‘Earthworm Dilemma’ Has Climate Scientists Racing to Keep Up - Sensationalist Headlines

‘Earthworm Dilemma’ Has Climate Scientists Racing to Keep Up Worms are wriggling into Earth’s northernmost forests, creating major unknowns for climate-change models. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/science/earthworms-soil-climate.html Native earthworms disappeared from most of northern North America 10,000 years ago, during the ice age. Now invasive earthworm species from southern Europe — survivors of that frozen epoch, and introduced to this continent by European settlers centuries ago — are making their way through northern forests, their spread hastened by roads, timber and petroleum activity, tire treads, boats, anglers and even gardeners. As the worms feed, they release into the atmosphere much of the carbon stored in the forest floor. Climate scientists are worried. “Earthworms are yet another factor that can affect the carbon balance,” Werner Kurz, a researcher with the Canadian Forest Service in Victoria, British Columbia, wrote in an email. His fear is that the growing incursion of earthworms — not just in North America, but also in northern Europe and Russia — could convert the boreal forest, now a powerful global carbon sponge, into a carbon spout. Moreover, the threat is still so new to boreal forests that scientists don’t yet know how to calculate what the earthworms’ carbon effect will be, or when it will appear. “It is a significant change to the carbon dynamic and how we understand it works,” Ms. Shaw said. “We don’t truly understand the rate or the magnitude of that change.”

They even tried bribing them in the image above to stay

Seems like nature is going to continue climate change for us, whether we cut our emissions totally or not.

the lack of earthworms in fields seems like something that could be solved given these guys impressive reproductive rate but if pesticides and nitrates are making the land too toxic for them then just breeding more and spreading them won't solve the problem

There's also the almost initially-unavoidable and now-impossible issue where invasive species of earthworms have displaced native ones, which itself causes a biological turnover as some species have different preferences from others. The effect is basically irreversible at this point as it would basically take you to raze entire continents to solve.

I was really hoping this would be a true "unknown" effect when I read the title but in reality it's just "very bad or catastrophic", great.

Human carbon emissions have been polluting the air for the past 259 years since the Industrial Revolutions. Global deforestation has massively reduced the Earth's ability to capture carbon in trees, as well as massively reducing the biodiversity of the planet. The coral reefs of the world are all dying and becoming bleached, reducing the biodiversity of the oceans. Rivers are increasingly dammed and the rivers/lakes which feed them are becoming host to algae. The ice caps are melting and there's an untold amount of captured CO2 ready to be released from the ground when they melt far enough. Now the worms are fucking up the northern forests. The 21st century is going to be a rough one.

it's all so tiresome

The climate was always actually going to heat up, but naturally everything could adapt or keep up. We're speeding it up in a way that's incredibly dangerous.

I mean, it seems to have worked...

We're voting this week in the EU, so hopefully we can shift the balance there a little bit further towards sensible environmental policies.

We've already unleashed the methane dragon by warming the tundra enough to melt permafrost. The very idea of runaway greenhouse effect iirc was due to studies years ago on what the effects of this would be. There is no stopping the cascade now, and the best we can do is mitigate and adapt. We can slow it down enough to reach Cretaceous temperatures in 2,000 years, rather than 200 or so with current trajectory.