‘Climate change is an existential threat to humanity,’ says postdoctoral researcher Fabian Dablander of the UvA’s Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics and one of the lead authors of the study. ‘To secure a liveable future, each of us needs to ask ourselves: how can I best contribute at this crucial moment in human history? Scientists are well placed to help tackle climate change beyond conducting academic research. However, little is known about their wider engagement with the issue. Hence our study, in which we conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses of a survey of over 9,000 researchers from all scientific disciplines, not just climate science.’

Fundamental and personal

Most respondents (83%) in the survey say they are ‘quite a bit’ or ‘a great deal’ worried about climate change. The vast majority (91%) of them believe that fundamental changes in social, political and economic systems are needed to truly tackle climate change. Most respondents (84%) also think that significant changes in personal behaviour and lifestyle are needed. Many of them say they have already made significant changes to their lifestyle, by driving less (69%), flying less (51%) and switching to a more plant-based diet (39%).

Willingness to engage

A majority of scientists in the survey believe that climate activist groups can bring about positive change and that scientists should be more engaged in climate advocacy and even protest. A significant proportion of respondents are already engaged in climate advocacy (29%), have participated in legal protest (23%) and/or have even engaged in civil disobedience (10%), and about half say they would be willing to engage in some of these in the future.

Breaking down barriers

Based on the data, Dablander and colleagues then looked at which factors predict scientists’ engagement in advocacy and protest. They propose a two-step model of engagement. First, in order for scientists to be willing to engage, they need to overcome mostly intellectual barriers such as a lack of belief in the effectiveness of the actions, lack of identification with activists, lack of knowledge, fear of losing credibility, and fear of repercussions. Second, to actually engage they need to overcome mostly practical barriers such as a perceived lack of skills, lack of time, lack of opportunities, and not knowing any groups involved in climate action.

Based on their two-step model, the researchers propose ways to increase scientists’ engagement, such as facilitating interactions between scientists who are already engaged and those who are not, and making institutional reforms, for example by offering more time and money for climate-related actions or rewarding public engagement.

Wake-up call

‘Governments and corporations continue to make empty promises that downplay the level of transformation that is required to prevent climate breakdown,’ says Adam Aron, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of the study: ‘This study makes clear that scientists from all disciplines are very worried and are calling for this fundamental transformation. I hope it helps wake people up and get engaged — more and more scientists are.’

About the survey

In their study, the researchers sampled the scientific community by sending targeted emails to more than 250,000 academics. The more than 9,000 scientists who ultimately responded to the survey came from 115 countries, all academics disciplines, and all career stages. The researchers acknowledge the possibility that scientists who were already involved in climate change may have been more likely to participate in the survey, which could affect the extent to which the reported percentages are representative of the scientific community as a whole.

Despite feeling like a stationary mass, most solid ground is undergoing a process of deformation, sinking and rising in response to many environmental factors. In Antarctica, melting glacial ice means less weight on the bedrock below, allowing it to rise. How the rising earth interacts with the overlying ice sheet to affect sea level rise is not well-studied, said Terry Wilson, co-author of the study and a senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University.

In the new study, Wilson’s colleagues at McGill University developed a model to predict how these interactions could impact global sea level, finding that if humans can lower greenhouse gas emissions and global warming is slowed, upward shifts in the solid earth could reduce Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise by about 40%, significantly bolstering the best case scenarios for global sea level rise. In this low-emissions scenario, land uplift slows the flow of ice from land to ocean, allowing for more of the ice sheet to be preserved.

Conversely, if humans are unable to lower carbon emissions in time, ice retreat will outpace uplift, pushing ocean water away from Antarctica and amplifying sea level rise. These events could significantly worsen the most dire models of projected sea level rise along populated coastlines, said Wilson.

“Our measurements show that the solid earth that forms the base of the Antarctic ice sheet is changing shape surprisingly quickly,” said Wilson. “The land uplift from reduced ice on the surface is happening in decades, rather than over thousands of years.”

The study was published today in Science Advances.

To arrive at these conclusions, the team developed a 3D model of the Earth’s interior using geophysical field measurements from the Antarctic Network (ANET) of the Polar Earth Observing Network (POLENET) project. The mission is focused on studying the changing polar regions by collecting GPS and seismic data from an array of autonomous systems across Antarctica.

Researchers then performed a number of simulations to capture many possible evolutions of Antarctica’s ice sheet and the extent of global sea level rise Earth may experience until the year 2500, according to those parameters.

“We can project what difference it actually will make if we all contribute to a low-emission scenario now, versus what’s come to be called ‘business as usual’ emissions,” said Wilson, who is also the lead investigator of the ANET-POLENET project.

She attributes the model’s unprecedented level of detail to how deftly it incorporates data from Antarctica. GPS stations monitor how the land is moving and seismometers measure how fast seismic waves from earthquakes travel through the earth, yielding important insight into where the land uplift will be fast or slow.

Surprisingly, according to some of the team’s GPS observations processed by researchers at Ohio State, Wilson said, the Antarctic Ice Sheet is currently experiencing a solid earth uplift of about 5 centimeters per year, about 5 times the rate that North America experiences.

Another significant aspect of the study is how the changes in Antarctica under different carbon emissions scenarios will impact coastlines around the world. Because sea level change will not be uniform, the study notes that nearly 700 million people around the world living in coastal regions will be most impacted by rising seas due to Antarctic ice loss.

Since some regions, such as small island nations, will be more vulnerable than others, mitigating environmental conditions like atmospheric and ocean warming is a vital issue for society, said Wilson.

“Many people are now more aware they’re experiencing the effects of climate change,” she said. “This work reinforces that our actions as individuals, nations and globally can make a difference in what kind of Earth our offspring will experience in their lifetimes.”

The study results highlight how complex the relationship between the solid earth and the processes that happen atop it is, as well as the importance of continuing to gather enough data to make prompt and accurate predictions about what the next few centuries of our planet will look like.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty in every model and every prediction that you make,” said Wilson. “But to document how fast our world is changing, it’s very important to continue advancing our ability to make predictions that are more certain, which is the only path that will allow us to tend to our future in a meaningful way.”

Wilson completed the study with colleagues from McGill University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Columbia University, Washington University, Colorado State University and the Union of Concerned Scientists. This study was supported by the U.S National Science Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

The finding is significant because the Antarctic Ice Sheet is the largest ice mass on Earth, and the biggest uncertainty in predicting future sea levels is how this ice will respond to climate change.

“With nearly 700 million people living in coastal areas and the potential cost of sea-level rise reaching trillions of dollars by the end of the century, understanding the domino effect of Antarctic ice melt is crucial,” said lead author Natalya Gomez, an Associate Professor in McGill’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Canada Research Chair in Ice sheet — Sea level interactions.

The study focuses on how the ice sheet interacts with the earth beneath, and how that dynamic is influenced by carbon-emission levels. This relationship has not been thoroughly explored in previous studies, the researchers said.

“Our findings show that while some sea level rise is inevitable, swift and substantive action to lower emissions could prevent some of the most destructive impacts of climate change, particularly for coastal communities,” Gomez said.

Rising seas and nature’s double-edged sword

As ice melts, its weight decreases, causing the land beneath it to rise like an expanding sponge. The researchers say this process, called post-glacial uplift, can be a double-edged sword.

If emissions drop quickly, limiting global warming, post-glacial uplift can act as a natural brake on ice-mass loss. It lifts the ice up, slowing the flow of ice from land to ocean. The study found this dynamic can reduce Antarctica’s contribution to sea- level rise by up to 40 per cent.

However, if carbon outputs keep pace and the planet heats up quickly, the rebounding land will not be enough to slow the rapidly melting ice, and instead pushes more ocean water away from Antarctica, accelerating sea-level rise along populated coastlines.

To reach their findings, Gomez and collaborating scholars from Canada and the United States developed a 3-D model of Earth’s interior. Their model used geophysical field measurements from the U.S. ANET-POLENET project, which had pioneered large-scale deployments of sensitive instruments to record the bedrock uplift and seismic signals across large expanses of Antarctica. These extensive field measurements were essential for characterizing the three-dimensional variations of the Antarctic mantle incorporated in the study.

“Our 3-D model peels back Earth’s layers like an onion, revealing dramatic variations in thickness and consistency of the mantle below. This knowledge helps us better predict how different areas will respond to melting,” said co-author Maryam Yousefi, a geodesist at Natural Resources Canada and previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill and Penn State universities.

It’s the first model to capture the relationship between Antarctica’s ice and underlying earth in such detail, she added.

Notes Rob DeConto, a co-author and glaciologist at the University of Massachusetts, “This study marks a breakthrough in our ability to better predict the impacts of climate change on rising seas and to inform effective environmental policy.”

Global impacts

The findings, published in Science Advances, highlight the inequalities of climate change, the scholars noted. Island nations, which contribute the least to global emissions, are likely to bear the brunt of their consequences, they said.

The study is a collaboration between researchers at McGill, Pennsylvania State, Cambridge, Columbia, Colorado State, Ohio State, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Washington and the Union of Concerned Scientists. It was funded by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Canada Research Chairs program.

To better understand the potential impact of climate change on fisheries in the region, a research team from Hokkaido University, The University of Tokyo, and the National Institute of Polar Research used bioeconomic modeling to study how the abundance and distribution of eight commercially important marine fish and invertebrate species might change under a range of climate scenarios from 2021-2100. The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

“The movement of fish stocks or populations out of their traditional fishing grounds can be challenging for resource managers and stakeholders, exacerbating the risks of overexploitation and the race to fish,” says Irene D. Alabia, a climate change researcher at the Arctic Research Center at Hokkaido University in Japan.

The researchers’ model includes biological parameters, such as population growth rate and fishing mortality rate, and economic parameters, such as the costs and income associated with each species’ fishery. The team modeled four climate-based socioeconomic pathway scenarios: sustainable development, middle of the road, regional rivalry and fossil-fuelled development.

The analysis suggested that under low to moderate levels of climate change, well-managed marine ecosystems may experience only limited economic impacts between now and 2040. However, more extreme warming, including the loss of sea ice, would have more severe impacts.

All the climate scenarios pointed to a shift northward for all of the species studied due to the loss of sea ice habitat and warmer water temperatures in the eastern Bering Sea. The most significant shift in abundance was predicted for Greenland halibut, with the fishery’s center of gravity forecast to move by more than 80 kilometers per decade under the highest impact climate scenario. In contrast, the walleye pollock fishery was projected to shift around 30 kilometers per decade.

Even in the most extreme climate scenario, the news wasn’t all bad. The abundance of Pacific cod was forecast to increase, but the high-value snow crab was forecast to decrease.

“The magnitude of abundance changes varied across species, identifying potential winners and losers under climate change and hinting at the potential restructuring of future marine communities in the Pacific Arctic region,” Alabia said.

The researchers stressed the importance of climate-smart solutions to protect and preserve marine fisheries in order to support food security and ensure a sustainable fishery sector under climate change.

Perhaps you’re eating healthier. Or you’re shifting to plant-forward foods to support a sustainable planet. Or you’re simply out of fresh eggs.

Good news: Plant-based substitutions are healthy and plentiful.

While vegan dairy and egg replacements are on store shelves, we’re focusing on DIY versions using primarily whole foods you may have in your kitchen. Such as nuts, fruits, and seeds. Even beans.

No milk. No meat. No eggs. No problem.

Flax Seeds

Joy Lehman of Meatless Monday recruits flax seeds for some recipes that call for eggs.

For a “flax egg,” she whisks 1 tablespoon of ground flax meal with 3 tablespoons of water. Then she waits about 10 or 15 minutes until it’s gooey.

Lehman notes that flax eggs are best suited to dense baked goods, like brownies, pancakes, quick breads, cookies, and muffins. She doesn’t recommend them for fluffier cakes.

The Meatless Monday website features several recipes using “flax eggs,” including Black Bean Meatless Balls and Zucchini Noodles, which offer a bonus plant-based substitution of beans instead of meat.

Black Bean Meatless Balls and Zucchini Noodles

(Recipe courtesy of Myra from The Happy Health Freak)

Ingredients

• 1 large zucchini, spiralized or julienned
• 1 15-ounce can of black beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 small shallot, diced
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 2 tablespoons bread crumbs
• 2 tablespoons ground flax seed, or flax seed meal, and 6 tablespoons water (instead of 2 eggs)
• handful fresh parsley, chopped
• handful fresh basil, chopped
• 1 tablespoon Italian spices
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Your favorite marinara sauce

Instructions

1. In a small bowl, add flax seed and water, mix well, and set aside.
2. In a medium bowl, add the black beans and mash with a fork. Add all the other ingredients and mix well.
3. Once the flax seed and water has thickened, stir into mixture
4. Preheat a large frying pan on medium-high heat. Spray with non-stick spray or drizzle with olive oil. Form mixture into balls, add to the frying pan and heat for 2-3 minutes a side, flipping frequently.
5. Meanwhile, spiralize or julienne a medium zucchini and add to another frying pan over medium heat. Cook your zucchini noodles for about 5 minutes, depending on how soft you like them.
6. Top your cooked zucchini noodles with meatballs and your favorite marinara sauce.

Other recipes using “flax eggs” on Meatless Monday website:

Nuts

Professional chefs often reach for nuts when whipping up delectable vegan fare. The Minimalist Baker turns black beans and walnuts or pecans into savory vegan brownies that are easy on the calories.

The Minimalist Baker’s Vegan Gluten-Free Black Bean Brownies

Ingredients

• 2 Tbsp flaxseed meal
• 6 Tbsp water
• 1 15-oz. can well-rinsed black beans
• 3 Tbsp coconut oil or your oil of choice
• 3/4 cup cocoa powder
• 1/4 tsp sea salt
• 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 1/2 heaping cup organic cane sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• Crushed walnuts, pecans, or dairy-free chocolate chips can be used as a topping

Cashew Béchamel

Ken Rubin, chief culinary officer at Rouxbe online culinary school, describes his plant-based white sauce as extremely versatile on its own or as a base for other sauces. He suggests adding roasted cauliflower or red peppers.

For richness and creaminess, Rubin rocks cashews. Find his recipe for Cashew Béchamel, along with an instructional video, online. He also provides a related recipe for Penne Carbonara.

Rubin offers a few extra tips:

• Soaking raw, unsalted cashews for a few hours or overnight can help make them easier to blend and increases the creaminess.
• Raw cashew halves and pieces are usually less expensive than whole cashews and work as well when blended.
• A little goes a long way for thickening sauces, so be prepared to thin it out with seasoned vegetable stock as needed.
• Freeze sauce in small batches so thawing time is shorter.
• A high-speed blender creates the absolute smoothest texture, but a regular blender will work just fine.

Bean Juice

Don’t pour it down the drain. Instead, use leftover liquid from cans of chickpeas or other legumes in chocolate mousse, marshmallow fluff, meringues, and a wide variety of other dishes. The fancy name for this intriguing ingredient is aquafaba. The Vegan Society showcases its versatility in an article, “20 Amazing Things You Can Do With Aquafaba.”

Other recipes featuring vegan swap-outs are featured in “All You Need To Know About Successful Vegan Baking” from The Vegan Society.

Fruits

Dalin Espinal of South Florida adores avocados in her recipes for Key Lime Pie Avocado Mousse, Pistachio Avocado Ice Cream, and Dark Chocolate Mousse.

It’s bananas for Barbarba Cole Gates’ dairy-free Chunky Monkey Nice Cream.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on February 11, 2020 and updated with a new recipe in July 2024. Feature image: penne carbonara, courtesy of Rouxbe.

Professor Philip Evans and PhD student Kenny Cheng were experimenting with high-energy plasma to make wood more water-repellent. However, when they applied the technique to the cut ends of wood cells, the surfaces turned extremely black.

Measurements by Texas A&M University’s department of physics and astronomy confirmed that the material reflected less than one per cent of visible light, absorbing almost all the light that struck it.

Instead of discarding this accidental finding, the team decided to shift their focus to designing super-black materials, contributing a new approach to the search for the darkest materials on Earth.

“Ultra-black or super-black material can absorb more than 99 per cent of the light that strikes it — significantly more so than normal black paint, which absorbs about 97.5 per cent of light,” explained Dr. Evans, a professor in the faculty of forestry and BC Leadership Chair in Advanced Forest Products Manufacturing Technology.

Super-black materials are increasingly sought after in astronomy, where ultra-black coatings on devices help reduce stray light and improve image clarity. Super-black coatings can enhance the efficiency of solar cells. They are also used in making art pieces and luxury consumer items like watches.

The researchers have developed prototype commercial products using their super-black wood, initially focusing on watches and jewelry, with plans to explore other commercial applications in the future.

Wonder wood

The team named and trademarked their discovery Nxylon (niks-uh-lon), after Nyx, the Greek goddess of the night, and xylon, the Greek word for wood.

Most surprisingly, Nxylon remains black even when coated with an alloy, such as the gold coating applied to the wood to make it electrically conductive enough to be viewed and studied using an electron microscope. This is because Nxylon’s structure inherently prevents light from escaping rather than depending on black pigments.

The UBC team have demonstrated that Nxylon can replace expensive and rare black woods like ebony and rosewood for watch faces, and it can be used in jewelry to replace the black gemstone onyx.

“Nxylon’s composition combines the benefits of natural materials with unique structural features, making it lightweight, stiff and easy to cut into intricate shapes,” said Dr. Evans.

Made from basswood, a tree widely found in North America and valued for hand carving, boxes, shutters and musical instruments, Nxylon can also use other types of wood such as European lime wood.

Breathing new life into forestry

Dr. Evans and his colleagues plan to launch a startup, Nxylon Corporation of Canada, to scale up applications of Nxylon in collaboration with jewellers, artists and tech product designers. They also plan to develop a commercial-scale plasma reactor to produce larger super-black wood samples suitable for non-reflective ceiling and wall tiles.

“Nxylon can be made from sustainable and renewable materials widely found in North America and Europe, leading to new applications for wood. The wood industry in B.C. is often seen as a sunset industry focused on commodity products — our research demonstrates its great untapped potential,” said Dr. Evans.

Other researchers who contributed to this work include Vickie Ma, Dengcheng Feng and Sara Xu (all from UBC’s faculty of forestry); Luke Schmidt (Texas A&M); and Mick Turner (The Australian National University).

Local foods are critical to the food security and health of Indigenous peoples around the world, but local “informal” economies are often invisible in official economic statistics. Consequently, these economies may be overlooked in the policies designed to combat climate change. For instance, Indigenous communities in the North American Arctic are characterized by mixed economies featuring hunting, fishing, gathering and trapping activities, alongside the formal wage economy. The region is also undergoing a rapid transformation due to social, economic and climatic changes. In Canada, the introduction of carbon taxation has implications for the cost of fuel utilized in local food harvesting.

As a first step in understanding the sensitivity of Arctic food systems to carbon tax policy, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in collaboration with the Innovation, Inuvialuit Science, and Climate Change Division of the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, attempted to estimate the economic and environmental importance of local food production in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the western Canadian Arctic. To do this, the authors utilized data from a regional study of harvesting conducted in 2018, aiming to calculate the total edible weight of food produced by Inuit harvesters within a one-year timeframe.

Reducing CO₂ emissions requires locally-adapted policy

The authors then calculated what it would cost to replace these foods with market substitutes, like beef, pork, chicken or farmed fish. They then gathered data from agriculture and transport science to estimate the carbon emissions associated with producing and shipping market substitutes to Arctic communities. Finally, using data from a community-based study of Inuit harvesting in one community in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (Ulukhaktok), the research team was able to estimate the amount of gasoline used per kilogram of food harvested, and used this information to infer the total amount of gasoline used in local food production in the region.

The resulting estimates suggest that, under plausible scenarios, replacing locally-harvested foods in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region with imported market substitutes would cost over 3.1 million Canadian dollars per year and emit over 1,000 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions per year. In contrast, gasoline inputs to local harvesting cost approximately 295,000 Canadian dollars and result in 317 to 496 tonnes of emissions, less than half of what would be emitted by market substitutes. “Our findings illustrate how local food harvesting, even when reliant on fossil fuels — as is the case in Canadian Arctic communities — are more economically-efficient and less carbon intensive than industrial food production,” says first author Elspeth Ready, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “Local food harvesting also reduces reliance on supply chains that are vulnerable to climate change.”

The results indicate that climate change policies that fail to account for local food production may undermine emission targets and adversely impact food security and health in remote communities, which face heightened economic and logistical constraints relative to more populated regions. This finding is significant because it illustrates that while climate change is a global crisis, successfully reducing emissions requires locally-adapted policy. The statistical modelling approach developed in the paper lays a foundation for similar studies in other regions.