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This article outlines the background to an emergent all-island movement advocating for recognition of the rights of nature – including calls for recognition of Lough Neagh’s right to participate in its community ownership – and proposes that these developments could prefigure a far-reaching transition in our regard for our island home and all its subjects, including the . Noting the significance of the fact that prominent voices in the Irish rights of nature movement originated in the of Derry and Donegal, the paper proposes that the plight of the iconic Lough Neagh in particular presents an unprecedented opportunity for governments in Dublin, Belfast and London to address a blind spot at the heart of the Anglo–Irish ‘peace process’, that is our regard for the intrinsic rights of the land, the waters, and all the communities of species who constitute our island home to flourish. With Ireland’s celebrated eco-philosopher and mystic, John Moriarty, the emergent movement is behind the call to enfranchise the earth and everything in it.

The scientific consensus on human-caused global warming has been a topic of intense interest in recent decades. This is in part due to the important role of public perception of expert consensus, which has downstream impacts on public opinion and support for mitigation policies. Numerous studies, using diverse methodologies and measures of climate expertise, have quantified the scientific consensus, finding between 90% and 100% agreement on human-caused global warming with multiple studies converging on 97% agreement. This study revisits the consensus among geoscientists ten years after an initial survey of experts, while exploring different ways to define expertise and the level of agreement among these groups. We sent 10 929 invitations to participate in our survey to a verified email list of geosciences faculty at reporting academic and research institutions and received 2780 responses. In addition to analyzing the raw survey results, we independently quantify how many publications self-identified climate experts published in the field of climate change research and compare that to their survey response on questions about climate change. As well as a binary approach classifying someone as ‘expert’ or ‘non-expert’, we also look at expertise as a scale. We find that agreement on anthropogenic global warming is high (91% to 100%) and generally increases with expertise. Out of a group of 153 independently confirmed climate experts, 98.7% of those scientists indicated that the Earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity such as burning fossil fuels. Among those with the highest level of expertise (independently confirmed climate experts who each published 20+ peer reviewed papers on climate change between 2015 and 2019) there was 100% agreement that the Earth is warming mostly because of human activity.

The consensus that humans are causing recent global warming is shared by 90%-100% of publishing climate scientists according to six independent studies by co-authors of this paper. Those results are consistent with the 97% consensus reported by Cook et al (Environ. Res. Lett. 8 024024) based on 11 944 abstracts of research papers, of which 4014 took a position on the cause of recent global warming. A survey of authors of those papers (N = 2412 papers) also supported a 97% consensus. Tol (2016 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 048001) comes to a different conclusion using results from surveys of non-experts such as economic geologists and a self-selected group of those who reject the consensus. We demonstrate that this outcome is not unexpected because the level of consensus correlates with expertise in climate science. At one point, Tol also reduces the apparent consensus by assuming that abstracts that do not explicitly state the cause of global warming ('no position') represent non-endorsement, an approach that if applied elsewhere would reject consensus on well-established theories such as plate tectonics. We examine the available studies and conclude that the finding of 97% consensus in published climate research is robust and consistent with other surveys of climate scientists and peer-reviewed studies.

ObjectivesThe first aim of this study was to quantify the difficulty level of clinical research Patient Information Leaflets/Informed Consent Forms (PILs/ICFs) using validated and widely used readability criteria which provide a broad assessment of written communication. The second aim was to compare these findings with best practice guidelines.DesignRetrospective, quantitative analysis of clinical research PILs/ICFs provided by academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies and investigators.SettingPILs/ICFs which had received Research Ethics Committee approval in the last 5 years were collected from Ireland and the UK.InterventionNot applicable.Main outcome measuresPILs/ICFs were evaluated against seven validated readability criteria (Flesch Reading Ease, Flesh Kincaid Grade Level, Simplified Measure of Gobbledegook, Gunning Fog, Fry, Raygor and New Dale Chall). The documents were also scored according to two health literacy-based criteria: the Clear Communication Index (CCI) and the Suitability Assessment of Materials tool. Finally, the documents were assessed for compliance with six best practice metrics from literacy agencies.ResultsA total of 176 PILs were collected, of which 154 were evaluable. None of the PILs/ICFs had the mean reading age of <12 years recommended by the American Medical Association. 7.1% of PILs/ICFs were evaluated as ‘Plain English’, 40.3%: ‘Fairly Difficult’, 51.3%: ‘Difficult’ and 1.3%: ‘Very Difficult’. No PILs/ICFs achieved a CCI >90. Only two documents complied with all six best practice literacy metrics.ConclusionsWhen assessed against both traditional readability criteria and health literacy-based tools, the PILs/ICFs in this study are inappropriately complex. There is also evidence of poor compliance with guidelines produced by literacy agencies. These data clearly evidence the need for improved documentation to underpin the consent process.

Ecological theories posit that heterogeneity in environmental conditions greatly affects community structure and function. However, the degree to which ecological theory developed using plant- and animal-dominated systems applies to microbiomes is unclear. Investigating the metabolic strategies found in microbiomes are particularly informative for testing the universality of ecological theories because microorganisms have far wider metabolic capacity than plants and animals. We used metagenomic analyses to explore the relationships between the energy and physicochemical gradients in Lake Fryxell and the metabolic capacity of its benthic microbiome. Statistical analysis of the relative abundance of metabolic marker genes and gene family diversity shows that oxygenic photosynthesis, carbon fixation, and flavin-based electron bifurcation differentiate mats growing in different environmental conditions. The pattern of gene family diversity points to the likely importance of temporal environmental heterogeneity in addition to resource gradients. Overall, we found that the environmental heterogeneity of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) and oxygen concentration ([O2]) in Lake Fryxell provide the framework by which metabolic diversity and composition of the community is structured, in accordance with its phylogenetic structure. The organization of the resulting microbial ecosystems are consistent with the maximum power principle and the species sorting model.

Understanding primary productivity is a core research area of the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research Network. This study presents the development of the GIS-based Topographic Solar Photosynthetically Active Radiation (T-sPAR) toolbox for Taylor Valley. It maps surface photosynthetically active radiation using four meteorological stations with ~20 years of data. T-sPAR estimates were validated with ground-truth data collected at Taylor Valley's major lakes during the 2014–15 and 2015–16 field seasons. The average daily error ranges from 0.13 mol photons m-2 day-1 (0.6%) at Lake Fryxell to 3.8 mol photons m-2 day-1 (5.8%) at Lake Hoare. We attribute error to variability in terrain and sun position. Finally, a user interface was developed in order to estimate total daily surface photosynthetically active radiation for any location and date within the basin. T-sPAR improves upon existing toolboxes and models by allowing for the inclusion of a statistical treatment of light attenuation due to cloud cover. The T-sPAR toolbox could be used to inform biological sampling sites based on radiation distribution, which could collectively improve estimates of net primary productivity, in some cases by up to 25%.

The Ross Sea I glaciation, marked by the northward advance of the Ross Ice Sheet (RIS) in the Ross Sea, east Antarctica, corresponds with the last major expansion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet during the last glacial period. During its advance, the RIS was grounded along the southern Victoria Land coast, completely blocking the mouths of several of the McMurdo Dry Valleys (MDVs). Several authors have proposed that very large paleolakes, proglacial to the RIS, existed in many of the MDVs. Studies of these large paleolakes have been key in the interpretation of the regional landscape, climate, hydrology, and glacier and ice sheet movements. By far the most studied of these large paleolakes is Glacial Lake Washburn (GLW) in Taylor Valley. Here, we present a comprehensive review of literature related to GLW, focusing on the waters supplying the paleolake, signatures of the paleolake itself, and signatures of past glacial movements that controlled the spatial extent of GLW. We find that while a valley-wide proglacial lake likely did exist in Taylor Valley during the early stages of the Ross Sea I glaciation, during later stages two isolated lakes occupied the eastern and western sections of the valley, confined by an expansion of local alpine glaciers. Lake levels above ~140 m asl were confined to western Taylor Valley, and major lake level changes were likely driven by RIS movements, with climate variables playing a more minor role. These results may have major implications for our understanding of the MDVs and the RIS during the Ross Sea I glaciation.

The permanent ice cover of Lake Vida (Antarctica) encapsulates an extreme cryogenic brine ecosystem (−13 °C; salinity, 200). This aphotic ecosystem is anoxic and consists of a slightly acidic (pH 6.2) sodium chloride-dominated brine. Expeditions in 2005 and 2010 were conducted to investigate the biogeochemistry of Lake Vida’s brine system. A phylogenetically diverse and metabolically active Bacteria dominated microbial assemblage was observed in the brine. These bacteria live under very high levels of reduced metals, ammonia, molecular hydrogen (H ₂), and dissolved organic carbon, as well as high concentrations of oxidized species of nitrogen (i.e., supersaturated nitrous oxide and ∼1 mmol⋅L ⁻¹ nitrate) and sulfur (as sulfate). The existence of this system, with active biota, and a suite of reduced as well as oxidized compounds, is unusual given the millennial scale of its isolation from external sources of energy. The geochemistry of the brine suggests that abiotic brine-rock reactions may occur in this system and that the rich sources of dissolved electron acceptors prevent sulfate reduction and methanogenesis from being energetically favorable. The discovery of this ecosystem and the in situ biotic and abiotic processes occurring at low temperature provides a tractable system to study habitability of isolated terrestrial cryoenvironments (e.g., permafrost cryopegs and subglacial ecosystems), and is a potential analog for habitats on other icy worlds where water-rock reactions may cooccur with saline deposits and subsurface oceans.

We present an analysis of the 20 year snowfall dataset in Taylor Valley and the results of a new snow cover monitoring study. Snowfall has been measured at four sites in Taylor Valley from 1995 to 2017. We focus on valley-floor snowfall when wind does not exceed 5 m s-1, and we exclude winter from our analysis due to poor data quality. Snowfall averaged 11 mm water equivalent (w.e.) from 1995 to 2017 across all stations and ranged from 1 to 58 mm w.e. Standard deviations ranged from 3 to 17 mm w.e., highlighting the strong interannual variability of snowfall in Taylor Valley. During spring and autumn there is a spatial gradient in snowfall such that the coast received twice as much snowfall as more central and inland stations. We identified a changepoint in 2007 from increasing snowfall (3 mm w.e. yr-1) to decreasing snowfall (1 mm w.e. yr-1), which coincides with a shift from decreasing temperature to no detectable temperature trend. Daily camera imagery from 2007 to 2017 augments the snowfall measurements. The camera imagery revealed a near tripling of the average number of days with snow cover from 37 days between 2006 and 2012 to 106 days with snow cover between 2012 and 2017.