Best Guidebook to Green World
What Really Caused the Great Extinction?
My nose started twitching even before I set foot outside the airport in Beijing.
While not quite hot, the air was thick. Thick with white fluff the size of grapes. “What is that?” I asked our driver, Mr.Guan, as he steered the car onto the highway.
“It’s pollen. From those trees,” he pointed to the rows of tall poplars lining either side of the road. “They’re a problem. People feel worse because of it.”
I started digging in my bag for antihistamines. “This morning, I had to wipe the car off,” he continued. “It covers everything and gives people all sorts of allergies.”
Sex change for trees?
Guan isn’t the only one fed up. This spring, Beijing’s government has decided to try out “sex change operations” on the female species of poplars, in an effort to prevent them from producing pollen. More than 300,000 poplar trees grow in the capital.
The leve of poplar pollen is especially high this season, worsening Beijing’s air quality – already under assault from industrial pollution and sandstorms – and adding further grief to residents who suffer from allergies or asthma.
Local news reports this weekend said gardening experts successfully injected the first batch of female poplars – about 30,000. Officials agreed on this unusual experiment after concluding it was a better option than spraying chemicals or cutting the trees down.
China is no slouch when it comes to climate engineering. In fact, it seems determined to wrestle Mother Nature to the ground.
The government routinely seeds clouds to create rainfall, and earlier this month Chinese scientists claimed to have created artificial snow in northern Tibet for the first time, amid growing concerns over the Tibetan Plateau’s melting glaciers.
My nose started twitching even before I set foot outside the airport in Beijing.
WRESTLING MOTHER NATURE IN BEIJING
A new study shows that the poisonous gases coming from the ocean may have not triggered the world’s greatest mass extinction. The world lost about 90% of the ocean species and 70% of its land species 251 million years ago, when the Permian period came to an end.
Scientists suspect that the high levels of hydrogen sulfide and methane in the atmosphere might be the ones responsible for poisoning creatures at that time.
“Toward the end of the Permian, we had a warming climate with much more carbon dioxide than today, ocean circulation was extremely sluggish, and the oceans became anoxic—essentially deprived of oxygen,” explained geobiologist and study co-author David Beerling from the University of Sheffield in England.
A computer simulated the conditions from the Permian period, experimenting with different concentrations of hydrogen sulfide and methane to see what happened in each case.
“We found some interesting things going on with ozone chemistry, but we didn’t find any evidence that hydrogen sulfide and methane triggered a collapse of the ozone layer. These are chemicals produced mainly at the tropics that oxidize [and thus neutralize] ozone-destroying pollutants, ” Beerling said
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