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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
/
Camels evolved from a cold-weather ancestor. We could learn from their
remarkable transformation
By Bill Weir, CNN Chief Climate Correspondent
Updated:
6:00 AM EDT, Tue April 16, 2024
Source: CNN
Since I became a climate reporter — and then a new dad — bedtime
stories are different now.
Coming home from flood or drought, wildfire or research lab there
awaits a four-year old named River who loves story time almost as much
as he loves animals. Armadillos, giraffes and humpback whales are the
current top three, but when picking a name for his tee-ball team, he
suggested the Brooklyn Cockatoos.
While I can’t yet bring myself to tell him how many of his favorites
are endangered — or how his worried dad has been collecting amid so
much loss and change — I can at least update his animal fables to fit
the times.
“Once upon a time, there was a camel,” I begin, after settling into
the night-night chair and flipping to a picture of his old man after a
ride around the Great Pyramids of Giza. I point out the splayed toes
perfect for walking on sand, and eyelids seemingly custom-made to see
through a sandstorm. “It looks like they were born to live in hot
places, doesn’t it?”
River nods.
“Wrong!” I blurt with the zeal of discovery. “The camel is
actually from Canada! Like your mom!”
I explain how that for 40 million years, the so-called “ships of the
desert” were ambling over beaver dams, nibbling through boreal
forests and dodging bears across North America, until a train of
dromedaries wandered west over the Bering land bridge around 17,000
years ago. Somewhere along the genetic line, camels’ ancestors
discovered a big hump of fat used to get through cold winters can also
help cross big, hot deserts.
Camel fur turns out to be a decent sunscreen that helps with thermal
regulation, those snowshoe feet perform well in sand while triple
eyelids evolved in countless blizzards also work in Sudanese haboobs.
But these accidental advantages were just the beginning. Camels got
better at closing their noses to keep out sand and lock in moisture.
They learned to drink saltwater, eat toxic plants and position their
bodies in the coolest possible angles to the sun.
Camels changed everything — anatomy, physiology and behavior — to
fit into their hot new climate.
But while they had eons to adjust, one generational tweak at a time,
record-shattering heat is sending millions of species of plants and
animals in search of more comfortable latitudes and elevations, some at
speeds fast enough to challenge the definition of “invasive
species.”
And to get my most poignant lesson in heat adaptation, I had to trade
desert gear for a snowsuit, sail to the bottom of the world and hang
out with penguins.
“They were everywhere,” I told River after returning from a to the
Antarctic Peninsula. He is happiest with nose pressed to the penguin
house glass at the Central Park Zoo, so the kid sat rapt as I showed
him my pics of a gentoo father diligently building a nest with his
beak, one rock at a time.
But then I had to figure out a way to tell him none of these babies
would survive.
Penguins need relatively dry, bare rock to nest, and after a warmer,
wetter Antarctic summer dumped enough rain and snow to delay nesting
season by a month, the new gentoos I’d met simply wouldn’t have
enough time to grow the feathers and fat needed to swim and fish the
Southern Ocean over winter.
But before I could mourn them for long, I learned the birds gathering
rocks for worthless nests are the one species that happen to be
Darwin’s survival-of-the-fittest test.
“Gentoo penguins are big climate change winners in the Antarctic,”
Heather Lynch told me. As the endowed chair for ecology and evolution
at Stony Brook University, her team had spent recent years watching as
chinstrap and Adélie penguins remained committed to ancient nesting
spots, fruitlessly trying to hatch eggs in standing water with
populations crashing as a result.
Conversely, the more flexible gentoo penguins keep moving farther and
farther south, chasing new prey, and even abandoning nests to increase
the odds of long-term survival. As a result, gentoo population numbers
have exploded by as much as 30,000% in just a few years.
“I think there’s a lesson in here for us as well,” Heather Lynch
said. “If we just stick to what we’ve always done, it’s not going
to turn out well for us. Just because Manhattan has always been where
it is, does it make sense that it will be there in two hundred or three
hundred years? I don’t know. But I think we would benefit from being
flexible and adaptive. And I think that’s kind of what the gentoos
are telling us.”
Here lieth the lesson of the camel and the gentoo: Heat will move us,
one way or another. An overheated atmosphere and the resulting flood,
drought, and storm will rearrange life on Earth, and those who can’t
move like the gentoo will have to adapt like the camel.
As northern climates way up on the 50th parallel now experience the
kind of temperatures once reserved for the tropics, folks from British
Columbia to Yorkshire, England, suddenly understand why smart Arizonans
keep oven mitts in the car. And those in already-scorching places like
Phoenix will have to start thinking about temperature management and
water conservation like the .
Sales of air-conditioned shirts and day- or weeklong heatstroke
insurance policies are booming in Japan. Seville, Spain, became the
first city to start naming heat waves like hurricanes, and after they
appointed a chief heat officer, Miami, Los Angeles and Phoenix soon
followed suit.
As our kids get older, our cities will get brighter.
While locals in places like Mykonos have been painting houses white for
centuries, Los Angeles painted a million square feet of its
heat-trapping asphalt with reflective paint. And Purdue professor
Xiulin Ruan and his students supercharged the idea and discovered ways
to make a , it can reflect up to 98 percent of sunlight back into deep
space and keep a surface up to 19 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than its
surroundings.
Seville is also reviving the use of qanats and , 1,000-year-old Persian
inventions that vent enough cool air from underground canals to lower
the temperature of baking streets by 10 to 15 degrees. This $5 million
investment, along with a “” to extend awnings, tree plantings and
drop-in cooling centers, is part of a specific campaign to save the
cultural treasure known as charla al fresco — that delicious moment
after sunset when grandmothers can pull their chairs together in
courtyards for a “cool chat.”
But maybe the best test to see if Homo sapiens are as savvy as camels
and gentoo penguins is whether we use technology that already exists on
store shelves to cool more efficiently, at a lower cost and with less
pollution and grid-crashing demand for peaker-plant power.
In 2018, the International Energy Agency fans and air conditioners make
up 20% of the total electricity used by buildings around the world,
but not a single nation places minimum energy performance standards on
cooling equipment that beat the efficiency of today’s readily
available technology.
“Don’t let the cold out!” my dad would bellow as I left the door
wide open in an urgent need to play, but both of us were clueless that
our dumb energy hog was already working harder because most American
air conditioners lacked a common part with the unsexy name of
“inverter.” We could control the fan speed on window units, swamp
coolers, and split systems back in the day, but the cooling compressor
had only two settings—on and off. An inverter AC adjusts compressor
speeds according to temperature and humidity, making the machine
quieter and faster to cool while using 30–50% less juice.
While 90% of Americans enjoy air conditioning, they are by people in
the Global South who do not. But much the way they leapfrogged
landlines with cell phones, the smartest developing markets are leaving
the past in the past. The market share of from 9% to 65% in a decade,
thanks to government incentives and public affection, while in India,
inverters were in of the machines sold in 2022.
And then there is the heat pump.
They’ve been around since the 1850s, but if you had quizzed me for a
definition over most of my life, I would have guessed it is a dance
from the seventies. Who would ever consider such a thing when in sweaty
need of home cooling? But it turns out that an air conditioner is —
get this — a heat pump! It just pumps it in one direction, from
inside to out, the same way our refrigerator pulls the heat away from
our groceries. But a heat pump goes both ways and even in subzero
extremes can find enough warm air outside to keep things toasty inside
at up to five times the efficiency of an electric radiator.
In 2023, only 16% of US homes had heat pumps, but with state and
federal incentives helping cover the upfront costs, Maine to install
100,000 of them by 2025 two years early and are now shooting for . And
nationally, heat pumps just for the second year in a row.
Homo sapiens may not have the thousands of years needed to change our
anatomy and physiology, but what about the psychology and technology it
will take to build a heat-resistant world?
Can we do it fairly? And can we do it in time?
As for the bedtime parable of the camel and the gentoo, I’m still
working out the ending. I just know River won’t be satisfied without
a magic plot twist that somehow saves all creatures great and small.
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