11.27.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, this is Kelly Taylor, and I'll be your host
for Radioized Diary of Science and Nature. I'll have some
articles on the topics of science and nature. But first
a reminder that radioe is a reading service intended for
people who are blind or have other disabilities that make
it difficult to read printed material. First up, we have

(00:24):
an article from Popular Science with an interesting title. Without dinosaurs,
there'd be no Thanksgiving dinner. And this is dated November
twenty fifth, written by Andrew Paul. It's hard to pick
a favorite dish on your Thanksgiving plate, but regardless of
your selection, there's a decent chance its history can be

(00:45):
traced back to one of the most cataclysmic events in
Earth's history. Quote. The dinosaur's absence meant changes in the
forest structure. You went from a more open canopy to
a more closed can rainforest, explains Mike Donovan, a paleobotanist
and the Fossil Plants Collections manager at Chicago's Field Museum. Quote.

(01:12):
This denser rainforest provided an opportunity for plants that grew
on vines on tree trunks, including things like grapes and legumes.
Around sixty six million years ago, a six point two
mile wide asteroid slammed into the present day Gulf of
Mexico and ushered in the final days of non avian dinosaurs.

(01:37):
This Cretaceous Paleogene extinction event ultimately wiped out at least
three quarters of all species, including the planet's raining reptiles.
But dinosaurs, reptiles, and other animals weren't the only species
that died off. Plenty of flora from global ecosystems disappeared too.

(01:58):
According to Donovan, the u ecological gaps didn't remain barren
for long. Quote. Many of the plants that evolved in
the years following the extinction of the dinosaurs are foundational
in the food chain. They make up huge portions of
our diet and are involved in building, construction, materials, and pharmaceuticals.
He said, really, we couldn't survive without them. Quote green beans, yams, coffee, cacao.

(02:29):
All these and more only began developing after Earth's megafauna disappeared,
granting them the space and time to flourish in what
eventually became present day rainforests. Like dinosaurs, the ancestors of
today's beloved Thanksgiving ingredients are often preserved as fossil specimens
in the geological record. Many examples are currently on display

(02:52):
at the Field Museum in the temporary exhibit After the
Age of Dinosaurs. Quote. The fossil record of plants from
this time shows us how these living plants evolved, where
they came from, how they changed over time, said Donovan.
From them, we can also learn about how plants may
need or may react to things like environmental changes in

(03:15):
the future by stepping in the past. Now, let's learn
a little bit more about plants. With an article from
Scientific America dated November twenty fifth, the headline is this
fossil is rewriting the story of how plants spread across
the planet, written by Taylor Mitchell Brown. Around four hundred

(03:41):
and ten million years ago, terrestrial life was relatively simple.
There were no forests or prairies. Land was largely dominated
by slimy microbial mats, the types of plants that would
eventually give rise to trees and flowers. It only just
evolved and would take another several million years to fully
flourish and diversify. A new discovery is rewriting the story

(04:05):
of how these vascular plants, as they're called spread onto land.
Researchers may have finally resolved a debate about an enigmatic
but widespread fossil called spongiophytin. It seems to have been
a strange life form called a lichen that may have
helped pave the way for plants to thrive on land.

(04:27):
The discovery, published recently in Science Advances, settles a question
that had been opened for over a century, says paleontologist
Giovan Gaia of the Institute of Geosciences at the State
University of Campinas in Brazil, who was not involved with
the research. Quote. Until now, most people thought lichens appeared

(04:47):
only after vascular plants, but this study shows they were
already there at the beginning, literally helping prepare the ground
for plant life. Lichens are the symbiotic result of fungi
and photosynthetic algae or sinobacteria working together. Today that amalgam

(05:08):
helps churn lifeless rocks and sediments into nutrient rich soil everywhere,
from polar deserts to tropical forests, says study lead author
Bruno Becker Kerber, a palaeontologist at Harvard. Vascular plants have
tissues that funnel those soil nutrients from the ground to
their stems. And leaves. Because lichen's soft body tissues are

(05:30):
rarely preserved in the fossil record, their origins have remained mysterious.
A twenty nineteen genetic analysis suggested they evolved well after
the emergence of vascular plants, indicating they likely played little
to no role in early land colonization. Scientists have long
debated whether spongiophytin, which flourished around four hundred two million

(05:53):
years ago, was lichen or algae. To determine the fossil's identity,
becker Kerber and his colleagues analyzed the underlying chemical properties
of lingering organic material within the fossils. Unlike algae, which
are lined with cell walls, lichen contain fungi lined with kitan,

(06:13):
the same material that makes up the exoskeletons of insects.
Kitan is loaded with nitrogen, and the team's results turned
up an unmistakable nitrogen signal. Quote. The more we tested it,
the more consistent the signal became. It was genuinely exciting.
Becker Kerber says there were other fungal traits present too,

(06:35):
such as a distinct branching pattern exhibited by growing fungal
cells called hyphi. The results suggest liken evolved around four
hundred ten million years ago, shortly after the initials spread
of vascular plants four hundred twenty million years ago, and
just before the earliest known forests around three hundred and

(06:55):
ninety million years ago. Quote. It's a major shift in
how we view the complexity of life's first steps onto land.
Becker Kerber says spongiophytin likely weathered rocks, stabilized sediments, cycled nutrients,
and contributed to the formation of protos soils just before

(07:16):
forests developed. Matthew Nelson, an evolutionary biologist at the Field
Museum of Natural History, says, if spongiophytin was a lichen,
it may have enabled the expansion of land plants into
areas previously uncolonized. The new picture suggests like an emerged

(07:38):
near the beginning of terrestrial plant history, and the unique
fungi algae relationship may have been essential to the spread
of plants. Quote. People often tell the story of life's
move onto land as a plant story. Becker Kerber says,
what our study shows is that fungi and lichens were
also part of it. Now we have an article from

(08:03):
Wired magazine and the headline is the Climate impact of
owning a Dog by Claire Elise Thompson on November twenty second.
I've been a vegetarian for over a decade. It's not
because of my health or because I disliked the taste
of chicken or beef. It's a lifestyle choice I made
because I wanted to reduce my impact on the planet.

(08:26):
And yet, twice a day, every day, I lovingly scoop
a cup of meat based kibble into a bowl and
set it down for my fifty pound rescue dog, a
husky mix named Loki. Until recently, I hadn't devoted a
huge amount of a thought to that paradox. Then I
read an article in the Associated Press headlined people often

(08:47):
miscalculate climate choices, a study says, one surprise is owning
a dog. The study, led by environmental psychology researcher Danielle
Goldwork and published in the journal PNAS Nexus, examine how
people perceived the climate impact of various behaviors options like

(09:07):
adopt a vegan diet for at least one year, or
shift from fossil fuel car to renewable public transport. The
team found that participants generally overestimated a number of low
impact actions like recycling and using efficient appliances, and they
vastly underestimated the impact of other personal decisions, including the

(09:28):
decision to quote, not purchase, or adopt a dog in quote.
The real objective of the study was to see whether
certain types of climate information could help people commit to
more effective actions, But mere hours after the AP published
its article, its aim had been recast as something else,
entirely an attack on people's furry family members. Quote climate

(09:54):
change is actually your fault because you have a dog,
one ready user wrote. Others in the community chimed in
with ire, ridiculing the idea that a pet chihuahua could
be driving the climate crisis and calling on researchers and
the media to stop pointing fingers at everyday individuals. Goldwert

(10:14):
and her fellow researchers watched the reactions unfold with dismay.
Quote if I saw a headline that said climate scientists
want to take your dog away, I would also feel upset.
She said, they definitely don't. You can quote me on that.
The study set out to understand how to shift behavior

(10:34):
by communicating climate truths instead, its media coverage revealed a
troubling psychological trade off. When climate related messaging strikes a nerve,
it may actually turn people off from the work of
shifting its societal norms. It's an instinct I understand on
some level. I love Loki, and my knee jerk reaction

(10:55):
is to defend the very personal choice of sharing one's
life with a dog. I also so sympathized with redirecting
the blame toward the biggest polluters, billionaires and fossil fuel companies.
Not bonbond the pet shuawei in question. But is it
irresponsible to shrug off any conversation about the environmental impact

(11:15):
of our pets, something far more within our control than, say,
the overflow of the overthrow of capitalism? Is there a
way to have a frank discussion about the climate impact
of our own personal lives without going to the dogs. Oftentimes,
when I'm questioning how a particular climate behavior might fit
in my life, I try to imagine how it looks

(11:37):
in my vision of a sustainable future. It's why, for instance,
I don't own a car and am dedicated to writing
public transit, even though it isn't always super convenient. I'm
keen to be an early adopter of systems I believe in,
but I struggle to imagine a future without companion animals.
Even knowing about their environmental impact, which is admittedly substantial.

(12:00):
Dogs and cats eat meat heavy diets, which is where
the bulk of their carbon pawprint comes from. A twenty
seventeen study from UCLA found that dogs and cats are
responsible for about twenty five to thirty percent of the
environmental impact of meat consumption in the United States. That's
equivalent to a year's worth of driving by thirteen and

(12:22):
a half million cars. For pets that eat traditional kibble
or wet food, that protein may come from meat byproducts
otherwise wasted animal parts such as organs and bones not
approved for human consumption, but an increasing number of pet
owners are opting to feed their fur babies human grade

(12:43):
meat products, which requires additional resources and generates extra emissions.
After they eat, of course, they poop a lot, at
least for dogs. That poop typically gets bagged in plastic
and sent to the landfill, and it turns out all
of biodegradable poop bags I've diligently bought over the years
don't help matters much. They also release greenhouse gases in landfills,

(13:08):
and most composting programs don't accept pet waste. With more
dogs around than ever before, the US dog population has
steadily increased from fifty two million in nineteen ninety six
to a new peak of ninety million in twenty twenty four.
Their overall climate toll is more than a chihuahua sized issue.

(13:30):
But pets are also more than just sources of carbon pollution.
According to a twenty twenty three Pew Research poll, ninety
seven percent of owners say they consider their pets to
be part of their families, with fifty one percent of
respondents saying they are on the same level as a
human family member. So whenever their climate impact crops up

(13:50):
in the discourse, as it has periodically, it makes sense
that people tend to get defensive. This don't you dare
take away my dog? You horrible environmentally backlash is certainly
not the first time the climate movement has been accused
of depriving people of the things they love. Climate policy
has long been painted as a force for austerity, coming

(14:13):
for your burghers, your gas stoves, your coal mining jobs.
That framing has been politically potent used by fossil fuel
interests in their allies to stoke resentment and delay government action.
Big oil at once wants us to believe that the
climate crisis is our fault and that we shouldn't have
to give up anything to fix it. For some climate advocates,

(14:36):
the solution has been to shift messaging away from individual
responsibility and focus instead on big systemic changes like overhauling
our electricity and transit systems through governmental investment and clean energy.
In her essay I work in the environmental movement, I
don't care if you recycle, author and podcaster Mary Annace

(14:59):
Hegler wrote, quote, the belief that this enormous existential problem
could have been fixed if all of us had just
tweaked our consumptive habits is not only preposterous, it's dangerous.
Its victim blaming, plain and simple. Egler and others have
taken a strong stance against environmental purity, the idea that

(15:20):
you can't care about or advocate for systems level change
if you aren't first changing your own habits. But not
everyone agrees that individual actions should be completely de emphasized.
In the Climate conversation, Kimberly Nicholas, a climate scientist and author,
of the popular book Under the Sky We Make has
argued that wealthy people living in wealthy countries and globally

(15:44):
wealthy is a lower bar than you might think do
have a responsibility to slash their outsized carbon emissions, and
particularly for those of us living in democracies, personal action
isn't just about the choices we make as consumers. Quote,
there's still an ongoing tension between personal and system change,

(16:04):
or individual and collective action. Nicholas said, it's really hard
to get that right, to get the right balance there
that acknowledges the role and the importance of both, and
to talk about and study and describe both in a
way that motivates people to take high impact actions. In
Ute Goldwortz saw that tension play out in her maligned

(16:27):
climate communications study. In the experiment, participants reviewed twenty one
individual climate actions like eating less meat, and five systemic
actions like voting, and rated their commitments to taking each action.
Two test groups then received clarifying information about the relative

(16:47):
impact of the twenty one individual actions. One group was
asked to estimate their ranking before learning how they actually ranked.
The other group received the information straight up, but participants
didn't receive any data about the carbon mitigation potential of
the five collective actions, which would be far more difficult

(17:09):
to quantify. What Goldort's team found surprised them. The teachings
did nudge people toward higher impact personal actions, but their
stated likelihood of engaging in collective ones actually went down,
a backfire effect that hints at the perils of focusing
too much on personal lifestyle choices. Quote. It might be

(17:33):
kind of like a mental substitution, Goldward said. People feel like, Okay,
I've done my part individually. I kind of checked the
box on climate action. Participants were also asked to rate
the plasticity of each of the actions, or how easy
it would be to adopt, and those measurements revealed another
nuance in how people view different forms of climate action.

(17:56):
For the individual focused options, participants were more likely to
commit to actions they saw as requiring little effort. For
the systemic actions, they were more interested in whether it
would have an impact, something researchers are still working on quantifying. Quote.
If you think voting or marching is just symbolic or ineffective,

(18:17):
you're not going to engage. Goldwort said. We have to
show people evidence that their voice or their vote can
shift policy, corporate practices, or social norms in quote, I,
for one, was surprised to see that participants rated the
commitment to quote not purchase or adopt a dog as easy.
When I asked Goldwort what might be behind that, she

(18:39):
noted that dog ownership is a decision people don't make
very often. It also doesn't require any action at all
for people who already don't own dogs. The results surely
would have been different if the listed action was get
rid of your existing dog, which it was not a
point that readers seemed to miss. Based on comments about
the study and there emails Goldwort said she received. Still,

(19:03):
for an animal lover like me, the idea of never
adopting another dog doesn't feel easy to commit to at all.
It feels like an immense sacrifice. The sadness I feel
at the thought of a future without dogs points me
to another important factor when it comes to motivation for
climate action. Joy. Actions we take to try to mitigate

(19:24):
a climate crisis may be partially driven by how easy
they are for us or how effective we believe them
to be, but any choice we make is also driven
by what we find joy in. It's an essential part
of staying committed and resilient in the fight for a
better future. In this way, carbon intensive activities like dog

(19:45):
ownership have value beyond their weight in emissions. Quote. People
have an emotional attachment to the people in animals and
creatures that we love, Nicholas said, and that is actually,
I think very powerful. We're not only going to solve
climate change by life up all the numbers. We certainly
need to do that, but we have to tap into
what people really care about and realize all those things

(20:08):
are on the line and threatened by the amount of
climate change we're heading for with current policies. Would I
fight to ensure that dogs like my beloved Loki can
continue wagging happily on this planet. Heck yes I would.
I've always felt that being a pet person goes hand
in hand with a sense of altruism and responsibility. And

(20:30):
if not giving up our pets means fighting climate change
by voting, marching, donating, advocating, and consuming like our pets
lives depend on it, I think we can all get
on board. That might also mean adjusting your pets diets.
While making my dog a full vegetarian seems challenging. Though
technically possible, just cutting out beef has a significant impact.

(20:53):
Shifting to lower carbon meats was even one of the
high impact actions included in gold Wort's study. That's he
can easily commit to, and we already buy insect based
treats which leave a pungent odor in my pockets but
seem to please his taste buds. There are also ways
that dog ownership intersects with other climate related behaviors and

(21:15):
icdotally I would say I travel less because I have
a dog whose care I need to think about walking
him every day. Has also made me vastly more connected
to my local environment, the goings on in my neighborhood,
and my neighbors themselves, all of which are important aspects
of building climate resilience. Some dogs have even been trained
to sniff out invasive species and help identify environmental contaminants,

(21:41):
though I'd never thought about it quite this way before
I've read Goldwort's study. The climate actions I take have
a lot to do with the love I feel for Loki.
Not because I want to leave a better world for him.
I recognize reality that I will almost certainly outlive him,
but because my feelings for him bring me closer to
the love I feel for all living things on this planet.

(22:02):
This ice age predator who shares my home, as the
anthropologist and comedian David aan Howe puts, it, is a
living reminder of the relationship humans have with other species
going back many thousands of years. Now. Here's an article
from the San Francisco Chronicle. California's coastal waters are transforming

(22:26):
at a surprising rate. Here's what the future could look like.
This is by Jack Lee, updated November twenty fifth. Waters
off the California coast, part of one of Earth's richest
marine ecosystems, have acidified faster than most of the rest
of the world's oceans over the past century, according to
a new study. The author's report that the broad swath

(22:49):
of coastal water that flows southward from British Columbia to
the Baja California Peninsula known as the California Current System,
and the adjacent sally along the border of the US
and Canada could also become far less supportive of marine
life in the coming decades. Based on modeling using a
worst case climate change scenario, the region is sitting at

(23:14):
the leading edge of ocean acidification impacts, says Mary Margaret Stoll,
who recently earned a doctorate in oceanography from the University
of Washington. Quote, it provides a window into future conditions
predict predicted in the coming decades for the rest of
the ocean end Quote. Since the Industrial Revolution, the amount

(23:35):
of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere has skyrocketed amid surging
human produced greenhouse gases. That's had impacts on the world's oceans. Quote.
The ocean is a tremendous sponge for that carbon dioxide,
said Tessa Hill, professor of oceanography at UC Davis's Bodega
Marine Laboratory, who wasn't part of the new study. About

(23:58):
a third of what we put into the atmosphere ends
up in the ocean. This absorbed carbon dioxide chemically reacts
to acidify seawater, which can disrupt marine life. Organisms like
dungeness crabs, oysters, and corals face difficulty forming hard shells
and skeletons. Such impacts could have ripple effects through marine

(24:22):
ecosystems and threaten fisheries. Scientists have projected that the world's
oceans will continue to become more acidic over time, but
it hasn't been clear what to expect specifically for the
California current system, said coethor Alex Gagnum, and associate professor
of oceanography at University of Washington. Waters in this region

(24:47):
are naturally more acidic than those of the open ocean
because of upwelling. This natural process is a distinct feature
of the California current system and brings nutrient rich water
up from the ocean depths, fueling the growth of marine life.
But this water is also extra acidic due to the
decomposition of organic matter in the deep ocean. Quote there's

(25:11):
been sort of a scientific debate about whether this really
productive region is going to be moderated from ocean acidification
or amplified, Gagnut said, the answer seems to be amplified.
Climate simulations from the new study indicated that carbon dioxide
increases in the California current system over approximately the past

(25:36):
century outpaced atmospheric carbon dioxide by fifty percent on average.
By contrasts, most of the world's oceans have added carbon
dioxide at about the same rate as the atmosphere. The
authors found a similar pattern in the Salish Sea, which
includes Puget Sound and the strait of one to Fuca.
The modeling results were reinforced by a separate analysis of

(26:00):
historical coral samples collected by the research vessel Albatross in
the California Current System and Salash Sea between eighteen eighty
eight and eighteen ninety four. The scientists quantified levels of boron,
a chemical element that builds up in different forms depending
on the acidity of surrounding seawater when the corals formed.

(26:23):
In twenty twenty, the researchers revisited some Salash Sea sites
where samples had previously been collected and gathered present day
corals for analysis. We were able to compare old corals
from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution with modern corals
collected from the same locations and figure out how much
acidification had happened, Cagnum explained. The authors uncovered that carbon

(26:47):
dioxide increases in the Salash Sea out gained the atmosphere
by about forty percent. They proposed that the intrinsically high
acidity of the California Current makes it more sensitive to
atmospheric carbon dioxide increases than other parts of the ocean.
The researcher's project, project I'm Sorry the researchers project continued

(27:14):
rapid escalation of carbon dioxide in the California Current through
the end of the twenty first century, as the ecosystem
continues to outpace increases in the atmosphere and other ocean
regions that could mean sooner than anticipated consequences for marine life.

(27:34):
The projections rely on extreme greenhouse gas emissions scenario involving
dramatic increases in coal use. Climate change mitigation efforts, while
far weaker than climate experts had sought, have meant such
an extreme scenario isn't actually likely to play out, but
one of the authors, agreeing with the One scientist agreeing

(27:58):
with the authors said that it's still quote useful to
see what those outer bounds look like. End quote. Well,
that'll be all for today's Diary of Science and Nature.
Your reader's Kelly Taylor. Now stay tuned for further programming
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