爱上海同城

A root cause of why the US-launched smear campaign against the Chinese economy has become hysterical lies in the fact that only by vilifying China can the US-led West find an excuse for its unjust actions and attacks against the Chinese economy. 

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an article on Sunday with a sensational headline "The World Is in for Another China Shock." Its narrative sounded contagious and suited to the taste of political elites in Washington, especially when they resort to protectionist measures against ordinary Chinese goods.

Some Western media outlets are seeking to create a climate of public opinion in which the Western economy falls victim to China's "dumping" of cheap goods, so as to pave the way for further protectionist measures such as anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigations into Chinese products.

With the WSJ serving as a vanguard, the US delivers a great deal of propaganda about "China flooding global markets with cheap goods," and uses that propaganda as a camouflage for its protectionist measures against China. It's an old trick by the US that should be condemned.

In recent years, Chinese industries have made steady progress in high-end manufacturing segments, including electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and more. China's rise has increasingly raised concerns from some Western politicians, observers and media outlets. It's no surprise when they adopt protectionist trade measures to suppress Chinese enterprises, but they should not expect China to yield to these disgraceful acts.

It should be noted that China enters the global market with a peaceful and cooperative manner in line with global trade norms. China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. China is a staunch supporter of free trade. 

The price advantage of Chinese goods can be attributed to multiple factors, including a complete industry chain, relatively low labor costs, and scientific and technological innovation. None of those seem to be factors related to China's "dumping of cheap goods."

The WSJ wrote in its article that the US and the global economy experienced a "China shock" - a boom in imports of cheap Chinese-made goods - in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and now, "a sequel might be in the making" as China doubles down on its exports. The author has a far more negative attitude toward the sequel's impact on the Western economy. This view is almost universal in the West at present.

Why is the West so much more afraid of the "sequel" that it needs to resort to protectionist measures to curb China's development? This reflects a lack of confidence by the West. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the West experienced an upward growth cycle, taking an open mind toward globalization. However, after the 2008 financial crisis, and especially in more recent years, the Western economy has faced a series of challenges. 

Amid the rise of anti-globalization sentiment and trade protectionism, some Western governments pin their hopes on putting up trade barriers to protect their own industries, although such measures will hinder industrial upgrading and the cultivation of emerging sectors.

It's a shame that some Western analysts claim "Chinese companies are flooding foreign markets with products they can't sell at home." The opposite appears to be true. Thanks to China's commitment to high-quality development and continuous progress in technological innovation, Chinese goods are increasingly competitive in the global market. Chinese ingenuity, diligence and adaptability have ensured sufficient supply of everything from daily necessities to high-quality tech products, allowing Chinese manufacturing to make great contribution to stabilizing global trade during a challenging time. China is by no means exporting excess capacity or dumping products they can't sell at home.

Meanwhile, the Chinese market is big enough to accommodate players from China, the West and other countries at the same time. Chinese officials have repeatedly stressed that foreign investment is welcome in China and the door to China will only open further.

China is the top trading partner for many countries in the world. The country is also a key market for many major international companies. There are many opportunities that foreign companies can take advantage of, including the large and fast-growing consumer market and investor-friendly policies. One thing is clear: China is important for multinational companies that want to be globally competitive.

Engaging with the Chinese market is seen as an opportunity rather than a risk. To the world economy, China is a contributor, rather than a saboteur that makes it suffer losses, or a "China shock."

European business groups are emphasizing the potential of the Chinese market this year, particularly in sectors such as new energy and healthcare, and anticipating more cooperation and government support in further tapping into these opportunities.

These comments were made ahead of China's annual two sessions, one of the most significant political gatherings each year, during which a more comprehensive picture of the world's second-largest economy last year will be reviewed while also laying a solid foundation for the economic recovery in 2024.

In a written interview with the Global Times, Jens Eskelund, president of the European Chamber of Commerce in China, said that the EU chamber has relatively modest expectations for the Chinese market this year while noting the potential of China's economy remains large.

In terms of the specific new potential that EU businesses intend to pursue, Eskelund said that the fight against climate change is one area where the EU's and China's interests significantly overlap, and where European companies have a wealth of expertise to bring to the China market.

China's aging population also creates opportunities and needs in the healthcare sector. Creating the right regulatory healthcare framework is necessary to both attract and reward innovation, while at the same time creating a sustainable and affordable management infrastructure, Eskelund said.

"China remains an important market for our member companies," Juha Tuominen, chairman of the FinnCham Beijing, told the Global Times, referring to the latest surveys last year in which Finnish companies' views on the Chinese market potential were positive.

The member companies of FinnCham represent a cross-section of industries, particularly when it comes to machinery, energy and digitalization. Moreover, booming cities such as Southwest China's Chengdu and Chongqing and Central China's Wuhan, Hubei Province, are attracting Finnish companies' attention, Tuominen said.

Healthcare and well-being are also new sectors where Finnish companies in China find opportunities, Tuominen said.

"For our members and Finnish companies, keeping sustainability and carbon neutrality high on the priorities list in China will be good news. In general, this situation is important to Finnish companies as they are among global leaders in sustainable technology and innovation across the board," the chairman said.

Speaking about the primary areas of interest for the upcoming two sessions, the heads of the foreign business chambers expressed expectations for more opening-up and support for foreign businesses.

Tuominen said that a key issue will be measures to boost consumption. "Naturally, we will be keeping an eye on what kind of government stimulus will be available to enhance business opportunities for our members," Tuominen said.

A topic of intense interest will be this year's GDP growth target, as "it will set the tone for business activities for sure," Tuominen said.

Eskelund said that the EU chamber will be interested to see how much emphasis will be placed on improving the business environment for foreign firms.

China has ramped up efforts to improve the business climate for foreign companies, with new policy guidelines being rolled out, and actual implementation of these policies has gradually landed on the ground.

Guidelines outlined by the State Council, China's cabinet, in mid-August 2023, put forward 24 specific measures in six areas to further optimize the foreign investment environment and intensify efforts to attract foreign investment.

Recently, China's Ministry of Commerce held a special roundtable on the implementation of the 24 pro-foreign investment measures, with the participation of representatives from more than 60 foreign-funded enterprises and nine foreign business associations, the ministry's spokesperson He Yadong said at a press conference on February 29.

During the meeting, the EU Chamber of Commerce in China said that the 24 measures are of great significance and exciting to European enterprises, and the implementation of relevant policies is worthy of affirmation, according to media reports.

On the whole, more than 60 percent of the measures have been implemented or made positive progress, and the vast majority of foreign-funded enterprises said that their confidence in investing in China was further enhanced, according to He.

The European Union on Wednesday failed to pass a controversial law that would hold big companies responsible for human rights and environmental abuses in their suppliers after some opposite voices see it as “administrative burden” and “fear of an uneven playing field on the global stage,” South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.

The legislation itself lacks credibility and appears to be an attempt to use human rights and environment issue to suppress China, which is doomed to fail, experts said.

The rules would have required EU firms with more than 500 staff and €150 million ($162.7 million) net turnover worldwide to conduct detailed audits of their suppliers and partners, including those in China. 

A Wednesday vote of the bloc’s 27 members in Brussels fell short of the qualified majority required to adopt the proposed rules.

Big member states including Germany and Italy abstained along with 10 other countries, diplomatic sources confirmed, while Sweden voted against the rules – leaving them below the required threshold of 14 member states with populations representing at least 65 percent of the union’s citizens, SCMP reported.

An EU diplomat said that members abstained for reasons that included the “administrative burden” and “fear of an uneven playing field on the global stage.”

Pro-business political parties around Europe were also concerned about the administrative burden the rules may require. Companies had also warned the laws would have left them disadvantaged when competing against firms that do not have to comply.

The fact that the law did not pass shows that politicizing economic and trade activities is not in line with the agreements of most EU member states, Cui Hongjian, a professor from the Academy of Regional and Global Governance with Beijing Foreign Studies University, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Those countries holding opposing views must also consider that keeping on this path will only further deteriorate the China-EU economic and trade cooperation, Cui said.

"The biggest problem facing Europe right now is the increasing contradiction between its desire to make a political impact and the need to consider its actual interests. If Europe does not change this trend, it will be difficult for it to achieve its goals," Cui said.

The controversial law is actually another form of so-called decoupling, Li Yong, a senior research fellow at the China Association of International Trade, told the Global Times on Thursday.

It is not surprising that  it has not succeeded. Trying to prevent Chinese companies from cooperating with the EU or European countries by distorting facts would only add meaningless costs to economic and trade, Li said. 

Chinese authorities have been rejecting EU accusations of so-called human rights violation. The groundless accusation on China’s human rights conditions, spreads disinformation, tarnishes China’s image and gravely violates China’s internal affairs, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told a press conference in December.

China is committed to propelling economic and trade cooperation with Egypt, supporting Chinese enterprises to invest in the country, particularly in the emerging fields, Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao said at a meeting with Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly.

During the meeting on Wednesday, Wang said that China is willing to enhance China-Egypt economic and trade cooperation. He highlighted the potential for collaboration in emerging sectors such as information and telecommunication technology, smart cities, e-commerce, green development, and high-tech industries.

Wang noted the continuous expansion of China-Egypt relations and the high level of bilateral economic and trade cooperation. He stated that China's modernization offers vast opportunities for other economies, including Egypt, and China welcomed Egypt's active participation in the high-quality construction of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Madbouly acknowledged the long-standing friendship between Egypt and China and thanked China for its valuable support over the years. He looked forward to the development in the relations between the two countries in various fields, including economy and trade. Egypt is keen to continue participating in BRI cooperation and welcomes Chinese enterprises to invest in Egypt.

Wang emphasized the importance of close communication and cooperation between China and Egypt within the frameworks of China-Arab and China-Africa cooperation.

Following the meeting, Wang and Egyptian Minister of International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat signed a handover certificate for a project to support Egypt's satellite assembly and testing.

Egypt is an important trading partner for China in Africa. According to the General Administration of Customs, China-Egypt bilateral trade reached 111.2 billion yuan ($15.5 billion) in 2023.

Wang's visit is among the latest developments in China-Africa cooperation. On Wednesday, China and the Republic of Sierra Leone signed a joint statement on deepening their comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership, As Sierra Leone's President Julius Maada Bio is on a state visit to China from Tuesday to Saturday, highlighting the ongoing engagement between China and African nations.

Perhaps the most unsettling scene in Poached, by science journalist Rachel Love Nuwer, comes early in the book, in a fancy restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The author and two friends sit down and are handed leather-bound menus offering roasted civet, fried tortoise, stewed pangolin and other delicacies made from rare or endangered species. The trio makes an abrupt exit, but only after seeing a live cobra gutted at one table and a still-living civet brought out to feed another group of diners.
Statistics on the illegal wildlife trade can be mind-numbing. Rhinos have dwindled to just 30,000 animals globally and tigers to fewer than 4,000. Over a million pangolins — scaly anteaters found in Africa and Asia — have been killed in the last 10 years. Just last month came a report from the Humane Society of the United States and the Humane Society International that the United States imported some 40,000 giraffe parts, from about 4,000 animals, between 2006 and 2015.

But in Poached, Nuwer gives readers a firsthand view of what the illegal wildlife trade is like on the ground and what, if anything, can be done to stop it. She accompanies a poacher into the U Minh forest of Vietnam in search of water monitors, cobras and civets. (Thankfully, they don’t find any.) She has dinner with a man who keeps a rhino horn in an Oreo tin. She visits a zoo in Japan that may have helped popularize trade in the rare earless monitor lizard. And she attends numerous meetings of wildlife officials and conservationists as they attempt to fight back against the illegal trade.

Poached isn’t all gloom and doom; there are a few success stories. Nuwer, for instance, visits Zakouma National Park in Chad where managers have halted the slaughter of elephants. This hard-won accomplishment exemplifies the book’s underlying message: There are no easy solutions to stopping wildlife trafficking. The effort in Zakouma required a lot of money and training for its rangers, which is not available in most places.

What’s most needed, Nuwer argues, is changing how we think about wildlife crime. Many people view poaching as belonging to a special category of illegal activity. But it’s not; it’s just crime. Those involved are often also dealing in drugs or conflict diamonds or human trafficking. A change in mind-set could help overcome a major conservation obstacle, Nuwer notes. Rather than detectives and the courts being tasked with handling this sort of crime, the job has been left to rangers, wildlife managers and conservationists. “As some have put it,” she writes, “it is like asking botanists to stop the cocaine trade.” The world’s wildlife deserves better than that.

A strand of spaghetti snaps easily, but an exotic substance known as nuclear pasta is an entirely different story.

Predicted to exist in ultradense dead stars called neutron stars, nuclear pasta may be the strongest material in the universe. Breaking the stuff requires 10 billion times the force needed to crack steel, for example, researchers report in a study accepted in Physical Review Letters.

“This is a crazy-big figure, but the material is also very, very dense, so that helps make it stronger,” says study coauthor and physicist Charles Horowitz of Indiana University Bloomington.
Neutron stars form when a dying star explodes, leaving behind a neutron-rich remnant that is squished to extreme pressures by powerful gravitational forces, resulting in materials with bizarre properties (SN: 12/23/17, p. 7).

About a kilometer below the surface of a neutron star, atomic nuclei are squeezed together so close that they merge into clumps of nuclear matter, a dense mixture of neutrons and protons. These as-yet theoretical clumps are thought to be shaped like blobs, tubes or sheets, and are named after their noodle look-alikes, including gnocchi, spaghetti and lasagna. Even deeper in the neutron star, the nuclear matter fully takes over. The burnt-out star’s entire core is nuclear matter, like one giant atomic nucleus.

Nuclear pasta is incredibly dense, about 100 trillion times the density of water. It’s impossible to study such an extreme material in the laboratory, says physicist Constança Providência of the University of Coimbra in Portugal who was not involved with the research.
Instead, the researchers used computer simulations to stretch nuclear lasagna sheets and explore how the material responded. Immense pressures were required to deform the material, and the pressure required to snap the pasta was greater than for any other known material.

Earlier simulations had revealed that the outer crust of a neutron star was likewise vastly stronger than steel. But the inner crust, where nuclear pasta lurks, was unexplored territory. “Now, what [the researchers] see is that the inner crust is even stronger,” Providência says.

Physicists are still aiming to find real-world evidence of nuclear pasta. The new results may provide a glimmer of hope. Neutron stars tend to spin very rapidly, and, as a result, might emit ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves, which scientists could detect at facilities like the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO. But the spacetime ripples will occur only if a neutron star’s crust is lumpy — meaning that it has “mountains,” or mounds of dense material either on the surface or within the crust.

“The tricky part is, you need a big mountain,” says physicist Edward Brown of Michigan State University in East Lansing. A stiffer, stronger crust would support larger mountains, which could produce more powerful gravitational waves. But “large” is a relative term. Due to the intense gravity of neutron stars, their mountains would be a far cry from Mount Everest, rising centimeters tall, not kilometers. Previously, scientists didn’t know how large a mountain nuclear pasta could support.

“That’s where these simulations come in,” Brown says. The results suggest that nuclear pasta could support mountains tens of centimeters tall — big enough that LIGO could spot neutron stars’ gravitational waves. If LIGO caught such signals, scientists could estimate the mountains’ size, and confirm that neutron stars have superstrong materials in their crusts.

Hubble’s in trouble again.

The 28-year-old space telescope, in orbit around the Earth, put itself to sleep on October 5 because of an undiagnosed problem with one of its steering wheels. But once more, astronomers are optimistic about Hubble’s chances of recovery. After all, it’s just the latest nail-biting moment in the history of a telescope that has defied all life-expectancy predictions.

There is one major difference this time. Hubble was designed to be repaired by astronauts on the space shuttle. Each time the telescope broke previously, a shuttle mission fixed it. “That we can’t do anymore, because there ain’t no shuttle,” says astronomer Helmut Jenkner of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who is Hubble’s deputy mission head.
The most recent problem started when one of the three gyroscopes that control where the telescope points failed. That wasn’t surprising, says Hubble senior project scientist Jennifer Wiseman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. That particular gyroscope had been glitching for about a year. But when the team turned on a backup gyroscope, it didn’t function properly either.

Astronomers are working to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it from the ground. The mood is upbeat, Wiseman says. But even if the gyroscope doesn’t come back online, there are ways to point Hubble and continue observing with as few as one gyroscope.

“This is not a catastrophic failure, but it is a sign of mortality,” says astronomer Robert Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Like cataracts, he says, it’s “a sign of aging, but there’s a very good remedy.”
While we wait for news of how Hubble is faring, here’s a look back at some of its previous hiccups and repair missions.

1990: The blurry mirror
On June 27, 1990, three months after the space telescope launched, astronomers discovered an aberration in Hubble’s primary mirror. Its curvature was off by two micrometers, making the images slightly blurry.

The telescope soldiered on, despite being the butt of jokes on late-night TV. It observed a supernova that exploded in 1987 (SN: 2/18/17, p. 20), measured the distance to a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and took its first look at Jupiter before the space shuttle Endeavour arrived to fix the mirror in December 1993.
1999: The first gyroscope crisis
On November 13, 1999, Hubble was put into safe mode after the fourth of its six gyroscopes failed, leaving it without the three working gyros necessary to point precisely.
An already planned preventative maintenance shuttle mission suddenly became more urgent. NASA split the mission into two parts to get to the telescope more quickly. The first part became a rescue mission: Astronauts flew the space shuttle Discovery to Hubble that December to install all new gyroscopes and a new computer.

2004: Final shuttle mission canceled
After the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere in 2003, NASA canceled the planned fifth and final Hubble reservicing mission. “That could really have been the beginning of the end,” Jenkner says.

The team has known for more than a decade that someday Hubble will have to work with fewer than three gyroscopes. To prepare, Hubble’s operations team deliberately shut down one of the telescope’s gyroscopes in 2005, to observe with only two.

“We’ve been thinking about this possibility for many years,” Wiseman says. “This time will come at some point in Hubble’s mission, either now or later.”

Shutting down the third gyroscope was expected to extend Hubble’s life by only eight months, until mid-2008. In the meantime, two of the telescope’s scientific instruments — the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and the Advanced Camera for Surveys — stopped working due to power supply failures.
2009: New lease on life
Fortunately, NASA restored the final servicing mission, and the space shuttle Atlantis visited Hubble in May 2009 (SN Online: 5/11/09). That mission restored Hubble’s cameras, installed new ones and crucially, left the space telescope with six new gyroscopes, three for immediate use and three backups. The three gyroscopes still in operation (including the backup that is currently malfunctioning) are of a newer type, and are expected to live five times as long as the older ones, which last four to six years.

The team expects Hubble to continue doing science well into the 2020s and to have years of overlap with its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in 2021. “We are always worried,” says Jenkner, who has been working on Hubble since 1983. “At the same time, we are confident that we will be running for quite some time more.”

Call it an October surprise: Hurricane Michael strengthened unusually quickly before slamming into the Florida panhandle on October 10 and remained abnormally strong as it swept into Georgia. The storm made landfall with sustained winds of about 250 kilometers per hour, just shy of a category 5 storm, making it the strongest storm ever to hit the region, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center, or NHC.

Warm ocean waters are known to fuel hurricanes’ fury by adding heat and moisture; the drier air over land masses, by contrast, can help strip storms of strength. So hurricanes nearing the Florida panhandle, a curving landmass surrounding the northeastern Gulf of Mexico, tend to weaken as they pull in drier air from land. But waters in the Gulf that were about 1 degree to 2 degrees Celsius warmer than average for this time of year, as well as abundant moisture in the air over the eastern United States, helped to supercharge Michael. Despite some wind conditions that scientists expected to weaken the storm, it strengthened steadily until it made landfall, which the NHC noted “defies traditional logic.” The fast-moving storm weakened only slightly, to a category 3, before hurtling into Georgia.
Although it is not possible to attribute the generation of any one storm to climate change, scientists have long predicted that warming ocean waters would lead to more intense tropical cyclones in the future. More recent attribution studies have borne out that prediction, suggesting that very warm waters in the tropical Atlantic helped to fuel 2017’s powerful storm season, which spawned hurricanes Irma and Maria.

Hurricane Harvey, fueled by unusually warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico in August 2017, also underwent a rapid intensification, strengthening from a tropical storm to a category 4 hurricane within about 30 hours. And this year, scientists reported that Hurricane Florence, which slammed into the Carolinas in September, was probably warmer and wetter due to warmer than average sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean.

We may truly be led by our noses. A sense of smell and a sense of navigation are linked in our brains, scientists propose.

Neuroscientist Louisa Dahmani and colleagues asked 57 young people to navigate through a virtual town on a computer screen before being tested on how well they could get from one spot to another. The same young people’s smelling abilities were also scrutinized. After a sniff of one of 40 odor-infused felt-tip pens, participants were shown four words on a screen and asked to choose the one that matched the smell. On these two seemingly different tasks, the superior smellers and the superior navigators turned out to be one and the same, the team found.

Scientists linked both skills to certain spots in the brain: The left orbitofrontal cortex and the right hippocampus were both bigger in the better smellers and better navigators. While the orbitofrontal cortex has been tied to smelling, the hippocampus is known to be involved in both smelling and navigation. A separate group of nine people who had damaged orbitofrontal cortices had more trouble with navigation and smell identification, the researchers report October 16 in Nature Communications. Dahmani, who’s now at Harvard University, did the work while she was at McGill University in Montreal.

A sense of smell may have evolved to help people find their way around, an idea called the olfactory spatial hypothesis. More specific aspects of smell, such as how good people are at detecting faint whiffs, could also be tied to navigation, the researchers suggest.

Climate change may be flipping good Arctic neighborhoods into killing fields for baby birds.

Every year, shorebirds migrate thousands of kilometers from their southern winter refuges to reach Arctic breeding grounds. But what was once a safer region for birds that nest on the ground now has higher risks from predators than nesting in the tropics, says Vojtěch Kubelka, an evolutionary ecologist and ornithologist at Charles University in Prague. With many shorebird populations dwindling, nest success matters more every year.
A longtime fan of shorebirds, Kubelka had heard about regional tests of how predator risk changes by latitude for bird nests. He, however, wanted to go global. Shorebirds make a great group for such a large-scale comparison, he says, because there’s not a lot of variation in how nests look to predators. A feral dog in the United States and a fox in Russia are both creeping up on some variation of a slight depression in the ground.
So Kubelka and his colleagues crunched data from decades of records of predator attack rates on about 38,000 nests of various sandpipers, plovers and other shorebirds. After a massive literature search, the study zeroed in on the experiences of 237 populations of a total of 111 shorebird species at 149 places on six continents. It’s the first attempt at a global comparison by latitude of predator attack rates on shorebird nests over time, he says.

Historical data of predator attack rates worldwide averaged about 43 percent before 1999, but has since reached 57 percent, the team reports in the Nov. 9 Science. The most dramatic upward swoop came from the Arctic nest reports. There, the rate of predator attacks averaged around 40 percent in the last century, jumping to about 65 or 70 percent since 1999. Meanwhile, tropical perils in the Northern Hemisphere changed “only modestly” the researchers say, from around 50 percent to about 55 percent.
Researchers also looked at how much, and how erratically, temperatures had changed at each site. Overall, the growing dangers to nests fit with climate change trends.
Biologists have discussed the idea that nest predation generally lessens when birds move out of the tropics. One advantage of migrating toward the pole to breed was, in theory, to escape from tropical abundance of snakes, rodents and other egg-lovers.

But rapid warming in the Arctic might have discombobulated some of the old predator-prey relationships, says coauthor Tamás Székely, a conservation biologist at the University of Bath in England. For instance, Arctic foxes used to get much of their nourishment from lemmings, voles and other small rodents. Skimpy snow cover in warmer winters, however, doesn’t insulate little rodents as well as it used to. Boom-and-bust cycles of lemming populations are in many places now “mostly bust,” he says. Foxes and other predators may be shifting more to bird eggs and nestlings.

That scenario of rodent-loving predators hunting more birds sounds “highly probable,” but may be just part of what’s going on, says Dominique Fauteux, an ecologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa who studies small mammals. Lemming collapses haven’t been reported across the whole Canadian Arctic, he says.

Instead, some researchers have proposed that shorebird nest failures come from a boom in geese that attract more bird predators overall. Also, a 2010 study suggests that nest predation in the Canadian Arctic was still lower than in temperate areas. There may be some global pattern, but on the ground, Fauteux says, “there clearly are nuances.”