BIRDS OF A FEATHER

Brazil's Bolsonaro Tweets Support For Podcaster Rogan


By AFP News
02/03/22 

Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro tweeted his support for embattled American podcast host Joe Rogan, whose spreading of disinformation about Covid-19 has caused a firestorm of controversy on streaming service Spotify.

The leader known as the "Tropical Trump," who has himself been accused of spreading disinformation on the pandemic, waded into the Rogan row with a rare English-language post on Twitter Wednesday.

"I'm not sure what @joerogan thinks about me or about my government, but it doesn't matter. If freedom of speech means anything, it means that people should be free to say what they think, no matter if they agree or disagree with us," Bolsonaro wrote.

"Stand your ground! Hugs from Brazil."

Rogan is at the center of an entertainment-world storm after several music superstars, including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, ditched Spotify over its handling of Rogan's controversial statements on Covid-19 vaccines.


Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has regularly downplayed the danger of the coronavirus and promoted the use of treatments that doctors say do not work against Covid Photo: Poder360 via AFP / Sergio Lima

Rogan, an ex-martial arts champ turned hugely popular talk show host, has discouraged Covid-19 vaccination in young people and promoted the off-label use of the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin to treat the disease.

Facing a spreading backlash, Spotify announced Sunday it would start guiding podcast listeners toward factual information on the pandemic.

But it has not cut ties with Rogan, whose show, "The Joe Rogan Experience," has been broadcast exclusively on the platform since 2020, under a deal worth an estimated $100 million.

The podcast draws 11 million listeners per episode on average.

Bolsonaro has himself questioned Covid-19 vaccines, joking they could "turn you into an alligator," and touted treatments such as anti-malarial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine despite research showing they are ineffective against the disease.

EXPLAINER: What will Neil Young’s protest mean for Spotify?

By DAVID BAUDER and MATT O'BRIEN

February 1, 2022



FILE - In this May 25, 2019, photo, Neil Young performs at the BottleRock Napa Valley Music Festival at Napa Valley Expo in Napa, Calif. Following protests of Spotify kicked off by Young over the spread of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, the music streaming service said Sunday, Jan. 30, 2022, that it will add content advisories before podcasts discussing the virus. The singer on Wednesday, Jan. 26, had his music removed from Spotify after the tech giant declined to remove episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which has been criticized for spreading virus misinformation. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP, File)


NEW YORK (AP) — Neil Young vs Joe Rogan seems like the strangest of cultural clashes.

Yet the 76-year-old rock star’s protest over coronavirus-related content on Rogan’s popular Spotify podcast has ignited a hot debate over misinformation and free speech, bruising a streaming service that has become the central way that millions of people around the world experience music.

“Rockin’ in the Free World”? Not on Spotify. Not anymore. Here’s what’s going on.

WHY IS YOUNG UPSET?

His protest came after dozens of doctors and scientists wrote an open letter to Spotify, complaining about Rogan’s decision to have a podcast discussion with Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious disease specialist who has been banned from Twitter for spreading misinformation on COVID-19. Malone has become a hero in the anti-vaccination community.

Saying Spotify was complicit in spreading misinformation, Young told the company that it could have his music or Rogan’s podcast — “not both.” Spotify agreed to remove his music from the service.

IS THE PROTEST SPREADING?

Slowly. Joni Mitchell said she was standing in solidarity and also asked for her music to be removed. So did Nils Lofgren, a guitarist who plays in one of Young’s backing bands, Crazy Horse, and also with Bruce Springsteen. Podcaster Brene Brown also said she was halting new podcasts without saying exactly why.

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Graham Nash, Young’s former bandmate in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, said Tuesday he wanted his solo music pulled, according to several reports Tuesday. India.arie said on Instagram that “Neil Young opened a door that I must walk through,” although she said she’s also concerned about unspecified Rogan comments on race.

The rock band Belly put the message “Delete Spotify” in the background of its Spotify page, but you could still stream their music. Pulling music off Spotify isn’t necessarily easy — often it’s the record company, not the artist, who controls that.

Spotify dominates the marketplace. It had 31 percent of the 524 million worldwide music stream subscriptions in the second quarter of 2021, more than double that of second-place Apple Music, according to Midia Research. Spotify is not always popular with musicians, many of whom complain that it doesn’t pay them enough for their work.

“Spotify has a huge amount of cultural capital that is itself power,” says Midia Research’s Mark Mulligan. ”And that is what at risk if more artists essentially tried to push their fans to other places.”

While losing Young and Mitchell may be a psychic blow, what would really matter is if a more current artist takes up the cause. Everyone in Spotify’s top 10 list of most-streamed artists, led by Drake’s 44 billion, are from past the turn of the century, with the possible exception of Eminem, who first became popular in 1999.

For those artists, and for Spotify, taking a stand like Young’s would have much more serious financial consequences.

WHY CHOOSE ROGAN OVER YOUNG?

Music accounts for the vast majority of Spotify’s revenue, but Rogan represents its future.

Spotify reportedly paid more than $100 million to license Rogan’s podcast, its most popular. He’s the centerpiece of the company’s strategy to become an audio company rather than just a music company. In the long term, Spotify has more control over potential revenue from podcasts than it does for music, Mulligan says.

The Swedish company is gunning to be the premiere podcasting platform, investing hundreds of millions of dollars since 2019 to buy podcast companies like Gimlet and Anchor, and sign top hosts like Rogan and Dax Shepard.

Spotify was set to overtake Apple last year as the biggest podcast platform in the United States, the world’s largest market, by number of listeners, according to the research firm eMarketer.

Popular podcasters, particularly the outspoken ones, are likely to be watching this protest very closely to see if Spotify will stick up for the right to speak freely.

WHAT IS SPOTIFY DOING TO QUIET THE PROTESTS?

The company announced that it would add a warning before all podcasts that discuss COVID-19, directing listeners to factual information on the pandemic from scientists and public health experts. It did not discuss Rogan specifically.

Spotify has shown more transparency in the past few days than it ever has about how it deals with questionable content, and the new policy is a good first step, says John Wihbey, a Northeastern University professor and specialist in emerging technologies.

Yet it’s not clear that anyone has effectively dealt with the issue of misinformation spread through podcasts, Wihbey says. Will Rogan’s audience actually listen to an advisory and then hunt down other COVID information?

“This could be just window-dressing,” he says.

Rogan spoke publicly for the first time late Sunday, saying he’s sorry his critics feel the way they do, and it wasn’t his intention to upset anyone or spread misinformation. He said he likes to have conversations with people who offer different perspectives, and said that some things once considered misinformation — that cloth masks were not good at protecting against COVID, for example — are now accepted.

But he said he could do a better job having people who dispute controversial opinions like Malone’s on faster so his listeners will hear the different perspective.

The calculus for Spotify can change if the protest snowballs, says Colin Stutz, news director at Billboard magazine. “I think they just ride this out and hope that it goes away,” he said.

DOES ROGAN NEED TO LISTEN TO MORE MUSIC?

Probably. He talked in a video posted on Instagram about how he loved Mitchell’s music. “‘Chuck E’s in Love’ is a great song,’” he said.

Whoops. That was Rickie Lee Jones.

To Rogan’s credit, he quickly corrected himself on Twitter.

___

Associated Press correspondents Kristin M. Hall and Tali Arbel contributed to this report.

Who is Joe Rogan, and why does Spotify love him so much?

February 1, 2022 

Joe Rogan is described on his website as “stand up comic, mixed martial arts fanatic, psychedelic adventurer, host of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.” It’s the last of these that has really made his name, and for many audiences, made the medium of podcasting too.

An estimated 200 million people download Rogan’s podcast each month, making him the most popular podcaster in the US.

When Spotify signed a US$100 million (A$140 million) deal with Rogan in 2020 for the exclusive rights to his podcast the industry took notice. Before this, podcasts were everywhere, and their “platform agnostic” status was central to their appeal for creators and audiences.

The deal was a gamble, but one based on the numbers. As music journalist Ted Gioia put it in May 2020, “Spotify values Rogan more than any musician in the history of the world”. The reason? “A musician would need to generate 23 billion streams on Spotify to earn what they’re paying Joe Rogan for his podcast rights”.

Spotify can justify the spectacular outlay: there is a ton of advertising dollars to be made in spoken word audio, where podcasting is eating up what was once radio’s domain. Spotify’s other stellar podcast hosts include Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

Read more: Michelle Obama, podcast host: how podcasting became a multi-billion dollar industry

Why is Joe Rogan so popular?

What’s important about Joe Rogan is also the type of listener he attracts. Media Monitors says Rogan’s listenership is “71% male and evenly split between high school and post-secondary graduates. Some 57% of his audience reports earning over $50k per year, with 19% making over $100k”, with an average age of 24.

The Atlantic places gender at the heart of his appeal, suggesting “[Rogan] understands men in America better than most people do. The rest of the country should start paying attention.”

Prior to Rogan signing for Spotify, exclusivity in podcasting was unheard of. In 2001, US “media hacker” Dave Winer made public RSS, the Really Simple Syndication feed that could automatically “drop” a podcast episode online to a subscriber. Winer made the conscious decision to make RSS free and universal, in order to preserve a democratic ethos for podcasting similar to the recently created blogs he loved.

Signing an exclusive deal with Rogan could “make” Spotify as a podcasting platform of choice (and audio empire generally), or it could see Rogan lose fans who couldn’t be bothered to move with him. A study by The Verge showed Rogan gained fans when he first made the exclusive podcasting deal.

Part of Rogan’s appeal is his rawness – with episodes regularly two to three hours long and with minimal (if any) editing. He says what he thinks and feels in the moment, harnessing the compelling emotional power of the voice in a similar way to the great radio broadcasters of any age.
So, what’s the problem?

Rogan often makes pernicious claims. One ironic example occurred when Rogan circulated a fake ad made by Gruen to represent Australia’s pandemic propaganda – made funnier given the ad parodied people who relied on Rogan’s advice rather than medical professionals.

He added a correction, albeit a small one, and these types of mistakes have become memes since then.




Far more seriously, Rogan has peddled egregious conspiracy theories and disinformation. He amplified disgraced radio host Alex Jones’ lie the Sandy Hook massacre did not happen (apparently causing internal conflict at Spotify last year as a result).

According to a report by Media Matters, which studied the Joe Rogan Experience for a year, Rogan regularly trafficks misinformation and bigotry. The author drew particular attention to Rogan’s “right-wing misinformation and bigotry”, “anti-trans rhetoric” and “COVID-19 misinformation”.

A collection of medical professionals have campaigned against misinformation on the platform, and artists including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have removed their work from Spotify.

Read more: Neil Young’s ultimatum to Spotify shows streaming platforms are now a battleground where artists can leverage power

In response, Spotify have finally released some “platform rules”, but they are generalised statements that avoid infringing the freedom of creators such as Rogan.

Most important in all of this is the audience. Rogan maintains he is just a comedian having long form conversations. This sounds fine on the surface (and similar to the infamous “not a journalist, but an entertainer” claims made by Australian shock jocks John Laws and Alan Jones), but in practice Rogan’s words are heard by many more people than the average comedian just having a chat.
Podcasting’s wild west

Podcasting is still the relative wild west as an industry and medium. With ties to both the music industry and radio, podcasting remains mostly unregulated and diverse.

In a podsphere that now counts around three million titles, multi-million dollar projects with immaculate audio production and slick scripting co-exist alongside amateurs uploading rambling, barely audible chats. A near-global and cross-platform phenomenon, podcasting often evades the laws of any one jurisdiction.

Dave Winer’s open origin principle for podcasts has been at stake since Joe Rogan sold his name to Spotify. The question now is: where does editorial freedom sit? Should podcasters be regulated? And if so, how?

In response to the recent Spotify controversy Rogan says he is “not interested in only talking to people that have one perspective”. But as a public figure with such a large platform, should he really give equal weight to voices that clearly have unequal evidence to support them?

Read more: Spotify's response to Rogan-gate falls short of its ethical and editorial obligations

Authors

Liz Giuffre
Senior Lecturer in Communication, University of Technology Sydney

Siobhan McHugh
Honorary Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney
Disclosure statement
Siobhan McHugh received funding from the Australian Research Council to produce the podcast Heart of Artness, about crosscultural relationships in the production of Australian Aboriginal art.

“SPOTIFY NEEDS HIM WAY MORE THAN HE NEEDS SPOTIFY”: JOE ROGAN DRAMA EXPOSES THE DRIFT OF AUDIO GIANT’S OTHER MEGA DEALS  

Spotify’s once-grand star-studded podcast ambitions now rest squarely on Rogan’s shoulders. Even the Obamas are frustrated with their deal. As one industry insider put it, having Joe Rogan “is like dropping a Taylor Swift album every day.”

BY JOE POMPEO

FEBRUARY 1, 2022

FROM GETTY IMAGES.

After radically reshaping how we listen to and purchase music, in 2019 Spotify set its sights on new conquests. The audio gold rush was well underway, and Spotify mined its riches with a push into podcasting, acquiring Gimlet Media, Parcast, and The Ringer. They also embarked on a series of mega deals for high-wattage talent, signing the Obamas, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, and, of course, podcasting phenomenon Joe Rogan, who entered into an exclusive licensing agreement for a reported $100 million. The strategy was a means to attract new customers while showing Wall Street a path forward that didn’t involve siphoning roughly 70% of Spotify’s revenues back to the music industry. Content, of course, has a tendency to court controversy, and Rogan is now giving Spotify more controversy than it bargained for.

With his outsize media footprint, no-fucks-given hosting style, and an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, Rogan is, like it or not, the face of Spotify’s podcasting play. It’s a face that comes with voluble “anti-woke” bona fides; a hyper-macho sensibility somewhere between MAGA and Bernie Bro; and, most problematically, a warm embrace of vaccine skepticism. But all of that is part of the appeal for Rogan’s loyal army of superfans, many of them young and male, which is what makes him so valuable to a company whose success depends on attracting large numbers of engaged paying subscribers. In the words of one seasoned audio industry insider, having Joe Rogan “is like dropping a Taylor Swift album every day. Spotify needs him way more than he needs Spotify.” (Spotify didn’t have a comment for this story.)

The Joe Rogan Experience, which debuted in the earlier and comparatively quaint podcasting era of 2009, towers over its Spotify peers. Part of that has to do with the reality that the company’s other big-ticket deals just simply haven’t gained the same traction. Harry and Meghan have produced a lone 33-minute holiday special since inking a reported $25 million Spotify contract in December 2020. (They currently don’t have anything else in development with Spotify, someone familiar with the matter confirmed.) The Obamas, whose 2019 deal was rumored to be in the same general ballpark, have produced a few compelling shows, including one podcast hosted by Michelle Obama and another in which Barack Obama teamed up with Bruce Springsteen. But the buzz around these efforts has paled in comparison to the couples’ best-selling memoirs, or even the award-winning features they’ve produced for a separate content deal they have with Netflix. Moreover, informed sources told me the Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground, has been frustrated with Spotify at times, finding it difficult to get additional shows off the ground. I’m told the Obamas are more interested in lifting young new voices than carrying shows themselves, and that this focus hasn’t always aligned with Spotify’s. (Another source said that Spotify and Higher Ground are in active production on new shows in this vein.) As for the other offerings under the Spotify banner, chances are you haven’t heard of them. But you almost certainly hear about Joe Rogan every time something crazy is said on his show.

Reduction of fertilizer use raising concerns in ag industry

BY KENDALL KING, LOCAL JOURNALISM INITIATIVE REPORTER ON FEBRUARY 2, 

The Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association is calling on producers to share their thoughts with the government on the proposed 2030 fertilizer emissions reduction target. -- NEWS PHOTO KENDALL KING

kking@medicinehatnews.com

Details regarding the federal government’s proposed 30 per cent emission reduction target for fertilizer use are yet to be released, as Canadian producers and agriculture stakeholders raise concerns about the impact the reduction could have on yield.

Though voluntary, the total, or absolute reduction of emissions produced by fertilizer use has become a concern for many in the agriculture industry.

“They’ve set it as a voluntary target but as industry, and as the agricultural sector, we take it very seriously when the government says, ‘We expect you to do this,’ because we know if we’re not achieving the expectations in the time frame, it’s quite possible the government decides to regulate,” Karen Proud, president and CEO of Fertilizer Canada, told the News.

Proud and her association are not against emissions reductions, but want a more detailed outline of how the target will be achieved without decreasing current rates of production.

“When you take an absolute stand, it means … total emissions from the use of fertilizer have to be reduced by 30 per cent of 2020 levels. That puts a cap on the amount of fertilizer you can use … which is going to have an impact on your productivity,” said Proud. “In Canada, we’ve already become very efficient so there’s not a lot of room to move in reducing the use of fertilizer.”

Stephen Vandervalk, Alberta vice president for the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association, is frustrated by the additional requirements producers will have to meet as a result of the target.

“I can’t even wrap my head around what it means to my farm,” Vandervalk told the News. “It’s pretty hard for us in agriculture to do more … We need fertilizer. It’s kind of like asking a manufacturer to cut their power by 30 per cent – except it’s not putting out widgets that you can take or leave, we’re talking about food.”

Vandervalk fears a decrease in the amount of food produced by Canadian farmers and the impact it will have globally.

“This will totally affect how much food is grown,” he said. “It will increase prices in the store by a drastic amount. (In addition), other countries which need to import food, would not have access to that food because we’re not going to be growing it.”

In a statement released to the News, the government confirmed it’s heard and understands producer concerns and is working with industry stakeholders to develop an approach that benefits both sides.

“Over the summer of 2021, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada engaged virtually with the provinces and territories and 22 agriculture producer and commodity associations. The department also received written feedback from 12 stakeholders comprising a mix of provincial and national agriculture organizations,” the statement read. “AAFC will soon publish a Fertilizer Emissions Reduction Discussion Paper, (which aims to) stimulate discussion and to lead to a shared understanding of the opportunities, barriers and challenges associated with achievement of the fertilizer emissions reduction target.”

One of the main topics industry leaders, like Fertilizer Canada, would like to discuss is sustainable farming practises.

“One of the things we’ve raised with the government is even in their accounting of what the emissions levels are, they don’t actually take into account the farming practises, like the 4Rs, within Canada,” said Proud. “So, they’re only looking at the amount of fertilizer used, not how that fertilizer is being used. We know from scientific studies that Canada is actually very efficient in its use of fertilizer.”

Proud hopes the Fertilizer Emissions Reduction Discussion Paper will shed light on the government’s emission reduction strategy.

“The announcement that came out at the end of 2020 took everyone by surprise,” said Proud. “There was absolutely no consultation before the government announced it … We need to make sure that all stakeholders are sitting at the table and discussing a practical and pragmatic approach.”

AAFC stated, “The Government of Canada will continue working together with industry to identify solutions (and) contribute to meeting Canada’s 2030 GHG emissions reduction target and achieving zero-net by 2050.”

Fertilizer Reduction | 4R Nutrient Stewardship Program (wheatgrowers.ca)

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What do ancient fossils tell us about life on a hotter planet?

By Neel Dhaneshaneel.dhanesha@vox.com  Feb 2, 2022

A fossilized dinosaur skeleton at the headquarters of CAPPA, a paleontology center in Brazil. In his book Otherlands, 

Thomas Halliday writes that fossils provide clues about the past and future of the planet.

 Carl De Souza/AFP via Getty Images

When Thomas Halliday was a young lad in the village of Rannoch, Scotland, he loved exploring the Caledonian Forest. The pinewoods were like living fossils, a remnant of the last glacial period and a bygone age when the west coast of Scotland was covered in trees. “It was such a diverse and wonderful place to explore as a 7-year-old,” Halliday told Vox. “I essentially had free rein to go and run about, and I became very interested in the natural world.”

Fittingly, the boy who explored the ancient forest went on to become a paleontologist. In his new book, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, out this week, Halliday writes about primordial history as though we could witness it first-hand, bringing life to prehistoric geese that were as ornery as their modern-day cousins, towering forests that transformed our planet, and dinosaurs that lived before the evolution of flowers.

“By visiting extinct sites with the mindset of a traveler, a safari-goer, I hope to bridge the distance from the past to the present,” Halliday writes. He dives into the fossil record and invites readers to “see ancient life forms as if they were commonplace visitors to our world, as quivering, steaming beasts of flesh and instinct, as creaking beams and falling leaves.”

I recently spoke with Halliday about the clues the past leaves for us. He told me that “temporal wanderlust,” or a hunger to understand eras that were different from our own, can teach lessons about the future of the planet and the grave dangers of human-caused climate change. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You describe this book as a travelogue through time. What inspired that idea?

When people think of paleontology, they tend to think of skeletons in a museum. It’s very separated from the living creature. And when it is presented as a living creature, it’s usually in some sort of monster film, out for human blood. This isn’t really how creatures behave in reality. The past isn’t this barbaric age, you know? It was a real, functioning, biological system. So I thought, “If we can visit the Cairngorms [a mountain range in Scotland] and talk about their wonderful biology, then why not interpret the fossil record in such a way that it becomes sort of like visiting those worlds?”

The chapters of your book read like vivid descriptions of a day in time — say, a Tuesday in the Pleistocene. How did you do that? How did you collect the details of the weather or the behaviors of animals?

The behavioral side of things and the climatic side of things are obviously not directly observed, they are inferred. If you look at sedimentology, there are patterns of grains in the rock that tell you something about the environment. For example, in the Miocene chapter, about 4 million years ago at Gargano [present-day Italy], the Mediterranean Sea has dried out and we’re on this island. There’s a giant, flightless goose there. It has a bony spur on its wing, which is an anatomical feature that you can directly observe [in fossils]. And we know birds today have this kind of spur on their wing for fighting. We can then reconstruct that this is a behavior that probably happened among these geese on Gargano. It’s probably something that is happening within the flock, between birds of the same species, rather than defense against predators, because of what we can see in today’s biology.

Many of your chapters are set on the cusp of disaster, either right before or right after. Why are these events so useful when you’re looking for stories in the past?

Part of it is because they are incredibly important in telling the story of life. There have been several mass extinctions, and the way that life responded to them is very important — not just for telling us what’s happened in the past, but what’s going to happen in the future. Everything in my chapter on the Oligocene is represented as fossils in what’s called a lahar, which is what happens when a volcano has erupted and you have this layer of ash that turns into a sort of slurry, which goes down mountainsides at horrendous speeds and buries everything. There’s little chance for things to escape. In Tinguiririca [present-day Chile], we see the remnants of mammals in this lahar, so I’m talking very specifically about particular individuals.

At one point you describe one of the earliest species that might have been lost to our human ancestors, or hominins. How far back can you see those impacts?

Right, so this is about 4 million years ago in what is now Lake Turkana. This is sort of a cradle of African fauna. There are several species of relatives of elephants, and there are a couple of giraffe species, and there’s early wildebeests, antelopes, and the ancestors of the domestic cat. All sorts of creatures that are very familiar to us now.

There are these bear otters, which are lion-sized otters that used to live alongside early hominins. And they have no living relatives, so this is a group that has gone extinct. Some people have suggested — although this is a little controversial — that because they had a similar sort of generalist diet to humans, perhaps the bear otters were out-competed and essentially sort of lost their place in the ecosystem.

We’re not talking about Homo sapiens. We’re talking about three-foot-tall Australopithecines. They’re some of the first species that we can confidently say are on the human lineage.

When you begin to talk about humans directly impacting ecosystems, that comes much later. There’s good evidence for people managing fire and using fire to clear ecosystems and to change the forest layout tens of thousands of years ago. And even in what we would today think of as relatively undisturbed ecosystems, like the Amazon jungle, there’s been thousands of years of very active management by people. Even though it’s not been done in the sort of open plantations we’re used to in Europe and North America, it’s a landscape which has been highly modified by humans.

Throughout your book, you write about animals evolving to adapt to changes. Why can’t the natural world adapt to what’s happening to the planet now?

The simple answer is that it’s far too fast. Some degree of warming and cooling is absolutely a natural cycle, but the way we’re doing it now is entirely unnatural. When we talk about the changes that occur on geological timescales, they’re typically extremely slow. The fastest-known increase in carbon dioxide concentration is happening now.

When you get rapid changes in climate, however temporary, you often then get a big transition in what life is doing. At the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, was what’s known as the Great Dying. It is the worst mass extinction that has ever happened. There was a huge outgassing of things like methane and other greenhouse gases from volcanic activity. In Siberia, 95 percent of life was wiped out by this radical change in global climate. There were huge problems with ocean acidification, with these gases going out into the atmosphere, and a loss of oxygen in the oceans. And a lot of these things are problems that we are seeing now.

“Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds” was published on February 1, 2022, 

by Random House.

 Lucas Heinrich (cover design) and Chris Wormell (cover illustration) for Penguin Random House

Are there any other organisms that have changed the biosphere in the way that humans have?

Yeah, absolutely. One of the classic stories is the first photosynthesizers. Photosynthesis is the process that turns carbon dioxide and light into oxygen and sugar and energy. This was first done by single-celled organisms billions of years ago, and before then there wasn’t really much oxygen on Earth. When the photosynthesizers started producing oxygen, it completely changed the atmospheric composition. Most of the microorganisms that lived on Earth were not really able to tolerate oxygen, and so it caused problems for them.

More recently, 360 million years ago or so, we have the scale trees. This is in the period that’s called the Carboniferous, when we really get the first big plants. These scale tree forests formed in sort of swampy conditions, there’s a huge growth in plant material, they’re absorbing lots of carbon dioxide from the air. All of this carbon that was in the atmosphere was absorbed by growing plants, the plants that died fell into the swamp, and their bodies were converted into peat and then into coal and then buried, and so all of this carbon was captured. All of this served to change the global climate. It made the world cooler.

Very shortly after, you get what’s known as the Carboniferous rainforest collapse. The plants have changed the world’s climate such that swamps are no longer a common ecosystem, and scale trees and their kin go extinct. In a sense, they sowed the seeds of their own destruction.

How are humans different from the other organisms that have changed the planet?

Well, we as conscious beings are able to reflect on our actions. We are able to predict what the outcome of our actions will be, and therefore to choose an appropriate path. The first experiments that showed that carbon dioxide caused air to warm faster were done by a woman called Eunice Foote in the late 19th century, about two years before the first oil well was dug in the US. And for various reasons, despite having known about the warming effects of greenhouse gases for well over 100 years, little has been done so far.

I am always hopeful, though. There is now a movement to choose the right path and to recognize what we’ve already lost forever, and what we can salvage. Every day we go on without changing things, things are going to get worse, but there’s never going to be a single point at which all is lost. We can always, as a society, choose the right path.

In your last chapter, you write that human-induced change is not new, and can even sort of be considered natural. How is the intervention natural? And how should we think about it going forward?

It’s natural in the sense that we are part of the biological world and that we should not try and consider ourselves apart from it. We have been part of this world as a species for 200,000 years and as a genus for 2 million years. There are so many species that we have evolved alongside. We depend on that biological world that we are tightly integrated into. It’s a very unusual time in Earth’s history, in that all the ecosystems of the world, from the bottom of the sea to the tops of mountains, are affected by the actions of this single species.

Are there periods in the past that you think are particularly important parallels for us to pay attention to as we look to the climate-changed future?

If we’re talking about climate change, the important periods are the five major mass extinction events. The Ordovician is the only one which was caused by global cooling, and I think is an important parallel here. People have an assumption that warmth is somehow what is bad here. But in fact it’s not the warmth itself, it’s the rate of change.

At the end of the Ordovician, you get this onset of glaciers that expanded out across the whole of Africa and South America, which at that time were joined. And when that happens, we see a big extinction event in marine organisms as they are forced into deeper water, which perhaps they can’t survive in. But then you get this rebound, and the world begins to warm again. The ice begins to melt, and there’s a second pulse of extinction.

Earth has two roughly stable states. You’ve got the icehouse world, which we are in at the moment, where there is permanent ice at the poles. And then you have greenhouse Earth, where there is no permanent ice at the poles. Life is currently not really adapted to a greenhouse world. Humans — and I mean all hominins, all great apes — have never experienced the greenhouse world.

You write that we shouldn’t become despondent, which is easy to do when you’re faced with forces that affect life on a planetary scale. What should we do instead?

The problem with despondency is it leads to inaction. There’s a poem which I really like by Piet Hein:

Eradicate the optimist
who takes the easy view
that human values will persist
no matter what we do.
Annihilate the pessimist
whose ineffectual cry
is that the goal’s already missed
however hard we try.

The point is that we cannot sit back. It’s never too late. The sooner we act, the more we save, but there’s always something else to save.

If this is a mass extinction that we are causing right now, life will rebound and eventually be as diverse as it is today. But this is our world. We are here, and there are wonderful creatures around today. There are wonderful landscapes and wonderful plants. And I think it’s a shame to throw it away. If we undergo a huge period of transition, usher in a new age where life is fundamentally different, then we’re less likely to be a part of it. So we should protect the world that is our land, our part of geological time.

Astronomers Find a New Asteroid Sharing Earth’s Orbit

The Trojan asteroid 2020 XL5, which follows the same path around the sun as our planet, was revealed only after a decade of searching.

An artist’s concept of an Earth Trojan asteroid — an asteroid following the same path around the sun as Earth — known as 2020 XL5.Credit...NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/Spaceengine


By Kenneth Chang
Feb. 2, 2022

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Astronomers have discovered a captive asteroid shadowing Earth in its orbit.

The asteroid, known as 2020 XL5, is only the second of its type ever seen, shepherded by Earth’s gravity into an orbit that is locked in synchrony with our planet’s. It has not shared our orbit for long — a few centuries, probably. And it will not be there in the far future. Simulations indicate that 2020 XL5 will slip out of Earth’s grasp within 4,000 years and head into the wider solar system.

But its presence offers a tantalizing glimpse of what else might be out there in the local gravitational whirlpools. Some bits might date back to the beginning of the solar system — shades of the building blocks that coalesced into our planet.

“These objects are not as exotic as we think,” said Toni Santana-Ros, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Barcelona in Spain and an author of a paper describing the discovery, which was published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. (A separate team of astronomers came to a similar conclusion in December.)

When two objects orbit each other, there are five points, known as Lagrange points, where the gravity of the two essentially balance, and a much smaller mass can sit there in equilibrium. Two of the five Lagrange points, known as L4 and L5, are stable: If a small body there is nudged slightly, it remains at that point. At the three unstable Lagrange points — L1 through L3 — a nudge will push the small body away for good.

(The unstable Lagrange points can still be very useful. The newly launched James Webb Space Telescope is about 900,000 miles away at the second Lagrange point, or L2, of the sun-Earth system. The instrument relies on thrusters to keep it from drifting away.)

Back in 1906, Max Wolf, a German astronomer who developed a photographic technique to discover asteroids, found an asteroid in the same orbit as Jupiter, always ahead of the planet by 60 degrees, or one-sixth of an orbit. Later observers found other asteroids in about the same place as well as asteroids that lagged Jupiter by the same margin.

These fit a prediction made more than a century earlier by mathematician Jose-Louis Lagrange. Astronomers started naming these objects after heroes of the Trojan War, and the bodies became known as the Trojan asteroids.

Many of Jupiter’s more than 11,000 Trojans do appear to be primordial remnants from the formation of the solar system. In October, NASA launched a probe named Lucy, after the fossilized skeleton of an early hominid ancestor, to visit several of them.

Similar asteroids appear to be trapped in the orbits of Venus, Mars, Uranus and Neptune. None have been found sharing Saturn’s orbit — the disruptive gravity of Jupiter is thought to be at fault — or Mercury’s, where any tiny Trojans would be all but impossible to find in the glare of the sun.

Earth also appeared to lack Trojan asteroids until astronomers found one in 2010 at the L4 Lagrange point, 60 degrees ahead of Earth. Subsequent searches came up empty until Pan-Starrs, an automated sky survey in Hawaii, turned up an intriguing object, 2020 XL5, that seemed like it might also be trapped around L4.

But the initial observations were insufficient to definitively pin down the object’s orbit. In 2021, an international team of astronomers including Dr. Santana-Ros made additional sightings of 2020 XL5 using three ground-based telescopes. The team was then able to search through images dating back to 2012 — where the asteroid indeed appeared, although no one had recognized it as one.

A decade of data was finally enough to firmly chart 2020 XL5’s elliptical orbit. “We were 100 percent sure this was an Earth Trojan,” Dr. Santana-Ros said.

Although 2020 XL5 is trapped in an orbit around a stable Lagrange point, it is not particularly close to L4. Its elliptical orbit, tilted nearly 14 degrees to the orbit of the planets, sweeps it closer to the sun than Venus and almost as far out as Mars.

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This makes it vulnerable to gravitational buffeting from other planets, especially Venus.

The researchers ran computer simulations of the orbit of 2020 XL5, tweaking it 800 times. Sometimes the asteroid escaped from the Lagrange point within 3,500 years; sometimes it loitered 5,000 years or more. But the orbit appears unlikely to remain stable for much longer than that

From appearances, 2020 XL5 is a dark, carbon-rich body, perhaps an interloper from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The researchers estimate its diameter at about three-quarters of a mile, much larger than the Earth Trojan discovered in 2010, which was estimated to be about a quarter-mile in diameter and is also located at the L4 Lagrange point.

Whereas the two known Earth Trojans appear to be transitory additions to our orbital neighborhood, other bodies that hover closer to the stable Lagrange points could remain in place indefinitely, raising the possibility that some of the primordial building blocks of Earth might still be found there.

“All the formation models gives you the idea that planets should have these families going around their L4 and L5 points from the beginning,” said Federica Spoto, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who was not involved with the research.

She added, “If we were able to find something like that, we might be able to understand what happened at the beginning, basically.”

Kenneth Chang has been at The Times since 2000, writing about physics, geology, chemistry, and the planets. Before becoming a science writer, he was a graduate student whose research involved the control of chaos. @kchangnyt

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Existence of Earth Trojan Asteroid Confirmed – Could Become “Ideal Bases” for Advanced Exploration of the Solar System

By ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITIES FOR RESEARCH IN ASTRONOMY FEBRUARY 2, 2022

Using the 4.1-meter SOAR (Southern Astrophysical Research) Telescope on Cerro Pachón in Chile, astronomers have confirmed that an asteroid discovered in 2020 by the Pan-STARRS1 survey, called 2020 XL5, is an Earth Trojan (an Earth companion following the same path around the Sun as Earth does) and revealed that it is much larger than the only other Earth Trojan known.

Data from NSF’s NOIRLab Show Earth Trojan Asteroid Is the Largest Found

The SOAR Telescope, part of NOIRLab’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, has helped astronomers refine the size and orbit of the largest known Earth Trojan companion.

By scanning the sky very close to the horizon at sunrise, the SOAR Telescope in Chile, part of Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, has helped astronomers confirm the existence of only the second-known Earth Trojan asteroid and reveals that it is over a kilometer wide — about three times larger than the first.

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of the second known Earth Trojan asteroid and found that it is much bigger than the first. An Earth Trojan is an asteroid that follows the same path around the Sun as Earth does, either ahead of or behind Earth in its orbit. Called 2020 XL5 the asteroid was discovered by the Pan-STARRS1 survey telescope in 2020, but astronomers were not sure then whether it was an Earth Trojan. The SOAR Telescope operated by NOIRLab in Chile helped confirm that it is an Earth Trojan and found that it is over a kilometer across — almost three times bigger than the other Earth Trojan known.

Using the 4.1-meter SOAR (Southern Astrophysical Research) Telescope on Cerro Pachón in Chile, astronomers led by Toni Santana-Ros of the University of Alicante and the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona observed the recently discovered asteroid 2020 XL₅ to constrain its orbit and size. Their results confirm that 2020 XL₅ is an Earth Trojan — an asteroid companion to Earth that orbits the Sun along the same path as our planet does — and that it is the largest one yet found.

“Trojans are objects sharing an orbit with a planet, clustered around one of two special gravitationally balanced areas along the orbit of the planet known as Lagrange points,”^[1] says Cesar Briceño of NSF’s NOIRLab, who is one of the authors of a paper published today in Nature Communications reporting the results, and who helped make the observations with the SOAR Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, in March 2021.

Several planets in the Solar System are known to have Trojan asteroids, but 2020 XL₅ is only the second known Trojan asteroid found near Earth.^[2]

Lagrange points are places in space where the gravitational forces of two massive bodies, such as the Sun and a planet, balance out, making it easier for a low-mass object (such as a spacecraft or an asteroid) to orbit there. This diagram shows the five Lagrange points for the Earth-Sun system. (The size of Earth and the distances in the illustration are not to scale.) Credit:
NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva, Acknowledgment: M. Zamani (NSF’s NOIRLab)

Observations of 2020 XL₅ were also made with the 4.3-meter Lowell Discovery Telescope at Lowell Observatory in Arizona and by the European Space Agency’s 1-meter Optical Ground Station in Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

Discovered on December 12, 2020, by the Pan-STARRS1 survey telescope in Hawai‘i, 2020 XL₅ is much larger than the first Earth Trojan discovered, called 2010 TK₇. The researchers found that 2020 XL₅ is about 1.2 kilometers (0.73 miles) in diameter, about three times as wide as the first (2010 TK₇ is estimated to be less than 400 meters or yards across).

When 2020 XL₅ was discovered, its orbit around the Sun was not known well enough to say whether it was merely a near-Earth asteroid crossing our orbit, or whether it was a true Trojan. SOAR’s measurements were so accurate that Santana-Ros’s team was then able to go back and search for 2020 XL₅ in archival images from 2012 to 2019 taken as part of the Dark Energy Survey using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope located at CTIO in Chile. With almost 10 years of data on hand, the team was able to vastly improve our understanding of the asteroid’s orbit.

This graphic shows where the Earth Trojan asteroid 2020 XL5 would appear in the sky from Cerro Pachón in Chile as the asteroid orbits the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 4 (L4). The arrows show the direction of its motion. The SOAR Telescope appears in the lower left. The asteroid’s apparent magnitude is around magnitude 22, beyond the reach of anything but the largest telescopes. Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva

Although other studies have supported the Trojan asteroid’s identification,^[3] the new results make that determination far more robust and provide estimates of the size of 2020 XL₅ and what type of asteroid it is.

“SOAR’s data allowed us to make a first photometric analysis of the object, revealing that 2020 XL₅ is likely a C-type asteroid, with a size larger than one kilometer,” says Santana-Ros. A C-type asteroid is dark, contains a lot of carbon, and is the most common type of asteroid in the Solar System.

The findings also showed that 2020 XL₅ will not remain a Trojan asteroid forever. It will remain stable in its position for at least another 4000 years, but eventually it will be gravitationally perturbed and escape to wander through space.

2020 XL₅ and 2010 TK₇ may not be alone — there could be many more Earth Trojans that have so far gone undetected as they appear close to the Sun in the sky. This means that searches for, and observations of, Earth Trojans must be performed close to sunrise or sunset, with the telescope pointing near the horizon, through the thickest part of the atmosphere, which results in poor seeing conditions. SOAR was able to point down to 16 degrees above the horizon, while many 4-meter (and larger) telescopes are not able to aim that low.^[4].

“These were very challenging observations, requiring the telescope to track correctly at its lowest elevation limit, as the object was very low on the western horizon at dawn,” says Briceño.

Nevertheless, the prize of discovering Earth Trojans is worth the effort of finding them. Because they are made of primitive material dating back to the birth of the Solar System and could represent some of the building blocks that formed our planet, they are attractive targets for future space missions.

“If we are able to discover more Earth Trojans, and if some of them can have orbits with lower inclinations, they might become cheaper to reach than our Moon,” says Briceño. “So they might become ideal bases for an advanced exploration of the Solar System, or they could even be a source of resources.”

Notes

1. Lagrange points are gravitationally balanced regions around two massive bodies, such as the Sun and a planet. The Earth-Sun system has five Lagrange points: L1 is between Earth and the Sun; L2 is on the opposite side of Earth from the Sun; L3 is on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth; and L4 and L5 are along Earth’s orbit, one 60 degrees ahead of our planet along its orbit and the other 60 degrees behind it. (The image in the middle of this article illustrates their positions.) Trojan asteroids are found at L4 and L5. The two Earth Trojans found so far are at L4.
2. Jupiter has over 5000 known Trojan asteroids, and a NASA spacecraft called Lucy has recently launched on a mission to explore them. Venus, Mars, Uranus, and Neptune are also known to have Trojan asteroids.
3. Man-To Hui (Macau University of Science and Technology) and collaborators published observations in the Astrophysical Journal Letters in December 2021 supporting the Trojan nature of 2020 XL₅.
4. These kinds of observations low in the sky are also the ones that will be most affected by the increasing number of satellite constellations.

More information

This research is presented in a paper titled “Orbital stability analysis and photometric characterization of the second Earth Trojan asteroid 2020 XL₅” published on 1 February 2022 in Nature Communications.

Reference: “Orbital stability analysis and photometric characterization of the second Earth Trojan asteroid 2020 XL₅” by T. Santana-Ros, M. Micheli, L. Faggioli, R. Cennamo, M. Devogèle, A. Alvarez-Candal, D. Oszkiewicz, O. Ramírez, P.-Y. Liu, P. G. Benavidez, A. Campo Bagatin, E. J. Christensen, R. J. Wainscoat, R. Weryk, L. Fraga, C. Briceño and L. Conversi, 1 February 2022, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-27988-4

The team is composed of T. Santana-Ros (Departamento de Fisica, Ingeniería de Sistemas y Teoría de la Señal, Universidad de Alicante; Institut de Ciències del Cosmos, Universitat de Barcelona), M. Micheli (ESA NEO Coordination Centre), L. Faggioli (ESA NEO Coordination Centre), R. Cennamo (ESA NEO Coordination Centre), M. Devogèle (Arecibo Observatory; University of Central Florida), A. Alvarez-Candal (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, CSIC; Instituto de Física Aplicada a las Ciencias y las Tecnologías, Universidad de Alicante; Observatório Nacional / MCTIC), D. Oszkiewicz (Faculty of Physics, Astronomical Observatory Institute), O. Ramírez (Solenix Deutschland), P.-Y. Liu (Instituto de Física Aplicada a las Ciencias y las Tecnologías, Universidad de Alicante), P.G. Benavidez (Departamento de Fisica, Ingeniería de Sistemas y Teoría de la Señal, Universidad de Alicante; Instituto de Física Aplicada a las Ciencias y las Tecnologías, Universidad de Alicante), A. Campo Bagatin (Departamento de Física, Ingeniería de Sistemas y Teoría de la Señal, Universidad de Alicante; Instituto de Física Aplicada a las Ciencias y las Tecnologías, Universidad de Alicante), E.J. Christensen (Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona,), R. J. Wainscoat (Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii), R. Weryk (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Western Ontario), L. Fraga (Laboratório Nacional de Astrofísica LNA/MCTI), C. Briceño (Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), and L. Conversi (ESA NEO Coordination Centre; ESA ESRIN).