Orts #952

in connection with the link in last week's Orts to a story about "the debatable land of fungi",
a correspondent send this link to remarkable time-lapse photography of mushrooms"blooming"

https://www.facebook.com/457765807639814/posts/2253404018075975/

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The early history of climate science (source, NYT online)

An experiment demonstrating the warming power of carbon dioxide was presented in 1856 at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Albany, New York.
 
The amateur scientist who performed and wrote up the experiment was Eunice Newton Foote, an inventor and women’s rights campaigner.
 
Her experiment was straightforward: to see whether releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would increase temperatures, she used thermometers and two glass tubes — one rich in carbon dioxide, the other less so.
 
She laid out both tubes in the sun to see whether one might heat up more. We know the answer: The one with more CO2 did.
 
Her findings were presented at the Albany meeting by a man, in keeping with the era’s limitations on women. But her work was published, and three years later it was replicated and advanced by the Irish scientist John Tyndall.
 
The work created the foundational understanding of the greenhouse effect, which informs climate research to this day.

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 Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at the Hokkaido University, discovered that leaves falling into streams and rivers leach acids into the ocean that stimulate the growth of plankton, the first and most important building block in the food chain. More fish because of the forest? The researcher encouraged the planting of more trees in coastal areas, which did, in fact, lead to higher yields for fisheries and oyster growers.
     -- Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees
In a footnote, he refers to J. Robbins, Why Trees Matter, in the New York Times, April 11, 2012:
https://nyti.ms/33nDqXg