Climate & ecological emergency (CEE) from local to global

David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, 1970s environmental slogan “think globally, act locally” needs to be recast ½ c. later to “think globally, observe locally” first. 

I bird-dogged the increased flooding thru SusCott in East Anglia prior to joining Extinction Rebellion (XR) then starting & morphing Cambrdgeshire.ai (here) five years ago. I'm a geologist who was paid, after all, to observe, assess & interpret, see opener here:

... a geologic principle [is] that small-scale features - the texture of a rock fragment at left - reflect much larger ones - local land form at right to entire mountain chains - within a knowledge framework...

Flysch sample & outcrop, Gan, SW FR (Greg Zolnai, 1984)

Here is a WhatsApp chat with an old XR friend re: the late return of swallows, swifts & house martins - I myself remember the return of the swallows in San Juan Capistrano (here) when living in So. Cal. - these are photos taken recently at the Château de Pau in SW FR, swifts(?) in close-up at top:

click to enlarge (may be slow)

click to enlarge (may be slow)

"In Pau SW FR they're almost a month late, I think they were kept south by the Arctic air mass swept southward, when anticyclone stuck over No. Atlantic last couple weeks. 

Saw the same at 90° exactly  40 yrs. ago, "the summer that never was" - 40 frost-free days in Calgary, W CAN & snow never left the ground in the high Arctic I was at that summer [see also here] - brant geese were swept far W from Greenland by same anticyclone except they were on its W side then (the last weeks cold here was E of anticyclone).

That's cold air drawn S from Arctic. We usually say "le fond de l'air est frais" (the air is cool in the background) in the spring, but here's it's the opposite with a cold breeze stirring warmer ambient air... it still lingers in the current 32°C 90°F heatwave cooled to 27°C 80°F by remnant cool air still blown about.

Cold air like humid air is dense and creates "conveyor belts", hence its sharpness last couple of weeks. Worst conveyor belt was Tropical Storm Debby in 2024. The air was so saturated & heavy that it forgot to deflect NE at the coast, and motored on NW over the Appalachian Mountains: at altitude it dumped its super-saturated humidity & heavily flooded valley bottoms; that never had happened historically & so the infrastructure was all in the wrong places and valley bottoms were devastated. My cousins were lucky as they lived halfway up the mountainside.

CEE is not so much the higher even the more wildly variant temps etc. It's the fact it takes millions of years for plants to adapt & millennia for civilizations to settle in the right places, centuries even to move. But violent weather like floods and storms extending into fall & spring disrupt vegetation and infrastructure that took centuries now take decades to change... Ergo asynchronous processes with no chance to catch up!

I think trees are deciduous wintertimes for two reasons. a) Less light means lesser sacrifice for chlorophyll to function. b) No leaves mean storms blow thru trees w/out toppling them. Today however, not only do storms occur in leafier fall & spring, but soil is also more saturated from increased rain & floods: this means double-trouble with leaves catching the wind & roots not gripping firmly; that in turn disrupts nesting - there was a lost generation of swifts in East Anglia 5 yrs. ago around spring floods - it also disrupts the synchronization among flowering / bugs / nesting stressing bird life in fields & gardens." [I lived then at the edge of a village just N of Cambridge UK.]

These observations are not scientific, but they do try to link the local with the global as in the introduction. This has been recently suggested by the call for an integrative approach to study the CEE. Matching climate to biological scales (Trends in Ecology & Evolution) asks ecologists and evolutionary biologists to consider how organisms experience climate rather than how weather stations record it when doing climate–biology research.

click to enlarge

One useful outcome following my anecdote would be to study how climate change is causing "phenological mismatches" among flowers, insects, and birds disrupting pollination and spring food webs. Perplexity AI:

"Climate change is shifting the timing of flowering, insect emergence, and bird migration at different rates, so food and pollination links no longer line up as well. That can reduce pollination, leave insects or birds short of food, and weaken spring growth and reproduction.

What is decoupling?

Plants often respond to warmer temperatures by flowering earlier in spring, while insects and birds may shift their timing too, but not always by the same amount or in the same direction. When these schedules drift apart, flowers may bloom before pollinators arrive, or birds may arrive after peak insect abundance.

Why it matters in spring

For flowering plants, successful reproduction depends on pollinators being present at the right time. For birds, especially migratory species, success can depend on insect peaks or other seasonal food resources that now may be earlier or shorter-lived.

Typical effects

• lower pollination success when insects miss the flowering window.
• reduced food availability for birds if insect outbreaks or fruiting periods shift.
• broader stress on ecosystems because interactions across the food web become less synchronized"