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Fall of Akkadian empire due to climate change
Fall of Akkadian empire due to climate change
Preface. Any civilization or region that survives energy decline must then survive climate change for many centuries. As far as the wind systems that collapsed the Akkadian empire, it’s already happening:
“Greenhouse gases are increasingly disrupting the jet stream, a powerful river of winds that steers weather systems in the Northern Hemisphere. That’s causing more frequent summer droughts, floods and wildfires, a new study says. The findings suggest that summers like 2018, when the jet stream drove extreme weather on an unprecedented scale across the Northern Hemisphere, will be 50% more frequent by the end of the century if emissions of carbon dioxide and other climate pollutants from industry, agriculture and the burning of fossil fuels continue at a high rate” (Berwyn 2018).
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Bressan, D. 2019. Climate Change Caused the World’s First Empire To Collapse. Forbes
The Akkadian Empire was the first ancient empire of Mesopotamia, centered around the lost city of Akkad. The reign of Akkad is sometimes regarded as the first empire in history, as it developed a central government and elaborate bureaucracy to rule over a vast area comprising modern Iraq, Syria, parts of Iran and central Turkey. Established around 4.600 years ago, it abruptly collapsed two centuries later as settlements were suddenly abandoned. New research published in the journal Geology argues that shifting wind systems contributed to the demise of the empire.
The region of the Middle East is characterized by strong northwesterly winds known locally as shamals. This weather effect occurs one or more times a year. The resulting wind typically creates large sandstorms that impact the climate of the area. To reconstruct the temperature and rainfall patterns of the area around the ancient metropolis of Tell-Leilan, the researchers sampled 4,600- to 3,000-year-old fossil Porites corals, deposited by an ancient tsunami on the northeastern coast of Oman.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Nuclear reactor issues
Nuclear reactor issues
Preface. There are half a dozen articles below. Although safety and disposal of nuclear waste ought to be the main reasons why no more plants should be built, what will really stop them isbecause it takes years to get permits and $8.5–$20 billion in capital must be raised for a new 3400 MW nuclear power plant (O’Grady 2008). This is almost impossible when a much cheaper and much safer 3400 MW natural gas plant can be built for $2.5 billion in half the time or less.
U.S. nuclear power plants are old and in decline. By 2030, U.S. nuclear power generation might be the source of just 10% of electricity, half of their 20% production of electricity now, because 38 reactors producing a third of nuclear power are past their 40-year life span, and another 33 reactors producing a third of nuclear power are over 30 years old. Although some will have their licenses extended, 37 reactors that produce half of nuclear power are at risk of closing because of economics, breakdowns, unreliability, long outages, safety, and expensive post-Fukushima retrofits (Cooper 2013).
If you’ve read the nuclear reactor hazards paper or my summary of it, then you understand why there will continually be accidents like Fukushima and Chernobyl. That makes investors and governments fearful of spending billions of dollars to build nuclear plants.
Nor will people be willing to use precious oil as it declines to build a nuclear power plant that could take up to 10 years to build, when that oil will be more needed for tractors to plant and harvest food and trucks to deliver the food to cities (electric power can’t do that, tractors and trucks have to run on oil).
And if we are dumb enough to try, we’ll smack into the brick wall of Peak Uranium.
Nuclear Safety in the news
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Energy Slaves: every American has somewhere between 200 and 8,000 energy slaves
Energy Slaves: every American has somewhere between 200 and 8,000 energy slaves
Source: https://www.homesthatfit.com/how-precious-is-energy-ask-your-slaves/
Preface. To give you an idea of what energy slaves are, consider what it would take to use human power to provide these:
Human Power Shower – Bang goes the theory – BBC One
And as the article below points out, if you tried to bicycle to power your TV, that free electricity is not free at all. Since food costs money it may even end up being more expensive produced by cycling than from the grid — you’ll end up paying for it all the same, just not in utility bills, but in food.
Slav, I. 2019. Why Powering A City With Bicycles Is Impossible. oiprice.com
Many people have taken a crack at estimating how much muscle power the energy contained within oil represents. Although there are different results, they all show how powerful oil is and how angry our descendants will be that we wasted it driving around in 4,000 pound cars for pleasure as they’re sawing wood and heaving hundred-pound sacks of grain onto horse-drawn wagons.
As I was writing my book “When Trucks Stop Running”, I came up with this (but didn’t include it since there are too many numbers): A class 8 truck can carry 50,000 pounds of goods 500 miles in one day. This would take 1,250 people carrying 40-pound backpacks walking 16 miles a day for 31 days. If the people ate 2,000 kcal of raw food a day, they’d burn 77.5 million kcal (and even more energy if the food is cooked). The truck needs 31 times less energy: at 7 mpg, that’s 71 gallons of diesel containing 35,000 kcal per gallon. Trucks carried over 13.182 billion tons of goods, equal to 329 million people each carrying 40 pound packs.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Hydrogen fuel cell cars are a waste of time and money, and explosive
Hydrogen fuel cell cars are a waste of time and money, and explosive
Preface. Below are several articles about hydrogen. Today in 2019 it is still far from commercial. A massive amount of infrastructure needs to be in place before people will consider buying hydrogen fuel cell cars, and because of explosions in South Korea, Norway, and California, building this infrastructure is going slowly.
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Reuters. 2019. Explosions and subsidies: Why hydrogen is struggling to catch on in Korea. Accidents and infrastructure are holding it back. Reuters.
SEOUL — Aiming to cash in on a major push by South Korea to promote fuel cell vehicles, Sung Won-young opened a hydrogen refueling station in the city of Ulsan last September. Just one year on, he’s thinking about closing it down. Sung’s new hydrogen station is one of five in Ulsan.
The government paid the 3 billion won ($2.5 million) cost – six times more than fast charging equipment for battery electric cars – and the two pumps, located next to Sung’s gasoline stand, see a steady flow of Hyundai Nexo SUVs daily.
EvSung hasn’t been able to turn a profit, hamstrung as the equipment can only refuel a limited number of cars each day. Refueling takes about 5-7 minutes, but the next driver must wait another 20 minutes before sufficient pressure builds in the storage tank to supply the hydrogen or the car’s tank will not be full.
That means only about 100 fuel cell cars can be fueled a day, compared to up to 1,000 at his gasoline stand. Many drivers can also not be bothered to wait 20 minutes and leave without a full tank.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Many signs of peak oil and decline
Many signs of peak oil and decline
Preface. Recently the IEA 2018 World Energy Outlook predicted an oil crunch could happen as soon as 2023. Oil supermajors are expected to have 10 years of reserve life or more, Shell is down to just 8 years.
Political shortages are as big a problem as geological depletion. At least 90% of remaining global oil is in government hands, especially Saudi Arabia and other countries in the middle east that vulnerable to war, drought, and political instability.
And in 2018, the U.S. accounted for 98% of global oil production growth and since 2008, the U.S. accounted for 73.2% of the global increase in production (see Rapier below). What really matters is peak diesel, which I explained in “When trucks stop running”, and fracked oil has very little diesel, much of it is only good for plastics, and yet America may well be the last gasp of the oil age if production isn’t going up elsewhere.
Related
2019. When will ‘peak oil’ hit global energy markets? dw.com. Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil predicts a 25% rise in global energy demand for the next two decades, due to “global demographic and macroeconomic growth trends. When you factor in depletion rates, the need for new oil grows at 8% a year,” he told analysts in March.
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Clearly the depth of wells we need to drill show we are reaching peak oil production: 2019-11-19 The Truth About The World’s Deepest Oil Well
How deep into the ground do we have to go to tap the resources we need to keep the lights on? How deep into the ground are we able to go?
The first oil well drilled in Texas in 1866 was a little over 100 feet deep: the No 1 Isaac C. Skillern struck oil at a depth that, from today’s perspective, is ridiculously shallow.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
After peak oil we need small family farms. But U.S. farms are getting even bigger
After peak oil we need small family farms. But U.S. farms are getting even bigger
Preface. Oh dear, wrong direction! Eventually 75 to 90% of Americans will need to be farmers to feed their family and support craftsmen and others in towns, just as it always was before fossil fuels arrived. These big farms are more dependent on fossils than smaller farms as well. I would hate to see them survive peak oil, because that would mean most people would become peasant/slaves rather than owning their own land.
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Weinraub, M. 2019. Size matters. Big U.S. farms get even bigger amid China trade war. finance.yahoo.com
HAZELTON, N.D. (Reuters) – As the 2018 harvest approached, North Dakota farmer Mike Appert had a problem – too many soybeans and nowhere to put them. Selling was a bad option. Prices were near decade lows as U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war with China weighed heavily on the market. Temporary storage would only buy him a little bit of time, particularly in an area where cold weather can damage crops stored in plastic bags.
So Appert, who farms 48,000 acres (19,425 hectares), cut a check for $800,000 to build eight new permanent steel bins. That allowed him to hold onto his bumper crop and wait for prices to recover.
He sold half of the 456,000 bushels stored on his farm throughout the following summer, earning about $1 more per bushel and avoiding storage at nearby CHS elevators or an Archer Daniels Midland Co. <ADM.N> processor in the area.
But most farmers do not have $800,000 to spend on steel bins, and many are going under. The number of U.S. farms fell by 12,800 to 2.029 million in 2018, the smallest ever, as the trade war pushes more farmers into retirement or bankruptcy.
Roger Hadley, who farms 1,000 acres in Indiana, was unable to plant any corn and soybeans this year after heavy rains added to farmers’ woes.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Venezuela collapse: looting, hunger, blackouts
Venezuela collapse: looting, hunger, blackouts
Preface. Venezuela is experiencing a double whammy of drought and low oil prices, which has lead to blackouts and inability to import food, ultimately due to their oil production peaking in 1997. The same fate awaits the U.S. someday when oil declines.
Related posts:
- Nafeez Ahmed: Venezuela’s collapse is a window into how the Oil Age will unravel
- Book review of “In order to live: A North Korean girl’s journey to freedom” by Yeonmi Park
- Inside North Korea’s Environmental Collapse
- Who Lives, Who dies in a never-ending energy crisis. Book review of Nothing to Envy. Ordinary Lives in North Korea
- North Korea: what happens to a country when the oil is cut off?
- How different nations have coped with oil shortages
- Dmitry Orlov: How Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union
- A book review of “Russia’s Food Policies and Globalization”
- Lessons Learned from How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
- Cuba’s agriculture experiments are not working out
And Mexico may be the next to collapse, as you can read here.
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2019. Venezuela’s Water System is Collapsing. New York Times.
In Venezuela, a crumbling economy and the collapse of even basic state infrastructure means water comes irregularly — and drinking it is an increasingly risky gamble. Scientists found that about a million residents were exposed to contaminated supplies. This puts them at risk of contracting waterborne viruses that could sicken them and threatens the lives of children and the most vulnerable.
The risks posed by poor water quality are particularly threatening for a population weakened by food and medication shortages.
Electrical breakdowns and lack of maintenance have gradually stripped the city’s complex water system to a minimum. Water pumps, treatment plants, chlorine injection stations and entire reservoirs have been abandoned as the state ran out of money and skilled workers
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Peak Sand
Peak Sand
Preface. Sand Primer:
- Without sand, there would be no concrete, ceramics, computer chips, glass, plastics, abrasives, paint and so on
- We can’t use desert sand because it’s too round, polished by the wind, and doesn’t stick together. You need rough edges, so desert sand is worthless
- Good sand is getting so rare there’s an enormous amount of illegal mining in over 70 countries. In India the Sand Mafia is one of the most powerful, will kill for sand. It’s easy to steal sand and sell there.
- This has led to between 75%-90% of beaches in the world receding and a huge amount of environmental damage.
- By 2100 all beaches will be gone
- Australia is selling sand to nations that don’t have any more (like the United Arab Emirates, who used all of their ocean sand to make artificial islands)
- Sand is a big business, sales are $70 Billion a year
- concrete is 40% sand
How Much Sand is needed?
- 200 tons Average house
- 3,000 tons Hospital or other large building
- 30,000 tons per kilometer of highway
- 12,000,000 tons Nuclear Power Plant (that’s equal to nearly 250 miles of highway)
Half of all sand is trapped behind the 845,000 dams in the world.
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Fountain, H., et al 2019. Melting Greenland Is Awash in Sand. New York Times.
Glaciers grind rocks into silt, sand and gravel. Greenland hopes that there’s enough sand for them to become a sand exporter, if the environmental damage isn’t too high.
That won’t be easy. Nearly all sand is mined within 50 miles of its destination because it costs too much to move it more than that. So Greenland would have to find a way to make moving sand profitable.
A way to find the sand is required as well, since much of what the glacier produces is a fine silt that isn’t suitable for concrete.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Boston Globe: the false promise of nuclear power
Boston Globe: the false promise of nuclear power
Preface. This article raises many objections to nuclear power. Theoretically it could be cheaper, but the exact opposite has happened, it keeps getting more expensive. For example the only new reactors being built in the U.S. now are at Georgia Power’s Vogtle plant. Costs were initially estimated at $14 billion; the latest estimate is $21 billion. The first reactors at the plant, built in the 1970s, took a decade longer to build than planned, and cost 10 times more than expected. The two under construction now were expected to be running 2016, but it’s now unlikely that they’ll be ready in 2022.
The authors also point out that reactors are vulnerable to catastrophes from extreme weather, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis; from technical failure; and unavoidable human error. Climate change has led to severe droughts that shut down reactors as the surrounding waters become too warm to provide the vital cooling function.
And much more.
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Jay Lifton, Naomi Oreskes. 2019. The false promise of nuclear power. Boston Globe.
Commentators from Greenpeace to the World Bank agree that climate change is an emergency, threatening civilization and life on our planet. Any solution must involve the control of greenhouse gas emissions by phasing out fossil fuels and switching to alternative technologies that do not impair the human habitat while providing the energy we require to function as a species.
This sobering reality has led some prominent observers to re-embrace nuclear energy. Advocates declare it clean, efficient, economical, and safe. In actuality it is none of these. It is expensive and poses grave dangers to our physical and psychological well-being. According to the US Energy Information Agency,the average nuclear power generating cost is about $100 per megawatt-hour. Compare this with $50 per megawatt-hour for solar and $30 to $40 per megawatt-hour for onshore wind. The financial group Lazard recently said that renewable energy costs are now “at or below the marginal cost of conventional generation” — that is, fossil fuels — and much lower than nuclear.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Nuclear waste disposal drilled deep into earth’s crust
Nuclear waste disposal drilled deep into earth’s crust
Preface. I suspect one the greatest tragedies of the decline of oil will be all the nuclear waste left for thousands of low-tech generations in the future. We owe it to them to clean up our mess while we still have excess oil energy to do it. But far more likely nuclear wastewill sit at nuclear reactors, military sites, and wherever nuclear warheads are kept, shortening the lives of anyone who lives near them.
There are two articles below about possible ways to dispose of nuclear waste into deep holes that sound good to me.
Related: Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste by William M. Alley & Rosemarie Alley. 2013. Cambridge University Press to understand how serious the problem is.
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Vidal, J. 2019. What should we do with nuclear waste? Ensia.
Richard Muller, professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and his daughter, co-founder of company Deep Isolation gave a demonstration in January 2019 of how nuclear waste could be buried permanently using oil-fracking technology. A 140 pound steel canister (with no radioactive waste) was placed in a previously drilled borehole deep into the ground.
With this technique, there’s no need to excavate expensive tunnels. The Mullers think with larger canisters pushed through 300 boreholes up to two miles deep under a billion tons of rock where radiation can’t possibly leak out. This method could store most of the US’s highest level nuclear waste permanently for a third of what storage methods cost now.
Many ideas have been investigated, but most have been rejected as impractical, too expensive or ecologically unacceptable. They include shooting it into space; isolating it in synthetic rock; burying it in ice sheets; dumping it on the world’s most isolated islands; and dropping it to the bottom of the world’s deepest oceanic trenches.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Carbon capture could require 25% of all global energy
Carbon capture could require 25% of all global energy
Preface. This is clearly a pipedream. Surely the authors know this, since they say that the energy needed to run direct air capture machines in 2100 is up to 300 exajoules each year. That’s more than half of global energy consumption today. It’s equivalent to the current annual energy demand of China, the US, the EU and Japan combined. It is equal to the global supply of energy from coal and gas in 2018.
That’s a showstopper. This CO2 chomper isn’t going anywhere. It simply requires too much energy, raw materials, and an astounding, impossibly large-scale rapid deployment of 30% a year to be of any use.
Reaching 30 Gt CO2/yr of CO2 capture – a similar scale to current global emissions – would mean building some 30,000 large-scale DAC factories. For comparison, there are fewer than 10,000 coal-fired power stations in the world today.
The cement and steel used in DACCS facilities would require a great deal of energy and CO2 emissions that need to be subtracted from whatever is sequestered.
Nor can the CO2 be stored in carbon capture sorbents – these are between the research and demonstration levels, far from being commercial, and are subject to degradation which would lead to high operational and maintenance costs. Their manufacture also releases chemical pollutants that need to be managed, adding to the energy used even more. Plus sorbents can require a great deal of high heat and fossil fuel inputs, possibly pushing up the “quarter of global energy” beyond that.
As far as I can tell the idea of sorbents, which are far from being commercial and very expensive to produce, is only being proposed because there’s not enough geological storage to put CO2.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Scientists on where to be in the 21st century based on sustainability
Scientists on where to be in the 21st century based on sustainability
Preface. The article below is based on Hall & Day’s book “America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions: Surviving the 21st Century Megatrends”. Related articles:
- Hess, P. 2016. These will be the best places to live in America in 2100 A.D. Popular Science.
- Lang, G. 2018. Urban energy futures: a comparative analysis. European Journal of Futures research 6:19.
Day, J. W., et al. Oct 2013. Sustainability and place: How emerging mega-trends of the 21st century will affect humans and nature at the landscape level. Ecological Engineering.
Five scientists have written a peer-reviewed article about where the best and worst places will be in the future in America based on how sustainable a region is when you take into account climate change, energy reserves, population, sea-level rise, increasingly strong hurricanes, and other factors. Three of the scientists, John W. Day, David Pimentel, and Charles Hall, are “rock stars” in ecology. Below are some excerpts from this 16 page paper that I found of interest (select the title above to see the full original paper).
Best places to be
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Global oil discoveries far from breaking even with consumption
Global oil discoveries far from breaking even with consumption
Preface. According to Bloomberg (2016), oil discoveries in 2015 were the lowest since 1947, with just 2.7 billion barrels of conventional oil found globally (though Rystad calculated this differently at 5.6, nearly twice as much). Since the world burns 36.5 billion barrels of oil a year in 2019, we’re not even close to breaking even.
Rystad Energy (2019) in “Global discoveries on the rise as majors take a bigger bite” estimates barrels of oil equivalent, which includes both conventional oil and gas. Since oil is the master resource that makes gas, transportation, and all other goods and activities possible, I’ve taken the second number as the percent of oil in the BOE to come up with how much conventional oil was found. It falls way short of the 36.5 billion barrels we’re consuming. The pantry is emptying out, perhaps pushing the peak oil date forward in time as we continue to grow at 1% a year in oil consumption and put nothing at all back on the shelves. Peak Demand? Ha! Not until we’re forced to cut back from oil shortages.
2013 50:50 17.4 billion BOE 8.7 billion BOE oil shortfall: 27.8 billion BOE
2014 54:46 16.0 billion BOE 7.4 billion BOE oil shortfall: 29.1 billion BOE
2015 61:39 14.4 billion BOE 5.6 billion BOE oil shortfall: 30.9 billion BOE
2016 57:43 8.4 billion BOE 3.6 billion BOE oil shortfall: 32.9 billion BOE
2017 40:60 10.3 billion BOE 6.2 billion BOE oil shortfall: 30.3 billion BOE
2018 46:54 9.1 billion BOE 4.9 billion BOE oil shortfall: 31.6 billion BOE
This doesn’t include fracked oil, but the IEA expects that to peak somewhere from now to 2023.
What it means is enjoy life while it’s still good, and stock your pantry while you’re at it.
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Mikael, H. August 29, 2016. Oil Discoveries at 70-Year Low Signal Supply Shortfall Ahead. Bloomberg.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How safe are utility-scale energy storage batteries?
How safe are utility-scale energy storage batteries?
Preface. Airplanes can be forced to make an emergency landing if even a small external battery pack, like the kind used to charge cell phones, catches on fire (Mogg 2019).
If a small battery pack can force an airplane to land, imagine the conflagration of a utility scale storage battery might cause.
A lithium-ion battery designed to store just one day of U.S. electricity generation (11 TWh) to balance solar and wind power would be huge. Using data from the Department of Energy (DOE/EPRI 2013) energy storage handbook, I calculated that the cost of a utility-scale lithium ion battery capable of storing 24 hours of electricity generation in the United States would cost $11.9 trillion dollars, take up 345 square miles, and weigh 74 million tons.
And at least 6 weeks of energy storage is needed to keep the grid up during times when there’s no sun or wind. This storage has to come mainly from batteries, because there’s very few places to put Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES), Pumped Hydro energy storage(PHS) (and also because it has a very low energy density), or Concentrated Solar Power with Thermal Energy Storage. Currently natural gas is the main energy storage, always available to quickly step in when the wind dies and sun goes down, as well as provide power around the clock with help from coal, nuclear, and hydropower.
Storing large amounts of energy, whether it’s in larger rechargeable batteries, or smaller disposable batteries, can be inherently dangerous. The causes of lithium battery failure can include puncture, overcharge, overheating, short circuit, internal cell failure and manufacturing deficiencies. Nearly all of the utility-scale batteries now on the grid or in development are massive versions the same lithium ion technology that powers cellphones and laptops.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Microbes a key factor in climate change
Microbes a key factor in climate change
Preface. The IPCC, like economists, assumes our economy and burning of fossil fuels will grow exponentially until 2100 and beyond, with no limits to growth. But conventional oil peaked and has stayed on a plateau since 2005, so clearly peak global oil production is in sight. As is peak soil, aquifer depletion, biodiversity destruction, and deforestation to name just a few existential threats besides climate change.
The lack of attention to microbes in the IPCC model further weakens their predictions about the trajectory of climate change. As this article notes, diatoms are our friends, they “perform 25–45% of total primary production in the oceans, owing to their prevalence in open-ocean regions when total phytoplankton biomass is maximal. Diatoms have relatively high sinking speeds compared with other phytoplankton groups, and they account for ~40% of particulate carbon export to depth”.
Diatoms didn’t appear until 40 million years ago, and sequester so much carbon that they caused the poles to form ice caps. So certainly scientists should study whether their numbers are decreasing or increasing. But also the IPCC needs to include diatoms and other microbes in their models. It’s a big deal that they haven’t, since microorganisms support the existence of all higher life forms.
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University of New South Wales. 2019. Leaving microbes out of climate change conversation has major consequences, experts warn. Science Daily.
Original article: Cavicchioli, R., et al. 2019. Scientists’ warning to humanity: microorganisms and climate change. Nature Reviews Microbiology.
More than 30 microbiologists from 9 countries have issued a warning to humanity — they are calling for the world to stop ignoring an ‘unseen majority’ in Earth’s biodiversity and ecosystem when addressing climate change.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
