Science Friday - Rewilding, Allergy Season, Sharing Science Rejections. June 2, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

Could Restoring Animal Populations Store More Carbon? Did you know that land and ocean ecosystems absorb about half of the carbon dioxide we emit each year? But what if the earth had the capacity to absorb even more? With the help of some furry, scaly, and leathery critters, maybe it can. A recent study in the journal Nature Climate Change claims that by restoring the populations of just a handful of animals—like gray wolves, bison, and sea otters for example—the Earth could capture around 6.41 more gigatons of CO2 each year. This idea of restoring wildlife is called rewilding. Ira talks with the co-author of this study, Dr. Trisha Atwood, an associate professor at Utah State University, based in Logan, UT. They chat about what critters make the rewilding list, and how they fit into the carbon cycle.   Allergy Season Is Blooming With Climate Change Spring is in the air, and for many people that means allergy season is rearing its ugly head. If it feels like your allergies have recently gotten worse, there’s now data to back that up. New research shows that since 1990, pollen season in North America has grown by 20 days and gotten 20% more intense, with the greatest increases in Texas and the Midwest. This is because climate change is triggering plants’ internal timing to produce pollen earlier and earlier. It’s a problem that’s expected to get worse. SciFri producer Kathleen Davis speaks with William Anderegg, assistant professor at the University of Utah’s School of Biological Sciences about pollen counts, and pollen as a respiratory irritant.   Why This Scientist Shares Vulnerable Career Moments Dr. Rachel Lupien, a paleoclimatologist at Aarhus University, makes it a point to be honest about the challenges she runs into at work. She hopes that other scientists can learn from them. So last year, when a paper she wrote was rejected from journals five times, she tweeted about the experience.   While the responses ranged from supportive replies to harsh emails, Rachel says that it feels good to talk about professional headaches with peers who understand. Digital producer Emma Gometz interviews Rachel about why it’s important to be honest about setbacks as a scientist, and how transparency helps all professional scientists do better work. Read more personal stories from scientists, including Rachel’s experience working as a paleoclimatologist across the world, and building mentorship networks of her own, on SciFri’s six-week automated email newsletter, “Sincerely, Science.” To learn more about Sincerely Science and read Rachel's paper, visit sciencefriday.com.   To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, how animals could help us suck up more CO2 and get us closer to our climate goals, and we'll meet a scientist who's not afraid to share the good, the bad, and the ugly about her research. But first, a record was broken in space this week, and no, it didn't have to do with the size of a black hole or the number of stars in a galaxy. No, there are currently 17 people in space more than there have been at any one time. Here to tell us more about that and other science news of the week is Umer Irfan, staff writer at Vox based in Washington, D.C. Welcome back to Science Friday.

Hey, ERA. Okay, Omer, let's talk about this. 17 people. Who are they? Well, it's a crew of three Chinese astronauts. They're heading to the Chinese space station called Tian Gong. And with their launch this week, now, as you noted, there are 17 people in orbit across various nationalities.

There are six Chinese citizens, five Americans, three Russians, two Saudis, and one Emirati astronaut. And why is this such a big deal? Well, it shows that there's multiple different approaches to space that are being implemented right now. First, we have this sort of collaborative approach that we're seeing with the International Space Station, where you have multiple countries, and then you have China's approach where they're going alone to their own space station. And this week in their crew, this was actually their first civilian astronaut that they launched into space. Prior to this, they've been mainly sending members of their military. So it shows that they're also actually investing more in the science aspect of this.

And recently with satellites, we're seeing a lot more interest paid attention to the commercialization of space as well. Let's stick with space for a moment, or at least the upper atmosphere, because NASA held its first public meeting this week about unidentified aerial phenomenon, something we used to call UFOs. What's the big takeaway from this? Right. You know, first of all, it's just interesting that NASA is taking this seriously and also that they're doing so, so very publicly. For a long time, you know, UFOs and UAPs were the realm of cranks. And they're saying that, you know, no, there's actually something that we can discuss here. We want to actually have a scientific approach to this.

And one of the things that they discussed in their public meeting is they want to try to destigmatize this so people can talk about this without being thought of as somebody who's kooky, but also to be able to scrutinize this using all of NASA's tools and try to figure out whether there's an innocent, explanation or if there's something deeper and bigger that we don't understand is going on. Yeah, they always try to come up with an explanation, but there are always a tiny number of things that we see that we can explain, right? Right. You know, they have a database of reported sightings of mysterious objects, and they say that roughly 2 to 5 percent are only truly unexplainable.

That doesn't mean that, you know, they're necessarily aliens or something paranormal. It's just that maybe we don't fully understand them. But what we've seen in recent years, particularly since last year, is that they're that we have started to re-scrutinize parts of our atmosphere that we weren't looking at closely before. So that's part of why we're seeing a lot more sightings of some strange objects. You may recall that balloon from China that was over the U.S. last year. So now suddenly everybody's looking and we're seeing a lot more stuff that we didn't know was there. But now we have to start attaching explanations to those as well.

So are they going to then make a special effort to look for more of these unidentified things? Well, the big thing is they want to come up with an approach more than a solution. They want to come up with the scientific framework for how we categorize them, what kinds of tools we use to analyze them, and then from there maybe we can come up with better explanations. But the first thing, the priority for this group is to have a report to put together on just the way that we're going to actually do this research from here on out. Okay, let's move from Sky to Fly.

There's a piece out in Vox this week about new research into flies, how they're not only understudied but also underappreciated. Tell us about that. Right, Mike. colleague Benji Jones suddenly got flies on his brain and wrote about how we actually don't fully understand the critical role that flies play in our ecosystem. You know, this is actually a huge family of species all over the world, you know, not just the house flies, but flies that do valuable things like pollinating crops, including chocolate, you know, the vast majority of

pollinators for chocolate are actually flies. But because they're not as cute as bumblebees or as scary as mosquitoes, they're actually very understeadied. And so we may not even full know the true number of flies that are out there and with the roles that they're filling in our ecosystem. You know, that's interesting because they're so common, I would assume that scientists knew whole bunch of stuff about them. Right. There's this sort of security and obscurity thing that because they're so easy to take for granted,

we try not to pay too close attention to them. But really, you know, we've seen in recent years with this insect declines in nature that we may be losing a whole number of species before we even figure out what they do. And that could be dangerous and have bigger ecological impact. if we lose a critical pollinator or a fly that perhaps helps us decay a crop or some other kinds of waste in nature and breaks that cycle in nature. Yeah, you know, we all see the common housefly, but how many other kinds of flies are there? Is that surprising to learn? Well, we don't even fully know, you know.

Is that right? Yeah, within like one family, for instance, they may be up for tens of thousands to millions of species that we don't fully know about. And, you know, they come in all shapes and sizes. some of them can look like bees, some of them can look like ants, and some of them look like the common house fly. So we may not even know what we're fully looking at when we see one. Let's move on to something that's really interesting. And that is that State Farm, the largest insurance company in California, said it would

stop issuing new home business and casualty insurance policies in the state because of their losses from climate change-related events. Tell us more about that because that's really important, isn't it? Right. California is, you know, the largest real estate market in the country. It has some of the most valuable real estate in the country. And so it's a juicy market for insurers. But the fact that the largest one is pulling out shows that they say that their business just doesn't make sense here. And obviously in California, we've seen a lot of disasters that have forced major insurance payouts, the big ones being wildfires. But this year we also saw some pretty epic rainfall leading to billions of dollars in damages. Now, State Farm didn't specifically cite climate change. They cited mounting construction. costs, the reinsurance market, and increasing catastrophic losses. But all three of these reasons are linked to climate change. You know, part of the reason it's more expensive to build is we've had supply chain disruptions, but also meeting new building codes that are resilient to disasters makes buildings more expensive. The increasing catastrophic losses, many of these events are

worsened by climate change, and then reinsurance. You know, reinsurance is basically insurance for insurance companies. And this market has been reacting to these massive payouts after huge hurricanes and wildfires, and they've been raising their rates. So now State Farm is paying higher for its own insurance, and now they're saying that it's harder to balance their books looking ahead into the future of what we might see with average temperatures rising. And this is part of a trend that's been happening for a while, right, even in other states. That's right. You know, State Farm isn't the first company to pull out of California, and, you know, other insurers have also, like, dropped policyholders in California. But we've also seen this happening in Florida, in Louisiana. A number of

insurers are simply just saying we can't afford to keep people on our books with all the risks that are rising and it's going to cost us more than we make. And that's really going to affect our business model. And in practical terms, it's going to affect whether or not people can rebuild in the wake of a disaster. And so this is going to be a huge social and policy problem as well. Let's move on. There's a global treaty on plastics use conducted by the UN that is facing some negotiation challenges. Can you tell me what this treaty was aiming to do and what the roadblocks have been? Right. So the goal of this plastics treaty is to deal with plastic pollution. You know, this is one of the biggest environmental problems we're facing right now. There's so much plastic that's, you know, leaking into our oceans right now that if current trends continue, we'll have more plastic in the ocean than fish by mass. That plastic then makes it into our food and then it makes it into our bodies and has untold health effects. So obviously this is a high priority. It's just that countries can't quite agree on exactly how to go about dealing with this. There's basically two main camps. One

group wants better recycling and when managing the waste. And the other group wants to reduce plastics production in the very first place. And these groups are at odds because it's mainly fossil fuels, which is where we get most of our plastics from. And so the same countries that produce oil are also really invested in plastics and other countries are trying to, you know, push back on them. And that's why they're kind of at an impasse this week. So there's kind of an argument then. Not all the countries. There are countries in, at the UN, that might veto this idea? Yeah, exactly. So some of the big oil producers and plastic producers, they want to have some veto power over some of the things that are being proposed here because they want to make sure that they can stay in business. You know, on one hand, they're also saying that, you know, they're concerned about climate change and the world moving away from fossil fuels.

And so their idea is that maybe they can shift their business model towards producing more plastics. And now they're getting squeezed on this front as well. But of course, the bigger problem is what happening to the environment and the other countries who want to limit plastic production in the first place say that this. is not really a fair way to go about things. And now countries are trying to just, you know, hash this out. Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's close out with the hurricane season. The hurricane season kicked off this week and meteorologists have a new tool in their arsenal to help predict their intensity. I thought we were pretty good at predicting hurricanes. Well, we are good at predicting hurricanes in some respects. You know, over the past 20 years or so, we've developed a longer

lead time for projecting where hurricanes are going to go. Previously, You would only get a good forecast about 24 hours in advance. Now we can get those kinds of forecast 72 hours in advance, and that buys a lot of valuable time for getting people out of harm's way and triggering evacuations. But scientists have struggled to anticipate intensity, particularly this phenomenon called rapid intensification. That's where storms pick up roughly 35 miles per hour of wind speed or more in less than 24 hours,

and that means that the strength of the hurricane picks up a lot and does a lot more damage very quickly. And that can surprise us. We saw that happen last year with Hurricane Ian. That ended up being one of the deadlier hurricanes we've seen in recent memory because we didn't see it picking up that much steam that quickly. But this year, scientists and NOAA say they have a new tool that they're going to deploy to try to figure out whether they can see these rapid intensification events coming and then also issue warnings and get people out of the way sooner.

Yeah, because we've seen, I remember seeing these things, these hurricanes, they blow up in the Gulf of Mexico. You have 90 degree water there and suddenly, bam. Exactly. You know, hurricanes are powered by hot water, and sometimes if the hurricane moves towards a particularly hot patch of water, there's a lot more energy for it to absorb and build up and then dissipate through wind. And it's hard to anticipate that. But with this tool, with these models and these forecasts, scientists hope that they can actually sort of see this coming. Do we know when we'll get that first new kind of tool prediction coming up? Well, they're aiming to deploy it this summer.

So hopefully maybe with the first tropical storms building up, they'll have a better sign of what's coming. Omer, we always hear about El Nino, whether it's here or not having an effect on hurricanes. What's up for this year? Well, this year, Noah's projecting what they consider a pretty average hurricane season. Obviously, the water is going to be warmer. But El Nino tends to have a disruptive effect on hurricanes. It tends to rip them apart before they form. And so with those two countervailing effects happening this year, they think that we're going to roughly see an average number of hurricanes in the Atlantic.

All right, Omer. Always great to have you. Always good stuff you bring us. My pleasure. having me, Ira. Umer Air Fon, staff writer for Vox, based in Washington, D.C.

We have to take a break and when we come back how critters like sea otters, wolves, and wildebeests can help store carbon dioxide. We'll be right back after this short break.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Did you know that Earth's land and ocean ecosystems absorb about half of the carbon

dioxide we emit each year? Take man They're one of the best carbon sinks around. They store carbon in their long, thick roots and branches and trap it away in the sediments and soils around them, or grasslands. They hide away most of their carbon underground in their tangled web of roots and in the soil, which is another carbon sink in and of itself. The earth has an incredible capacity to sequester carbon, but what if it could absorb even more with the help of the critters living on the land and in the sea. Well, a recent study in the journal Nature Climate Change found that restoring the populations of

just a handful of animals, like gray wolves, bisoned, and sea otters, for example, if that could be done, the earth could capture nearly six and a half more gigatons of CO2 each year. This idea of restoring wildlife is called rewilding. to talk about this study and what rewilding could look like is co-author of the study. Dr. Tricia Atwood, Associate Professor at Utah State University based in Logan, Utah. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Aira. I'm super excited to be here. Nice to have you. Let's start with the definition. What does rewilding mean?

So for us, we specifically called it trophic rewilding in our paper because we're interested in some of the higher order animals, so things like wolves, sharp. So trophic rewilding is to restore or protect animal functional roles in ecosystems. And what that essentially means is either protecting or restoring animals to ecologically meaningful densities so that they're doing things in their ecosystems like they used to before humans kind of came on the scene. And when you say they're doing things, how do these animals then fit into the carbon cycle by what they're doing. Yeah. So especially top predators, so things like sharks and wolves, they can have

amazing influences on the behavior of their prey. Their prey oftentimes eats things like plants. We all know that plants are really important aspect for accumulating carbon or sequestering carbon. So the way that these predators change the behavior of these herbivores can influence how much carbon is being accumulated and then stored long term within these ecosystems. So if you have the bigger animals eating the smaller animals that eat the plants, then the plants remain. Yeah, exactly. There's a list of animals in this study that could have the most impact on carbon storage. Tiger sharks are on it. What other critters are on that list? And how do you decide on them? So we decided on this list based off of some research that has already been done and shown that these animals can significantly

increase carbon accumulation or carbon storage within the habitats that they live in. And so the animals that we have kind of chosen are wildebeest. Wildebeest are really important because they can eat a lot of grasses and that helps suppress fires in savannas. Sea otters, sea otters are really great. A lot of people know the story about sea otters coming back and how bringing back sea otters helps suppress sea urchins along the coast. And as a result, we got our amazing kelp forest back, especially along the coast of California. Wolves, most people are familiar with Yellowstone and bringing wolves back and how that's really changed Yellowstone as a whole ecosystem by influencing the behavior and the densities

of elk and other deer. Tiger sharks, as you already mentioned. Tell me. Tell me about the tiger sharks. Yeah, tiger sharks. Other animals, their prey, are scared of sharks just like we are. And sometimes they choose herbivores, things like dugongs and sea turtles and herbivorous fish. We'll choose to not forage in an area or forage at different times because they are fearful of sharks and being caught out by a shark and, of course, eaten by it. So that can change where they forage and how they forage.

You know, I never thought of that. Yeah, it's a really cool city. That's kind of interesting. I mean, so they're scared of some of the animals so they don't go eat the vegetation where those animals are hanging out. Yeah, exactly. And we've seen this in places like Shark Bay, Western Australia, which is aptly named because it has some of the highest tiger shark densities in the world. And we see there that sea turtles and dugongs forge very differently in what we call these high risk areas where they're likely to lose in a fight against a shark.

And they instead forage in these more safer areas where they can see a shark coming more and evade a shark if one is starting to attack them. That is cool. Now, let's talk about how big of an impact rewilding can make on the climate. Give me some numbers or a timeline. Yeah, so you kind of hit it on the head earlier. So we kind of gave a back of the napkin or first kind of calculation of, if we were to bring back or protect just a handful of animals,

so that's included wildebees, sea otters, wolves, sharks, many pelagic fish species that have declined due to intense fishing, African elephants, bison, and bailing whales, that we could sequester about six and a half, 6.4 gigatons of CO2 per year more. And that's really significant because that number is extremely close to the 6.5 gigatons of CO2 per year that we would need in negative emissions to keep us below 2 degrees Celsius if we were to reach net zero.

That's amazing. And do any climate models account for the animals? They don't really currently. There's a couple of new models coming out where people are interested in including animals. But traditionally, NASA models, all of our predictions about climate change, none of those include animals. I understand now. How do you figure out then the exact impact one species could have? It seems like, that takes a lot of math. It definitely takes a lot of math, but I assure you it takes no more math than what we're already doing in terms of figuring out plants, especially microbes. You think we're already including microbes into these calculations, and we can't even see them. Right, right. I understand that. What about ecosystems? Are there some better at carbon storage than others? Yes, I'm a little bit biased because I'm a marine scientist, and so I, of course, love talking about marine systems.

And it just so happens that coastal vegetated systems, which includes seagrasses, tidal marshes, and mangrove forests are some of the best at storing carbon, both in terms of how fast they accumulate carbon and how long they can store it. So they can store carbon, sometimes 100. times faster than a temperate forest can, and they can store it for tens of thousands of years. That is. That's just amazing. So, okay, let's get down to practicality, if I may. How would this work? I imagine it's more complicated than just moving some animals around. Yes, exactly. It's a very complicated thing. Rewilding, of course, has a lot of other aspects that we have to think about, that include both the animals and the ecosystems, but also the communities that are around those. And by communities, I mean people.

And who is going to benefit and who may not benefit from protecting or restoring an animal population. And so we have to think carefully about what the organism is that we're going to rewild. Can it go back to its ecosystem in a way that we think it is going to, or has that habitat been so modified by other human activities that even if we bring that species back, it's not going to have the same effect that it used to have because that system is no longer the same. Okay. So give me some examples of rewilding that have gone right, that have worked. Yeah. So one example is wildebeest. And so wildebeest populations severely declined as a result of a disease

that was actually brought in through cattle. And because wildebeest populations declined so much, we saw that savannah's overgrew with grasses, and those grasses catch fire really, really easily, and they help things burn longer and hotter. And as a result, the burning of that grass led to higher CO2 admissions. When the wildebeest started to come back after we protected their populations, is we saw that fires were more suppressed in savannas.

And as a result, those savannas were holding more carbon than when the wild abuse populations were really low. That's interesting. You know, I've always seen film, movies, videos of sea otters frolicking in kelp forests. I mean, are they also an example of things that could go right? Yes, sea otters are absolutely a organism that could go right or has gone right. So sea otters love to live in kelp forests, and they were hunted almost to extinction as a result of their fur. And after they were put on the endangered species list and their populations started to come back, we saw that kelp forest also started to come back. And that was because the sea otters, as their populations grew, were starting to eat more and more sea urchins.

Searotons favorite food along the coast oftentimes is kelp. And so when those sea otters weren't there, the sea urchins were eating all the kelp. But now that the sea otters are back, they're keeping those sea urchins in check. And our kelp forests are beginning to flourish. Wow. Who would have thought? You know, you don't think about one or two levels up or down, the chain, do you? Yeah.

It really helps. Are any of the animals that we're talking about on this list in danger? Does that make a difference? Yes, it does make a difference. So we do have some endangered animals. We also have some animals that are protected through other policies. So for example, sea otters are protected through the Marine Mammal Protection Act. And baling wells are also protected as part of that. And that's one of the animals that we also listed as being significant. That influences it because it suggests that there's already policies in place saying that we need to be focusing on. restoring these populations to some set level, to some trigger level. And so that's great because it means that we have already laid the foundations for doing so. It's much harder to probably bring back species that aren't listed because there's not policies in place to kind of force people to have to do that. And some of these organisms, of course, are somewhat contentious in bringing back things like

sharks and wolves. Yeah. Well, that's what I was going to ask next about cases where we Wilding has gone wrong. Are there cases there? Yeah, so wolves and Yellowstone has been a trigger point for a lot of states that butt up against Yellowstone National Park, especially because we have ranchers that are very concerned about wolves moving outside of the park and starting to decimate their livestock, which, of course, is really important for their livelihoods. And so we can't control the boundaries of animals and we can rewild them, but we can't force them to stay in natural habitats. We're not creating a zoo. And there is a chance that they will move outside of those habitats and we will get into human wildlife conflict. Yeah, I want to get back to something you mentioned

before, and that's the huge social component in rewilding, especially when people's businesses or livelihoods are affected, like if they're ranchers or fishers. or for indigenous nations that have their own practices. How do you take all of this? How do you take all of them into consideration? One of the most important thing is whenever making a management or conservation decision is to make sure that all of the stakeholders are at the table. That includes your rancers, your conservationists, your fishermen, if you're talking about marine systems,

any indigenous cultures that would be influenced by that decision. And make sure that everybody there has an equal voice so that we can really look at what are the potential problems? What is the potential gain? Is there any way that we can potentially mitigate the problems that we're seeing? So, for example, with the wolves, we might be able to give some ranchers what we call cattle dogs that will actually help protect their flocks against wolves. So that's like a win-win situation. Yeah. And can you get more of those like protecting marine areas?

We do have some that actually protects seabirds. So you could put them out there. So we have, I think Australia it is, actually has dogs that protect penguins. Is that right? Yeah. I've never heard of dogs protecting penguins. Yeah. Yeah.

So they have guard dogs, basically, that live on these islands with them. and their entire job is to drive away foxes and anything that's trying to eat, but they're protecting. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You know, you've gone from America to Australia to sea creatures all over the world. It does seem like this really has to be a global effort, right, for it to work. Yes, we certainly, our list certainly includes animals from almost every continent.

it. But the U.S. and some of these bigger countries, Australia, can do a lot with the land that they already have. The U.S. has a lot of wild lands still available that we can use to help rewild animals without running into conflict with already built cities or urbanization. And so the U.S. Canada is in a great position to begin rewilding with less effects than places. like England. Right. And you're sort of saying also that we're just not going to solve the CO2 problem by just sequestering it, you know, artificially.

We need nature to help us. Yes. Yeah. So we definitely have to reach net zero fossil fuel CO2 emissions or all of this is, you know, somewhat pointless in terms of carbon. So that means stopping CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. But after we do that, and we really will do that, after we accomplish that, we need negative emissions strategies.

And that means we need to suck CO2 back out of the atmosphere and store it long term. And this is where nature can play a key role. And we call these strategies either nature-based solutions or natural climate solutions. Well, Dr. Ratwood, we're very happy to hear about these solutions. And thank you for your research and for taking time to be with us today. Yeah, great. Thank you so much, Ira, and we're super excited to talk about this, and we love that you guys were interested in this story. You're quite welcome. Dr. Tricia Atwood, Associate Professor at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. And I have a request for you. We're conducting a survey about the shape and sound of our radio program, and we want you to help.

Love us or hate us. We want to hear how you feel. Help us out, please, with 10 minutes of your time at Science Friday. That's science friday.com slash survey. After the break, you're not the only one still sniffing and sneezing your way through the allergy season, why it feels longer and more intense every year, and later, a lesson in bouncing back from rejection with the paleo-climatologists. So every single time this happened, I had to be the one, the lead author, I had to be the one to email everyone and say, unfortunately, this time. It was once again rejected. But I think it's really important to show that it happens all the time. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato. Oh, Gazert Haid. You know, I usually don't start a segment with a sneeze, but spring is in the air and our resident allergy sneezer, Kathleen Davis, is reminding us that, well, it's here. Welcome, Kathleen. Yeah, sorry to sneeze in everybody's here. No problem.

I understand you've had a really bad allergy season this year, right? Yes, as you may have heard just now. I've been having a really rough time, Ira. I wake up every morning and I am all stuffed up. My sneezing is just out of control. I go through so much tissue paper. It is honestly disgusting. I will spare you the details because I don't think you want to know how much I've gone through.

It's really brutal. I really think that the past few years have been extra bad allergy-wise for me. And I understand that in between sneezes, you've discovered that there's evidence to back up that recent bad allergy season, right? Yeah. So there's new research that says not only is the amount of pollen growing every allergy season, but the season is actually getting longer. It's not even just recent. This has been the trend over the past 30 years. Oh, man, that's bad news for we allergy sufferers. Why is this happening? Well, I talked to the lead researcher of this study, whose name is Dr. William Anderag. He is assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

And he says this is happening because of something that seems to be dictating a lot of changes to our planet, climate change. We've known for a long time that plants are really sensitive to temperature. And when you grow plants in a really controlled environment, like a greenhouse, and you turn up the temperature, or you increase the carbon dioxide in the air. Plants tend to grow bigger, and they tend to produce a lot more pollen. They also tend to shift their flowering seasons to start to flower earlier in the year. And so in our study, we really tried to ask, do we see this same responses across the entire swath of the U.S. and parts of Canada?

And the short answer is, yes, we see that in general, plants are starting to flower a lot earlier, and pollen levels start a lot earlier. Pollin seasons are getting longer, and the amount of pollen in the air is going up quite a bit. And just how much longer and how much more intense are we talking about? So since the pollen data really start in the 1990s, pollen seasons now are starting about three weeks earlier compared to the 1990s. And there's about 20% more pollen in the air on average over a year.

So a pretty substantial increase in pollen severity, as well. Yeah, that seems like bad news for those of us who are allergy sufferers. Yeah, it's not great news. Obviously, pollen is a major contributor to allergies, to asthma, to a lot of respiratory health conditions. And just how much was climate change responsible for these changes in pollen? Climate change was playing a very large role in the patterns we thought. By our estimates, is responsible for more than half of the change in the lengthening of pollen seasons, and pollen seasons starting earlier, and playing a more moderate role in the levels of pollen in the air. Do we have any idea what could be responsible for the other percentages? There are a number of possible things that might be influencing the other patterns that aren't explained by climate change.

We looked at some of the major potential ones like changes in urban vegetation and didn't see much there in terms of patterns, But we know that plants and vegetation are shifting across the country, both in response to human land use and more subtle changes in climate like species moving northward. So there's really a lot of possibilities there, and it's going to take more research to tease that apart. So what kind of plants are we actually talking about here that are releasing their pollen earlier in the year? There's certainly a signal across lots of different species of plants. We saw that some of the really high allergy-producing plants like ragweed and other weeds were pretty large contributors. The largest contributors in our data set were actually a lot of tree pollen. So we saw a lot of increases in tree pollen and earlier springs in tree pollen in our data set.

And what's actually happening in the plant that is caused? causing this change in pollen release? Yeah, scientists have studied the physiology that leads to pollen production for a while. And we know from these very controlled greenhouse settings that when you either turn up the temperature or increase carbon dioxide, a couple different effects happen in terms of plant physiology. First, plants tend to grow bigger. They grow more mass. They also seem to make these decisions to allocate more of their mass and their carbon to reproduction.

into pollen. So they tend to grow larger flowers, and individual flowers tend to produce more pollen. So they're responding in these ways. It's almost like, well, the conditions seem favorable. I'm going to put out a lot more pollen to reproduce more. So that's some of the physiological changes that have been documented in these controlled studies. Now, I know that you were looking at North America generally in this study, but I'm curious if you saw any sort of differences regionally in terms of areas that maybe got a little bit more pollen than others or any sort of trends like that? We did see pretty substantial differences regionally. So across the country, pollen seasons are getting longer and pollen levels are going up.

But the largest increases really tended to be in the Midwest, in Texas, and across the southeast. Those were the pollen increase hotspots in our study. And as you mentioned, you looked at 30 years of data for this study. Can we expect that this trend is going to continue? In the short term, I think we do expect that this trend is going to continue. The driver's temperature was the largest driver by far across all of these pollen stations. And temperatures are continuing to go up due to human-caused climate change. And so at least in the short term, I think the next couple decades, we very much expect a continuing trend.

Now we know that pollen impacts the respiratory system. What's the implication of having a pollen season that just keeps growing? So a pollen season that keeps growing means we're going to expose a lot more people to these higher pollen levels and for longer in the year. And I've spoken to several allergists about some of the trends in this. And what allergists have often seen is when pollen seasons start earlier, sometimes their patients are really not prepared and don't have. the medications ready and don't have a lot of their responses ready and they're taken by surprise and then often end up with very severe health consequences. We hear a lot about certain pollutants that are constantly being monitored at, I mean,

thousands of stations across the U.S. I'm thinking in particular of PM2.5, for example. I mean, do you think that we talk enough about pollen as an irritant? I think one of the striking things that I am, always a little stunned by actually in doing this research is that we don't really monitor pollen nearly to the scale that we monitor most of these other airborne pollutants. And our study, which is one of the largest and most comprehensive in terms of number of stations and scales to date, was only able to really look at 60 long-term stations, whereas we have thousands of air pollution stations in many states. So there's really, I think, a lot more.

needs to be done to improve our monitoring of pollen levels. Well, this was very informative. Thank you so much for joining us. Dr. William Andreg is an assistant professor at the University of Utah's School of Biological Sciences in Salt Lake City. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks to SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis for bringing us that story, which originally aired in 2021. We all love learning about cool science discoveries.

That's why we do this show, right? And some of my favorite stories are about the scientists behind the research. And as many of our guests have told us, it's not always so easy. You don't always find what you're looking for. And that big discovery, well, it might just be hidden under a pile of little failures. But failure can also be motivational. CyFRI Digital producer Emma Gomez spoke with six scientists who shared their proudest accomplishments and some spectacular flops, all published in a limited-run newsletter called Sincerely Science.

And today she brings us a story of transparency from one of those scientists, Dr. Rachel Lupian. Here's Emma. Dr. Rachel Lupian is an assistant professor of geoscience at Orhus University in Denmark. But before that, she was an undergrad, PhD student, and postdoctoral researcher, building mentorship networks and learning from her peers. Now that she's a professor, Rachel makes it a point to be honest about the challenges she still runs into. She hopes that other scientists can learn from them. That includes sharing a story that she admits was pretty embarrassing at the time. It starts when she and her team were looking to publish their findings about a sudden climate shift in East Africa a couple of hundred thousand years ago.

It's the kind of research, she says, is important to understand early human evolution, adaptation, and dispersal. Paleoclimatology is the study of climate in the past. It's just a fancy word for that. So that could be in the past 100 years. It could be in the past 1,000 years. It could be in the past 1 billion years. So I typically study paleo climate over the last maybe a few millions of years. That's the sort of time scale that I'm thinking about.

And most of my work has been to reconstruct the past climate of Africa. In this paper, specifically East Africa, A lot of my work is motivated by understanding how climate drove and influenced hominin evolution. So our early human ancestors were certainly influenced by the environments and the climates that they were living in. And so I'm sort of bringing that climate, that paleo climate perspective to reconstruct what their world may have looked like in different areas and at different time periods. You told me that this paper before it was published was actually rejected from five journals. So talk to me about what that was like and why these things happen. Oh, yeah.

Well, yes, it did. It is now finally published in its sixth journal. And it brings back sort of some tough memories. But it went through review at a fairly high impact journal and did okay. there but ultimately got rejected. And then what we call desk reject where the editor just doesn't even send it out for review. That happened a few times afterwards. And we were just going down and down sort of in the impact of journals. And it was, I think it was especially tough because it was with such a big team. It was such a group effort, this specific paper, because we were drawing on

on data and locations from a few different projects. So there were a lot of people involved. So every single time this happened, I had to be the one, the lead author. I had to be the one to email everyone and say, unfortunately, this time it was once again rejected. But I think it's really important to show that it happens all the time. And so that's a perfect transition to my next question, which was you shared that information on Twitter. So why did you decide to do that? Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's a good question. Do I regret it? No, I'm just kidding. I shared it on Twitter mainly because, well, first of all, I like to share, and a lot of people do this now, sort of a few tweets per publication to share the findings, the figures that you work to

many, many hours on using social media to share your scientific conclusions. But then, yeah, at the end of this Twitter thread, I put that sort of what happened. And I felt especially confident doing that because I, again, believed sort of in the rigor of this study. But I thought it was super important to share. A lot of people sort of in my career stage, I'm a first year assistant professor. I was a postdoc at the time that this happened. It's a really sort of sensitive time. You're starting to write proposals. You're trying to get these papers out. And there's a lot of sort of good news shared online, people accepting jobs and things like that. But it really is important to keep in mind that this happens to everyone. And so I think when you understand that

that this happens all the time and it's not just you, then it helps you that much more to sort of persevere and continue on your path. Yeah, that's really important. And so what was the response to that tweet like? It was generally really positive. I actually had a friend who's a teacher at a small liberal arts college used that thread as a way of, as an example of science communication and that sort of thing. People also commented on it saying, like publicly on Twitter saying that that's happened to them, which was really nice. I did have some negative sort of consequences from it. Things probably that wouldn't have been shared publicly, but I got in, I received an email from someone who didn't agree with the study and has a long history of

work in the region. So it was quite knowledgeable about the, about the study and everything. That was a little tough to handle, just sort of a typical consequence, I think, of putting yourself out there. Yeah, totally. And so to you, what are the benefits of being transparent about the full process, like the rejections and also when you get accepted, like that full process of making science? Yeah. I mean, I like to think that I'm a confident person. I'm a particularly privileged person in my background and in my position now as an assistant professor. So on paper, I sort of have a good CV. You know, I did a postdoc.

I got that permanent position that a lot of people are after. And so I felt like I could kind of take one for the team. I could put myself out there, show a weakness or a failure, if you will. Everyone says that rejection is a part of the job, but it doesn't make it easier to experience. It makes you feel like crap. It makes you feel like you aren't smart enough that you don't belong in the field, in the position that people have put trust in you that perhaps they shouldn't have. But that is so false, especially because everyone feels like that at a given time. So I think the further along in your career, the better you are at coping with it, because you learn how you are able to, what makes the most sense,

for you in terms of how to deal with the feeling. So for instance, when I get a paper rejection, I open the email and I don't even read the reviews until the next day until I'm, you know, ready for that. So that's something that puts a little bit of space between me and the initial reaction. So that's a good way of coping with it. I mean, really talking about it is, it makes me feel better. And I think it makes other people feel better as well. Thank you so much, Rachel. It was a real pleasure to have you on the show. Yeah, thanks so much, Emma. Thanks to High Fry's Emma Gomez for bringing us that story. And you can subscribe to Sincerely Science newsletter, yes, and read how telling scientist stories can improve the way we do science. You can do that by heading over to Sciencefriday.com slash sincerely science.

Science Friday.com slash sincerely science. And that's about it for this hour. We had help from Lots of people this week, including office manager, Valissa Mayors, Executive Director Danielle Johnson, experiences manager Diana Plasker. B.J. Leatherman composed our theme music. And a big shout out to our new member of our family, KACU in Abilene, Texas. Happy to be part of the big country, welcome aboard. If you missed any part of the program or you'd like to hear it again, yes, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday.

weekend. I'm Ira Plato.