Nine years ago, a few days before Christmas, I was a director at a company in San Francisco, and I was called into a meeting that was already in progress. That meeting turned out to be my exit interview. I was 64 years old at the time. It wasn’t completely unexpected. I signed a pile of papers and left the company.

So, 40 plus years of employment was over. I had a good reputation and background. Retirement was not a choice for me. I wanted to do something. And then an idea came into my mind, born from my concern for our environment. I wanted to build my own business, designing and producing biodegradable(可生物降解的)packaging from waste. This is called clean technology, and it was really meaningful to me. It could help reduce billions of pounds of single-use plastic packaging wasted each year.

Five years later, I’m delighted and proud to share with you that our income has doubled every year and we have no debt. Meanwhile, I have a wonderful partner, and we’ve won more than 20 awards for the work that we’ve done.

And I am doing the most rewarding and meaningful work of my life right now. But what I really long for is to find other first-time entrepreneurs(企业家)who are my age. I want to connect with them.

So I want to do something about that in a few years. I want us to start talking more about people who don’t become entrepreneurs until they are seniors. And then connecting all of them across industries, regions and countries—building a community.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, a team led by scientists from the University of California, using climate models and satellite data, reveal for the first time how protecting tropical forests can yield climate benefits that enhance carbon storage in nearby areas.

Many climate scientists use computer simulations (模拟) to mimic the planet's climate as it exists today and how it may exist in the future as humanity keeps emitting greenhouse gases. Such models rely on accurate measurements of all the moving parts of the climate system, from how much sunlight hits and warms the climate, to the response of forest biomass (生物量) to changes in temperature, rainfall and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

Jim Randerson, UCI professor of Earth system science, said, “This paper shows that avoiding deforestation yields carbon benefits in nearby regions as a consequence of climate feedbacks.”

He explained that for a new patch of deforestation in the Amazon, the regional climate changes that happen as a result led to an additional 5.1 percent more loss of total biomass in the entire Amazon basin. In the Congo, the additional biomass loss from the climate effects of deforestation is about 3.8 percent. Tropical forests store about 200 petagrams of carbon in their aboveground biomass. Since 2010, deforestation has been removing about 1 petagram of that carbon every year. (One petagram is equal to 1 trillion kilograms.)

Until now, climate modelers have, for lack of data, not considered tree mortality (死亡率) in their climate simulations. But by combining satellite data with climate variables, they obtained information about how sensitive carbon stored in vegetation is to climatic changes that result from tree mortality and fire.

Plants were expected to get larger with increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but changes in temperature, humidity(湿度）and nutrient availability seem to have trumped the benefits of increased carbon dioxide” said researchers from the National University of Singapore.

45 percent of the species studied now reach smaller adult sizes than they did in the past. The researchers pointed out that warmer temperatures and changing habitats, caused by climate change, are possible reasons for shrinking creatures.

“ We do not yet know the mechanisms(机制）involved, or why some organism are getting smaller while others are unaffected,” the researchers said. “Until we understand more, we could be risking negative consequences that we can’t yet quantify. ’’

The change is big in cold-blooded animals. Only two decades of warmer temperatures are enough to make retiles (爬行动物）smaller. An increase of only 1 degree centigrade caused nearly a 10 percent increase in metabolism(新陈代谢). Greater use of energy resulted in tiny tortoises and little lizards. Fish are smaller now too. Though overfishing has played a part in reducing numbers, experiments show that warmer temperatures also stop fish growing.

Warm-blooded animals aren’t immune(免除）from the size change caused by climate change. Many birds are now smaller. Soay sheep are thinner. Red deer are weaken And polar bears are smaller, compared with historical records.

This is not the first time this has happened in Earth’s history. 55 million years ago, a warming event similar to the current climate change caused bees, spiders and ants to shrink by 50 to 75 percent over several thousand years. That event happened over a longer time than the current climate change.

The speed of modern climate change could mean organisms may not respond or adapt quickly enough, especially those with long generation times climate change will be shown in the future.