Our colleague needs your help keeping a 1,200-year dataset alive!

If you have botanical expertise or are based near Arashiyama, Kyoto — DM her or email tuna@ourworldindata.org.

American Woodcock Shine YouTube video by steelels1

It has been brought to my attention that not everyone has seen every birdwatcher's favourite video.

(Sound on)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY43...

Ecologists and environmentalists supported him and showered him with honours for decades. If this is who we elevate and allow to represent us, we earn the justified contempt of our fellow citizens.

We can't change the past, but let's start by avoiding gauzy-eyed celebrations of his life.

(end)

Environmentalism needs better heroes than this.

Reserve your praise for people who saved forests and whales, or invented solar panels, or like Borlaug, tried to humanely solve the problems that got Ehrlich salivating for mass sterilisation and starvation.

(6)

This was not bravely facing a harsh reality. It was a stupid, racist worldview that caused misery for tens to hundreds of millions.

The fact that he's mainly known nowadays for a lost bet about prices does him a favour he does not deserve.

(5)

His ideas influenced the World Bank, which for a time made aid conditional on 'incentivising' sterilisation, which many poor countries did with gusto. It also inspired China's one child policy, which coerced on the order of a billion people.

(4)

Ehrlich instead called for cutting off emergency food aid to a famine-struck India to speed up the starvation of millions. And then recommended mandatory sterilisation, which was implemented in India in the 70s. More than 7 million people were forcibly sterilised. This is just in one country.

(3)

Most people have wrong beliefs and make wrong predictions. Ehrlich went further in drawing awful lessons from his wrong ideas. It's possible to imagine someone who saw a looming catastrophe working to actually *help* people. Norman Borlaug had the same worries, and fed billions. Celebrate HIM.

(2)

Paul Ehrlich is remembered for a bet that he lost, and a population prediction that went wrong. Many environmental scientists seem to remember him warmly for 'raising awareness'. They should not. His legacy is both stupid and vile beyond imagination.

(1)

For the record, I hold Brian in high regard and know he does not hold any of the opinions I am criticising here.

I chose to respond here because I'm shocked at the outpouring of warmth for Ehrlich amongst environmental scientists, despite how vacuously evil his stated desires were.

Thanks, Brian. I agree with your market-environment point but your reading of the article is generous, I think. It doesn't endorse Ehrlich's worst opinions, but it glosses over them and presents him sympathetically, even heroically. Environmentalists - and I am one - need better heroes than this.

This was not bravely facing reality. It was a stupid, vile, childish, racist worldview that caused misery for tens to hundreds of millions.

The fact that he's mainly known nowadays for a lost bet about prices does him a favour he does not deserve.

In contrast, Ehrlich called for cutting off emergency food aid to a famine-struck India to let millions starve. And then recommended mandatory sterilisation, which was implemented in India in the 70s. More than 7 million people were forcibly sterilised. And this is just in one country.

Brian, this soft-peddles someone who was not just wrong on his main claims, but drew awful lessons from it. It's possible to imagine someone who saw a looming catastrophe working to actually *help* people, like Norman Borlaug did. (contd).

Big effort, exciting results - our paper on the constraints of thermal limits in tropical insects is now out in @nature.com! 🦋🐝🪰🪲🦗
@ecoresearchzoo3.bsky.social
@biologie-uniwue.bsky.social
@uni-wuerzburg.de

My Year as a Degenerate Sports Gambler Practically overnight, America made wagering on a game as frictionless as checking the weather. I was determined to understand the consequences—for my country, and for myself.

One of the few paternalistic opinions I hold is that gambling should be banned in most places and times.

Instead, it's taken over US sports. Prediction markets are now turning every aspect of life into a gambling opportunity. I hope societies are able to resist.

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

GitHub - benjamin-rosenbaum/BayesFR: Fitting functional responses in 1 and 2-prey systems Fitting functional responses in 1 and 2-prey systems - benjamin-rosenbaum/BayesFR

I have written my first R-package for feeding experiments! BayesFR allows fitting functional responses by providing dynamical prediction models for use in #brms. Includes models for classical type 2 and type 3 responses, and also prey mortality or predator interference (more to come) #Rstats (1/3)

Excellent!

Of course! I believe in the golden rule and I would be sad if people stopped talking about phytoplankton after 30 seconds.

I was once asked by a US immigration officer what I worked on. He tried to stop me soon after but that was clearly just him being polite. He really wanted to know about phytoplankton, I wasn't going to deny him.

Referendum proposal: governments must publish the DAGs underpinning all policy proposals.

Great - it's right up your alley! Would be fun to apply this to the spatiotemporal gradients and community data in the Baltic.

How does salinity affect growth?

@fryderheim.bsky.social & I developed a model to describe this, and he's parameterised it for >100 species. We can now model how salinity changes should affect population & community dynamics!

Check out his poster on Monday afternoon at #OSM26

We have many ideas for how to build on this, which we discuss in the preprint. I hope some of you will find inspiration for future projects in there!

Here's the link again:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

/end

This effort was led by Ting Lv, a then-Phd student who went from modelling satellite data to digging into experiments & field occurrences.

It was made possible by the excellent field data compilation & SDM work by our collaborators Fabio Benedetti, Dominic Eriksson, and @meikevogt.bsky.social.

8/n

Extrapolation will always be a concern. The future will see changes in environmental covariance. Species will evolve.

But my confidence in our ability to forecast responses to warming is now a little higher than before.

7/n

This is tremendously heartening!

Despite many sources of uncertainty and bias, there's still a reasonable match.

Even a single lab growth curve for a species is informative. And even a hundred occurrences lets SDMs learn something useful.

6/n

The growth niche width in the lab is positively associated with the occurrence niche width in the field. Occurrence niche width estimates are likely most reliable for unimodal curves, followed by monotonic and finally bimodal curves. The six bimodal curves (hollow squares) were therefore excluded from the regression.

Remarkably, there's even a modest association between the growth niche width and the occurrence niche width.

The latter is wider on average, possibly because our growth niche widths miss a lot of intraspecific variation.

5/n

Median growth temperature in the lab predicts median occurrence temperature in the field reasonably well across 39 marine phytoplankton species. The mean response (solid regression line) is close to the 1:1 line (dashed line). Median occurrence temperature estimates are likely most reliable for unimodal curves, followed by monotonic and finally bimodal curves. The six bimodal curves (hollow squares) were therefore excluded from the regression.

The 'median growth temperature' in the lab matches the 'median occurrence temperature' in the field reasonably well.

There's certainly scatter, especially at intermediate values. But the regression line is pretty close to 1:1.

4/n

The temperature-dependence of population growth rate estimated from lab experiments (top row) and of uncalibrated occurrence probability estimated from SDMs fitted to presence/pseudoabsence data (bottom row), for three marine phytoplankton species. These species are examples of the three shapes of occurrence probability curves that we manually classified curves into - monotonic, unimodal, and bimodal. We consider the few bimodal curves to be biologically unrealistic and exclude these species from our analyses. The vertical red lines show the median growth temperatures and median occurrence temperatures. The grey shaded regions indicated the growth niche widths and occurrence niche widths. For Trichodesmium erythraeum and Thalassiosira gravida, different growth curves (in black) correspond to different published experimental datasets, largely representing different strains. We overlay the envelope of the individual curves in blue and use this to calculate the indicated median growth temperature and growth niche width.

We compared thermal performance curves (TPCs) estimated from lab experiments and occurrence probability curves estimated with SDMs and a dataset of global occurrences.

We excluded a few occurrence curves that were bimodal, probably reflecting data/SDM limitations.

3/n