marmot like?"
      https://www.eeb.ucla.edu/Faculty/Blumstein/MarmotsOfRMBL/LifeOfAMarmot.html

Photos and Images:

Click the photos and images used above to find their sources.