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This week’s Climate Champs, plus a tip for a cleaner drive.
Dear Reader,
For all the information we have at our fingertips — all the graphs, the charts, the analyses — we can thank scientists who have gathered and collated and discerned. They get inadequate thanks for the work they do. They’re criticized when their predictions turn out to be off (even if they trend accurately, there is a massive disinformation campaign that pounces on every tiny inaccuracy), and they’re often ignored even by those of us who respect their work, because … who wants to read bad news?
They continue to do the work because they know it’s important, and that companies, governments, nonprofits, and academic institutions can’t (won’t!) make wise and crucial choices without reliable data.
Which is why, today, Dot’s Climate Champs are those who continue to show up, monitor dwindling populations, catalog melting glaciers, witness the last of a species. There’s a cost to the work they do, and it’s paid in sleepless nights, in frustration, in stress, and in despair.
Biographic magazine gives us a deep dive into the long tail of scientific research documenting the impact of avian flu on a gannet colony. When researchers arrived in 2022, “everything seemed normal.” Then, in early June, the first gannet on Bass Rock tested positive for HPAI. The article quotes one of the scientists as saying that “Two weeks later, it was absolutely devastating. It was just so quiet. I don’t think a seabird colony is ever quiet. But at Bass Rock, it was just eerie.”
By month’s end, there were more than 5,000 dead birds, some of them birds that the researchers knew well. “They’d literally sat there and died whilst incubating eggs,” one researcher says. “It was just heartbreaking to see what [the virus] did to them.”
The population is slowly recovering. The researchers are too. But this work is not without cost to them, and so, today they are Dot’s Climate Champs for continuing to bring us valuable information to help us better understand and tend to our world.
Admiringly,
Dot
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