Global Warming
Did It! Well, Maybe Not.
(By Joel Achenbach,Washington
(By Joel Achenbach,
We're
heading into the heart of hurricane season, and any day now, a storm will
barrel toward the United
States
Somewhere
along the line, global warming became the explanation for everything.
Right-thinking people are not supposed to discuss any meteorological or
geophysical event -- a hurricane, a wildfire, a heat wave, a drought, a flood,
a blizzard, a tornado, a lightning strike, an unfamiliar breeze, a strange
tingling on the neck -- without immediately invoking the climate crisis. It
causes earthquakes, plagues and backyard gardening disappointments. Weird
fungus on your tomato plants? Classic sign of global warming. You are permitted to note, as a
parenthetical, that no single weather calamity can be ascribed with absolute
certainty (roll your eyes here to signal the exasperating fussiness of
scientists) to what humans are doing to the atmosphere. But your tone will make
it clear that this is just legalese, like the fine-print warnings on the flip
side of a Lipitor ad.
Some
people are impatient with even a token amount of equivocation. A science writer
for Newsweek recently flat-out declared that this year's floods in the Midwest
were the result of climate change, and in the process, she derided the
wishy-washy climatologists who couldn't quite bring themselves to reach that
conclusion (they "trip over themselves to absolve global warming"). Well, gosh, I dunno. Equivocation isn't a
sign of cognitive weakness. Uncertainty is intrinsic to the scientific process,
and sometimes you have to have the courage to stand up and say,
"Maybe." Seems to me that it's
inherently impossible to prove a causal connection between climate and
weather -- they're just two different things. Moreover, the evidence for
man-made climate change is solid enough that it doesn't need to be bolstered by
iffy claims. Rigorous science is the best weapon for persuading the public that
this is a real problem that requires bold action. "Weather alarmism"
gives ammunition to global-warming deniers. They're happy to fight on that
turf, since they can say that a year with relatively few hurricanes (or a cold
snap when you don't expect it) proves that global warming is a myth. There's an ancillary issue here: Global
warming threatens to suck all the oxygen out of any discussion of the
environment. We wind up giving too little attention to habitat destruction,
overfishing, invasive species tagging along with global trade and so on. You
don't need a climate model to detect that big oil spill in the Mississippi Massachusetts -- isn't caused by
global warming, but by all that fertilizer spread on Midwest
cornfields.
Some
folks may actually get the notion that the planet will be safe if we all just
start driving Priuses. But even if we cured ourselves of our addiction to
fossil fuels and stabilized the planet's climate, we'd still have an
environmental crisis on our hands. Our fundamental problem is that -- now it's
my chance to sound hysterical -- humans are a species out of control. We've
been hellbent on wrecking our environment pretty much since the day we figured
out how to make fire. This
caused that: It would be nice if climate and weather were that simple. But "one can only speak rationally about
odds," Kerry Emanuel, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology who has studied hurricanes and climate change, told me last week.
"Global warming increases the probabilities of floods and strong
hurricanes, and that is all that you can say." Emanuel's research shows that in the past 25
years, there's been an uptick in the number of strong storms, though not
necessarily in the number of hurricanes overall. Climate models show that a
1-degree Celsius rise in sea-surface temperatures should intensify top winds by
about 5 percent, which corresponds to a 15 percent increase in destructive
power. The tropical Atlantic sea surface has warmed by 0.6 degrees Celsius in
the past half-century. At my request,
Emanuel ran a computer program to see how much extra energy Hurricane Katrina
had because of increases in sea-surface temperature. His conclusion: Katrina's
winds were about 2 percent stronger in the Gulf, and not significantly stronger
at landfall. Maybe climate change was a factor in generating such a storm, or
in the amount of moisture it carried, but the catastrophe that Katrina caused
in New Orleans
Let's
go back to those Iowa Midwest has been plumbed with drainage pipes; streams
have been straightened; most of the state's wetlands have been engineered out
of existence; land set aside for conservation is being put back into corn
production to meet the demands of the ethanol boom. This is a landscape that's
practically begging to have 500-year floods every decade. Was climate change a factor in the floods?
Maybe. A recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
said that heavier downpours are more likely in a warming world. Thomas Karl, a
NOAA scientist, says that there has been a measurable increase in water vapor
over parts of the United States
and more precipitation in the Midwest . But tree-ring data indicate that the state
has gone through a cycle of increasing and decreasing rainfall for hundreds of
years. The downpours this year weren't that unusual, according to Harry J.
Hillaker Jr., the Iowa Iowa
Global Warming
(By Elizabeth Weise, USA
TODAY)
Alaska is
important in measuring the effect of global warming on the USA because what
happens here soon will be felt in the Lower 48 states, say experts such as
Robert Corell, a senior fellow at the American Meteorological Society. The spruce budworm, aspen leaf miner and the
spruce bark beetle, pests once kept in check by winter cold, are flourishing
here. Statewide, insect outbreaks have killed more than 4 million acres of
forest in a decade and a half, says John Morton, a biologist at the Kenai
National Wildlife Refuge in Soldotna.
Fires, long an integral part of the forest ecology here, are burning
millions of acres as summers get longer and hotter, says Scott Rupp, a
University of Alaska professor of forestry.
With each wave of fires, trees have a harder time coming back in the
increasingly warm and dry landscape.
This great northern forest may end up a grassland. "Soon, people
will be coming to the great plains of Alaska," Juday says. Alaska is ahead of the climate-change curve
because polar regions warm the fastest. They had long been kept frigid by vast
regions of snow and ice that reflect 70% of the sun's energy back out to
space. But higher temperatures are shrinking
that snow and ice cover. In the Arctic, summer sea ice has shrunk 15% to 20% in
the past 30 years, according to 2005's Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report.
As the snow and
ice recede, the sun's rays are hitting more dark ground and water, which absorb
most of the heat, reflecting just 20% of the energy away, says Matthew Sturm, a
research scientist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Cold Regions Research
Laboratory in Fairbanks. Lakes and ponds
are disappearing as the permafrost, permanently frozen ground that underlies
much of Alaska north of Fairbanks, melts.
"It's like pulling the plug in a bathtub," says Peter
Schweitzer, an anthropologist who works with the Arctic peoples in Alaska and
Russia. In some areas, as much as 40% of
surface water has disappeared, taking with it vital habitat for ducks and other
waterfowl, says Juday. The permafrost
that underlies much of the central and north of the state is a relic of the
last Ice Age. Some of the frozen ground under Fairbanks is 100,000 years old,
says Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost expert at Fairbanks. And it's now
starting to get "slushy." For
Ruth Macchione, that meant a more expensive design to her new home after the
cabin her husband built in the 1950s sank into the ground. The permafrost under
the cabin thawed because the structure wasn't built to keep the ground cold- a
key trick in building in cold regions.
Her new home incorporates piers to allow cold air to circulate
underneath it. "Local engineers are
getting worried about higher ground temperatures, so they're specifying more
pilings to combat that," says Billy Connor, director of the Alaska
University Transportation Center. That will mean higher construction costs
across the state, Sturm says.
More heat means
longer summers. The growing season in Fairbanks has gone from 80 to 120 days
since records were first kept in the 1900s, says John Walsh, director of the
Arctic System Research at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. But those summer days haven't come with any
more rain, so plants and trees adapted to short, cool summers grow quickly but
then dry out while it's still warm. That's one reason forest fires have become
such a problem, he says. In the Midwest
and East, a few extra degrees can bring on higher milk prices. That's because
cows don't like it hot. When the mercury gets over 80°F, milk production
drops. "Last year, we had herds
that were down 5 to 15 pounds of milk per cow, and they'll usually be making 65
to 75 pounds" a day, says Larry Chase, a professor of animal science at
Cornell. In the Midwest, the corn belt
is shrinking, says S. Elwynn Taylor, a professor of agricultural meteorology at
Iowa State University in Ames. Especially at the western edges in Nebraska and
the Dakotas, areas that were marginal for corn and soybeans are now unable to
economically grow them. David Lobell, an
environmental scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Calif.,
says that for every 2°F increase in growing-season temperature, farmers can
expect a 17% decline in yield for corn and soybeans.
Taylor isn't
convinced that the warming isn't simply part of a larger climate pattern that
has been seen in the Midwest since about 1850. He is not alone. Other
scientists see warming as part of a cyclical climate change, but they are
outnumbered by colleagues who say the planet is warming steadily because human
activity is adding to the greenhouse gases.
A landmark 2001 report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change forecast that the average global surface temperature will
increase 2.5 to 10°F above 1990 levels by 2100.
In White Mountain, a village of 200 on the western coast of Alaska near
Nome, stocking up the larder is harder now for Rita Buck, a native Alaska
Inupiaq. Buck's year used to be a steady
flow of work. First came salmon fishing, then harvesting berries.
Salmonberries, a type of raspberry, would arrive first, then blueberries,
blackberries and finally cranberries. Berries make up an important part of the
subsistence diet. But now, she says, the
berries are blooming too early, when frost is still a danger. "It freezes
all the berry blossoms and stops them growing," she says. Cherry growers in Michigan, the nation's
primary grower of tart cherries for pies, are having much the same problem.
Spring now arrives seven to 10 days earlier there than in the 1970s, but cold
snaps still come when they always have.
The commonly grown cherry variety isn't cold-hardy, so once it comes out
of dormancy, it has no resistance to freezing, says Jeffrey Andresen, an
agricultural meteorologist with Michigan State University. "In 2002, early warming brought the tart
cherry crop out of dormancy, and then a two-day freeze in April resulted in an
almost complete loss for the year," he says. Growers may have to plant new, more
cold-hardy varieties, which won't be cheap, Andresen says. "You can't just
pick up the trees and move them somewhere else."
In Alaska, the
sea ice that armors the coastline against winter storms is forming a week later
than it used to, says David Atkinson, a Fairbanks professor of atmospheric
science. The state accounting office
estimates that more than 100 coastal villages potentially face danger as winter
storms erode their once-protected shorelines. The open water makes for stronger
storms. Some areas have lost 30 feet of beach in a single storm, Atkinson
says. Warmer winters also are creating
problems for California farmers of high-value crops such as peaches, plums,
nectarines, almonds, pistachios and walnuts, which need a period of cold in the
winter to bloom properly. A series of
warm winters has played havoc with fruit production, says Theodore DeJong, a
professor of plant science. Farmers may have to switch out their current trees
with low-chill varieties, expensive but at least a solution. But for the trees that grow plums for prunes,
that's simply not an option. It would take 10 to 20 years to develop low-chill
varieties of these trees, DeJong says.
Packers already are moving some production to Chile. There could soon
come a day when California, grower of 95% to 98% of all plums in the USA, is
out of the business entirely.
The huge fires
that have hit Alaska in the past few summers filled the air with so much smoke
and ash that people in Fairbanks at times wore dust masks and doctors told
asthmatic patients to leave town until the fires were out. U.S. asthma and allergy rates are increasing
in part because more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is supercharging the production
of pollen that can trigger them. When carbon dioxide is doubled, ragweed stems
grow 10% more but pollen increases by 60%.
"Pollen counts of 120 used to be cause for alert. We're seeing
counts like 6,000 now," Epstein says.
Warmer winters also mean insects can survive and thrive in places where
the cold used to keep them in check. Lyme disease is spreading beyond the
former winter confines of the tick that carries it. And West Nile virus is
spreading farther because spring drought amplifies the bird-biting mosquito
cycle, Epstein says. Ten years of change
in the Arctic region is a preview of 25 years of change in the rest of the
world, says Corell. "This country
is at its best when it has a grand challenge, whether it's World War II or
going to the moon," says U. of New Hampshire professor Cameron Wake.
"This is the next grand challenge."
Captivity Could Help Polar Bears
Survive Global Warming Assault
(By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, March 25, 2012)
Polar bears
are ideally suited to life in the Arctic: Their hair is without pigment,
blending in with the snow; their heavy, strongly curved claws allow them to
clamber over blocks of ice and snow and grip their prey securely; and their
rough pads keep them from slipping. The
one thing they cannot survive is the disintegration of the ice. They range
across the sea ice far from shore to hunt fatty seals, whose blubber sustains
them. Heat-trapping greenhouse gas
emissions caused by burning fossil fuel are making the Arctic warm twice as
fast as lower latitudes, and Arctic summer sea ice could disappear by 2030,
according to climate models. So a group
of activists, zoo officials, lawmakers and scientists have a radical proposal:
Increase the number of polar bears in U.S. zoos to help maintain the species’
genetic diversity if the wild population plummets. In a worst-case scenario, a remnant group of
bears would survive in captivity.
That should
be good news for the St. Louis Zoo, which designed a $20 million polar bear
exhibit with a cooled saltwater pool and concrete cliffs covered in simulated
ice and snow for three to five bears. Its goal was to have them there by 2017.
But it doesn’t have a bear lined up, because it’s illegal to import them,
captive cubs are rare and finding orphaned bears in Alaska is difficult. The Fish and Wildlife Service could allow the importation
of polar bears for public display through future legislative or regulatory
changes but has shown no inclination to pursue those options. Evolved from brown bears tens of thousands of
years ago, polar bears have become an iconic species for their majestic size
and ability to thrive in the harsh Arctic. Today the image of a mammoth bear
clinging to a piece of ice embodies an environment under siege.
Polar bears
would prefer to hunt for seals year-round, but the disappearance of sea ice has
forced them onto land or far offshore where the ice remains only over deep
unproductive water. “Either way, they’re food deprived,” said Steven C.
Amstrup, chief scientist for the advocacy group Polar Bears International and
an emeritus researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey. Advocates of the plan to bring more into
captivity, including St. Louis Zoo president and chief executive Jeffrey
Bonner, say that saving a species whose habitat is disappearing is an immense
challenge. “Polar bears are simply the
first species where we have to get it right,” Bonner said. When it comes to
research on how to sustain an exotic species through breeding techniques, “that
research is only research that can be done in zoos,” he added.
Based on
current projections, federal scientists say two-thirds of the world’s polar
bears could be extinct by mid-century, though a significant cut in greenhouse
gas emissions could help halt that decline. There are roughly 20,000 to 25,000
polar bears worldwide, 3,500 of which live in Alaska and spend part of the year
in Canada and Russia. There are 19
sub-populations of polar bears living in Canada, the United States, Russia,
Denmark and Norway, and since scientists fear ice melt could cause some of
these to disappear from their historic ranges, the idea would be to preserve
enough genetic diversity in captivity to allow them to be repopulated through
artificial insemination of wild bears or other methods. Supporters of the plan
say researchers are just beginning to experiment with assisted reproduction
techniques for polar bears.
Zoological
institutions have helped save imperiled species before such as the California
condor and the Mexican wolf, which were bred in captivity and reintroduced into
the wild. The American bison’s numbers dropped
from the tens of millions to fewer than 1,000 after the 1880s, kept in small
private herds in places like the Bronx Zoo. While there are roughly half a
million bison now roaming the Great Plains, the International Union for
Conservation of Nature estimates at most 7,000 are genetically pure. The Bronx
Zoo shipped 15 head to Wichita in 1907, and the herd has grown to 650; this
month 71 bison calves were released on the American Prairie Reserve,
reintroduced from a herd a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai
tribes was forced to sell the Canadian government in 1907 when the Flathead
Reservation was opened to homesteaders. “If
you don’t build these insurance populations when you have the animals, then
it’s too late,” said the Toledo Zoo’s mammals curator Randi Meyerson, chairman
of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ polar bear species survival program.
“We’re planning for something we hope we don’t need.”
The number
of captive polar bears in the United States has declined since 1995, when there
were about 200. Today 64 bears reside in accredited institutions such as the
Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, which houses three. A total of 13 different polar
bears lived at different times at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo between 1959
and 1980, but it no longer has one in captivity and has no plans to acquire one
because creating the proper habitat would be, in the words of spokeswoman
Pamela Baker-Masson, “cost-prohibitive.” While polar bears have lived for decades in
zoos, Ronald Sandler, an associate professor of philosophy at Northeastern
University and director of the university’s Ethics Institute, called them “one
of the worst candidates for captivity” because they are large carnivores that
can roam for thousands of miles in the wild.
“It’s really hard to replicate the conditions in which they live,” he
said. “It doesn’t mean they’re miserable. But there’s no sense in which they’d
be able to live out the life they’d have in the wild.”
Shrinking
ice has put some polar bears into closer contact with humans, especially in
Canada, and, in some cases, communities encounter orphaned cubs. Manitoba’s
Assiniboine Park Zoo has created an International Polar Bear Conservation
Centre, aimed at helping transition cubs into captivity in some instances. The question
remains whether these cubs should be available for import into the United
States for public display, because as a federally listed threatened species,
polar bears are classified as “depleted” under the Marine Mammal Protection Act
and can be brought in only for bona fide scientific research or if it enhances
the species’ recovery. The proposal,
which would require an interpretation from the Fish and Wildlife Service that
polar bear imports comply with federal law, has sparked a fierce debate among scientists,
ethicists, policymakers and conservationists.
“If the world cares about polar bears, reducing carbon concentrations in
the atmosphere is the only way to preserve polar bears’ habitat,” said Lily
Peacock, a research biologist in the U.S. Geological Survey’s polar bear
program.
Even the
proponents of the zoo plan identify reducing carbon emissions as the top
priority for conserving polar bears. Robert Buchanan, president of the advocacy
group Polar Bears International, said displaying them in zoos could represent
the best way to convince the public to make such cuts. “The only way at this time to save bears is
to have people change their habits, and the way to do that is through zoos and
aquariums,” he said. “Polar bears are just ambassadors for their friends in the
Arctic.” The Fish and Wildlife Service
allows orphaned cubs from Alaska to be shipped to the lower 48 states for
display, like it did with the Louisville Zoo last year. It let in a
captive-bred polar bear from Australia in 2006 for Anchorage’s Alaska Zoo, but
hasn’t let in any other polar bears since the late 1990s. Four House Democrats led by Rep. William Lacy
Clay (Mo.) — all representing zoos hoping to obtain polar bears — urged
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in a Oct. 27 letter to issue permits for “live
rescued polar bears” to be put on display. Eighteen U.S. zoos have either
recently renovated polar bear exhibits or built new ones, are in the process of
construction, or planning to do so in the future.
Robert
Gabel, with the Fish and Wildlife Service’s International Affairs program, said
the agency has advised zoo officials “it’s going to be difficult for us to
authorize.” “We’d have to show that an
import would either stabilize or increase the wild population of polar bears. It’s
difficult to show how an import would accomplish that,” he said, adding that
while the law has an exemption for scientific research, “We’ve never allowed
that breeding in and of itself is research.” Dale Jamieson, a New York University professor
of environmental studies and philosophy, noted that if you’re facing the
prospect of taking an animal out of its natural environment for generations,
“we might as well simply be storing genetic material in gene banks.” Zoos, he
said “have a huge conflict of interest. This is how they make money.”
But Center
for Biological Diversity senior counsel Brendan Cummings, who helped lead the
legal fight to list polar bears, said federal officials need to realize they
may have to pursue this course if the population closest to humans, in Canada’s
southern Hudson Bay, begins to crash: “The most visible and unstable polar bear
population in the planet will be in crisis mode caused by our action,
greenhouse gas emissions, and there will be pressure to do something about it.” Fish and Wildlife already has identified
187,000 square miles in Alaska as critical habitat for polar bears and is
working on a plan to protect the species through such possible actions as
limiting bear hunting and human activity along the coast in polar bear denning
areas. The agency’s Alaska spokesman,
Larry Bell, said when it comes to captive breeding, “Right now, it’s not
something we’re considering.”
Meanwhile,
the World Wildlife Fund and Coca-Cola Co. have launched a campaign to preserve
what they call the “Last Ice Area,” 500,000 square miles of polar bear habitat
in northern Canada and Greenland, which is likely to remain frozen year-round
the longest. As Meyerson observed, all
the genomic banking and artificial insemination techniques in the world have
their limits. “This is all given that we have ice to return the animals to,”
she said.
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