May 14, 2012
Booth (Lehigh University, PA) and colleagues from U. Wyoming examined the rapid forest responses to multi-year droughts and fire variability during the Medieval climate anomaly in the Great Lakes region of North America. They used proxy records of vegetation, fire, and hydroclimate (charcoal data, pollen records and amoeba assemblages) to study forest dynamics. Climate change is projected to drive similar temporal variability and spatial heterogeneity and the authors estimate that risk and effects of future droughts in humid regions has been underestimated, a risk underscored by declining water levels in the Great Lakes during the past few decades.
Source: Booth, Robert K., Stephen T. Jackson, Valerie A. Sousa, Maura E. Sullivan, Thomas A. Minckley, and Michael J. Clifford. 2012. Multi-decadal drought and amplified moisture variability drove rapid forest community change in a humid region. Ecology 93:219–226.
May 14, 2012
A group of U. of Washington (Seattle) researchers analyzed the response of 493 mammals to changes in climate conditions using species distribution models. They calculated the velocity of climate change and the dispersal velocity of the animals as well as landscape permeability. They concluded that climate change will very likely outpace these animals whose vulnerability may have been underestimated in previous studies.
Source: , , and
Dispersal will limit ability of mammals to track climate change in the Western Hemisphere PNAS 2012 ; published ahead of print May 14, 2012, doi:10.1073/pnas.1116791109
May 14, 2012
A new article in Science (4 May 2012) document such unexplained variable melting rates of glaciers across Greenland indicating that their contributions to sea level rise may have been overestimated. Twila Moon from U. Washington (Seattle) and colleagues used satellite data documented a decade record of outlet glaciers along the coast of Greenland with much spatial and temporal variability. They conclude that sea level rise from Greenland glacier dynamics, if glaciers continue to behave similarly than in the last decade, will remain below the lower bounds projected for 21st century (9.3cm by 2100).
Sumary in Science News: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/340432/title/Study_keeps_pace...
May 04, 2012
Dr. Elizabeth Wolkovich, of UBC Vancouver, and her colleagues compared observations of plant flowering and leafing-out to results from warming experiments. A new paper in Nature documents their work spanning four continents and 1,634 plant species. They found that experiments were underpredicting the magnitude of plant responses to interannual temperature variation: advances in the timing of flowering and leafing have been underestimated by 8.5-fold and 4.0-fold, respectively, compared to long term observations. Such results introduce a large uncertainty into the ecosystem models they inform.
April 17, 2012
Scientists from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies generated a world map that showed spatial differences between 2012 March temperatures and a historical baseline for 1951-1980. The eastern US, western Europe and northern Russia were exceptionally warm.
The entire month was the warmest March on record in the US since 1895. NOAA released a temperature map focused on the US showing that average temperature was 4.8 degrees C above the 20th century average for March. Over 15,000 temperature records were broken and nighttime lows were warmer than former daytime records in 21 instances.
In the mean time, on the West coast, precipitation records were broken!
Read more from NASA: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=77671&src=eoa-iotd
April 12, 2012
In 2009, Washington's Climate Impacts Group published the Washington Climate Change Assessment report (WACCIA) and now a new report by the Dept of Ecology state including Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Ecology, Fish and Wildlife, Health, Natural Resources and Transportation recommendations was just released under the title: Preparing for a Changing Climate: Washington State's Integrated Climate Change Response Strategy. Seven high-priority response strategies should help Washington State adapt to climate change:
1. Protect people and communities most vulnerable to climate impacts by increasing state and local public health capacity to monitor, detect, plan, and respond to emerging threats and climate-related emergencies.
2. Reduce risk of damage to buildings, transportation systems, and other infrastructure.
3. Reduce risks to ocean and coastlines.
4. Improve water management by promoting integrated approaches that consider future water supply and address competing water demands for irrigated crops, fish, municipal and domestic water needs, and energy generation.
5. Reduce forest and agriculture vulnerability by enhancing surveillance of pests and disease.
6. Safeguard fish, wildlife, habitat, and ecosystems and improve the ability of wildlife to migrate to more suitable habitat as the climate shifts.
7. Support the efforts of local communities and strengthen capacity to respond and engage the public.
Read more.
March 28, 2012
Frank La Sorte, postdoc at Cornell, is lead author of a new paper online
(Journal of Animal Ecology) showing that birds shift their ranges northward to adapt to rising minimum winter temperatures. The study looked at 59 birds and results vary especially for species with specialized habitat needs. Physiological tolerance and prey base drive the habitat suitability. It took black vultures 35 years to spread northward as far as Massachusetts, where winters now are similar to Baltimore's in 1975, but turkey vultures and ruby-throated hummingbirds have moved north faster than the temperature warmed, in the case of hummingbirds, greatly helped by the availability of food provided by bird feeders in urban areas. Other species like the red-cockaded woodpecker, found only in the sandy longleaf pine forests, have not moved yet.
Read the paper's abstract here.
March 06, 2012
Tibetans living near Mt. Khawa Karpo (6,740 meters above sea level) and the upper Mekong River (2,000 meters) depend on the tremendous biodiversity on the slopes of the mountain for their livelihoods. However, glacial retreat, tree-line and shrub advances have been documented in the area. Slow-growing plants such as the endemic snow lotus, used to treat blood pressure and hemorrhaging, are at risk when faced with rapid change. Traditional Tibetan ways of life are threatened if crops fail, food spoils, diseases and pests are on the rise as the climate warms. But resourceful Tibetans are adapting rapidly to climate change and now grow grapes, which previously could never survive the severity of Himalayan winter, to make wine -- ice wine is their specialty.
Read the Science News article for more details.
March 06, 2012
Between 1914 and 1920, Joseph Grinnell, founder and former director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and his colleagues did a survey of the fauna of the area in and near Yosemite National Park and sighted alpine chipmunks at elevations of 7,800 feet. Today, the animals seem to be found at higher elevations, reducing their range by about 1,640 feet. Researchers from Craig Moritz's team in Berkeley compared genetic markers from 146 modern-day alpine chipmunks with those from 88 of their historical counterparts throughout Yosemite. They also looked at the genetics of lodgepole chipmunks who live at lower elevations and whose range has not changed. Genetic markers reveal a significant decline in "allele richness" in alpine chipmunk populations but no significant changes in genetic diversity in lodgepole chipmunks. Researchers also found that modern alpine chipmunks were more genetically differentiated across sites than in the past, a sign of increased fragmentation in their population.
Reference: Emily M. Rubidge, James L. Patton, Marisa Lim, A. Cole Burton, Justin S. Brashares, Craig Moritz. Climate-induced range contraction drives genetic erosion in an alpine mammal. Nature Climate Change, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1415
Discussion: Science News
March 05, 2012
Multi-year ice has been declining in the last 3 decades (-15% per decade) making the Arctic more vulnerable to further decline in the summer according to a new NASA study lead by Dorothy Hall, published in Journal of Climate and summarized in Science News. Moreover, a recent Nature article by Duarte et al. is showing that tipping elements in the Arctic have already started and that the time for action is now. Results from this second study are also discussed in Science News. Finally, the special December 2011 issue of the journal Ambio describes changes observed in the Arctic and presents projections of what the future might look like, information available in the final report from SWIPA (‘‘Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic’’) projects, downloadable from the AMAP (Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme) web-site: www.amap.no/swipa.
Reference:
Dorothy K. Hall, Josefino C. Comiso, Nicolo E. DiGirolamo, Christopher A. Shuman, Jeffrey R. Key, Lora S. Koenig. A Satellite-Derived Climate-Quality Data Record of the Clear-Sky Surface Temperature of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Journal of Climate, 2012; : 120210145456009 DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00365.1
Carlos M. Duarte, Timothy M. Lenton, Peter Wadhams, Paul Wassmann. Abrupt climate change in the Arctic. Nature Climate Change, 2012; 2 (2): 60 DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1386
